Acting Basic. Aesthetics of privilege in the age of instant self-branding
On upper class individuation, curated authenticity, and how the term “basic” went full circle.
In the time of instantaneous communication, where rapid changes in collective consciousness can happen almost overnight, the new cultural status quo might be a lack thereof. There is a peculiar sense that the rise of digital media has completely changed what we knew about trends over the recent years. Fashion, or maybe more broadly lifestyle aesthetic, is where this process is most visible. The daily performances of social capital thrive in the context of digital media logic (particularly Instagram) — they are instant, visually-oriented and very easy to curate. These processes have caused the evolution of upper-middle class trends to accelerate to the point that the most glamorous thing to do is, in fact, being unglamorous. In a situation where showing affluence is simply too easy and “basic”, privileged individuals find ways to mark their intelligence and fashion awareness by deliberately appropriating the cultural tropes from the other end of the economic spectrum — “acting basic”. It is often ironic, it’s almost always performative, and it might be problematic from the perspective of class.
Let’s start with the key terms. The adjective “basic”, which is a key word needed for unpacking the upper-class wealth performance, has had a few different and contradictory meanings. The origins of the term (in the lifestyle sense) are in African American Vernacular English, where it denoted a person who is basic in a very simple sense — “unsophisticated”, or “plain”. Urban Dictionary, the collective arbiter on cultural fads, has repeatedly changed its top definitions of “basic”. In 2006, it used to denote “obscenely obvious behavior, dress, action”, “pedestrian”, likely the working class, ordinary folk.
Now, if we look at the top definition from 2017, one of the quotes says something entirely different:
BASIC BITCH: Someone who is unflinchingly upholding of the status quo and stereotypes of their gender without even realizing it. […] She believers herself to be unique, fly, amazing, and a complete catch, when really she is boring, painfully normal, and par.
And an alleged inner monologue of a “basic bitch”:
“I’ve gotta get to Hollister and Bath and Body works for the third time this week, the just announced a new sale! I need a Pumpkin Spice latte or a Cosmo right now, I can’t handle this pressure. Can we go to Applebee’s for dinner tonight? …Ooh, the new Shia Labeouf movie! LOVE HIM!”
Sounds hardly like something an ordinary, working-class person would say. Having disposable income to shop at overpriced stores and coffee shops is what we would usually attribute to people of middle and upper-middle class standing. In the most recent discourse, a basic bitch is a young woman who, while being relatively well-off, makes a choice to conform to the “bland and uncreative” stereotypes of late capitalist femininity. In this sense, the notion of basic is hardly anything new — some still remember “Valley Girls” and “airheads” who were the archetypal shallow materialists. (And for some reason, such derogatory terms are disproportionately targeted at women and girls, but that’s a material for a different inquiry.)
The notion that someone can lose their social appeal by mindlessly exhibiting wealth remains unchanged. As an antidote to this threat of being basic, we see that the middle class over the last decade started adopting an “indie” lifestyle that values cultural capital over economic wealth. Still, the goods that are marketed as independent and artisanal are famously overpriced, overbranded and targeted at the upper class, which means that in order to be indie, you likely have to be rich.
This is not a new process, but what’s changed is the speed and ease of curating presence for the purpose of self-branding. Instagram, which is relatively the most egocentric mainstream social network, in the recent years has enabled an entirely new level of focus on self-branding. What Instagram makes very easy for users is exposing certain cultural markers and hiding others — curating a enhanced public persona. The content does not have to be spontaneously created, before posting we can choose from many different shapes, sizes and filters, and a unified format makes it a relatively easy game to play.
This makes it a perfect channel performing class and race. In the light of the theory of digital media sociology by danah boyd, a Media, Culture and Communication professor at NYU, our social media networks are neither neutral nor equal; conversely, they contribute to the enforcement of pre-existing class and racial privilege. It can present itself through certain lifestyle trends, such as polished, minimalist interiors, fancy #foodporn brunches, anything that says: “I have lots of disposable income, and I know how to show it well”. Another aspect of Instagram that accelerates this social competition is the short attention span it encourages. With hundreds of followed accounts and gigabytes of content in the news feed, it is difficult to look at the details. Instead, when judging pictures, we look for easy cultural markers and tropes, such as catchphrases, tags and — to the social media marketers’ enjoyment — logos and brands. Marketers, especially in the fashion industry, have successfully utilised this social competition, making Instagram one of the most important venues for branding and promoting fashion and lifestyle products in recent years.
But fashion — and culture at large — thrives on change. As with many cultural trends, there is a certain critical mass beyond which a trend starts reverting to its polar opposite.
And this most recent way of identity performance is: acting basic.
Acting basic means presenting yourself in an ostensibly effortless way, as contradictory as it sounds. The term “acting basic” has been coined in 2014 by the New York-based K-HOLE collective, specialising in qualitative market research and trend prediction, most known for coining the term “normcore”. What they noticed is that in the recent years of creative surplus and the dictate of individualism, it became an expectation to highlight your unique self — and being ordinary turned socially unfavorable. The problem is: the saturation of conspicuous markers of individuality and uniqueness (particularly through the digital means) has made uniqueness itself ordinary — a phenomenon that K-HOLE denoted as “Mass Indie”. Acting Basic means appropriating anything that figures in the collective cultural consciousness as “ordinary and unaspiring” in order to exempt self from the performance of economic and cultural capital — which is in itself performative.
One fashion brand that has been consistently a model for leveraging the “acting basic” trend on social media is Vetements. The brand started off with one alternative fashion show in 2014, and gained Internet hype almost overnight to become a headliner for the Paris Fashion Week the next year. Vetements has no physical store. Their only retail channels are digital high-fashion department stores such as Net-a-Porter or Luisaviaroma. From the marketing point of view, Vetements’ greatest asset and primary reason for popularity is their Instagram. With 2.3m followers, their social media reach is greater than on profiles of even well-established fashion houses like Comme des Garcons or Jean-Paul Gaultier.
What makes their branding strategy unique among the polished high-fashion counterparts is their irony, playful kitsch and a deliberate lack of glamour. The brand name itself — Vetements — is French for “clothes”, which couldn’t be more ostensibly ordinary. Among their showpieces on Instagram we can see plain jeans with a name tag, oversized tracksuits, or highlighter-shaped heels wrapped in plastic bags.
The piece that became a meme in the world of fashion, however, was their yellow DHL deliveryman T-shirt. It was a masterful attempt at leveraging the Instagram’s media logic by creating a playful, easily identifiable cultural trope that’s easy to produce and commodify. Some fashion commentators even went as far as to claim that the brand is subverting the elitist, boring and materialistic world of fashion, just like Marcel Duchamp subverted the world of art by putting a urinal on his exhibit.
But there is nothing subversive, not to mention anti-capitalist, about their branding strategy. The main aim of Vetements, as well as of every lifestyle brand, is to create revenue. If an elitist, high-fashion company manages to create attention by performing the polar opposite of itself on social media — and makes money in the process — it’s a success. The DHL T-shirt, as ordinary as it was, sold for $300 a piece, and it got sold out in weeks. Some fans even went as far as to buy actual DHL merchandise, which sold for only 6 dollars a T-shirt. But the “real” fake Vetements t-shirt had an added stripe on it, so the insiders could tell. And I doubt anyone would buy this T-shirt for the clothing itself — this item’s worth was exclusively the ironic appropriation of it, the cultural badge that it holds. And that is problematic to some — a person I know, who works as an actual deliveryman in DHL, would have to pay half a month’s salary to get this T-shirt. Making a campy joke out of the working class aesthetic can be an exciting novelty, as long as you are rich enough to entertain it.
From the outside, the success of Vetements and the celebration of the ordinary in fashion and lifestyle might seem like the end of elitism in these areas. However, it represents the exact same underlying intent that is obvious among modern-day trendsetters — to escape the privileged and bland basic, to avoid being stereotyped, and establish a unique (and uniquely attractive) self-brand. The difference is that instead of intellectually passive, conspicuous consumption, or a curated ‘alternative’ persona, the new trend is aesthetic of deliberate, curated performance of “unpolished” authenticity. The deliberate flight of affluent and culturally aware individuals away from stereotypes of the “basic” has caused them to perform as their exact opposite. The opposite of being basic is not being extraordinary anymore; it is: acting basic. And at this point, it is genuinely hard to predict what will come next.
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