The Null Device
Posts matching tags 'skulls'
2006/7/28
The New York Times has discovered that, in clothing and accessories, the skull is the Happy Face of the 2000s:
"This is such a huge gripe of mine," said Voltaire, a musician in New York and the author of "What is Goth?", a kind of "Preppy Handbook" for the living dead. "Throughout hundreds of years of history, what the skull has communicated is, 'I am dangerous.' That's where the irony is. You can buy dangerous for $11.99 at Kmart."
For years Voltaire was the happy owner of several skull-motif sweaters hand-knit by an eccentric Englishwoman. He recounted that a woman stopped him the other day on an East Village street to admire the one he was wearing. "She said: 'I love your sweater. Is it Ralph Lauren?' Then I found out that Ralph Lauren has a whole store that sells skull stuff."From what I gathered, the trajectory of the mainstreaming of skulls was: they started with variously scary misfit cultures (outlaw bikers, hot-rodders, or even actual murdering pirates if you go far back enough), then they were gradually adopted by less scary cultures (like metalheads and goths, both of which tend to be more amusing than intimidating). Then the Vice-twats and electrocoolsies (or "fashion goths", as Momus calls them) picked them up ironically, and soon every coke-snorting trustafarian in Williamsburg and Hoxton was wearing stuff with skulls on it. Then, of course, the cool hunters picked up on it, and soon H&M was selling socks with skulls on them and commercial pop bands soon had the full complement of skulls and lightning bolts on their cover artwork.
(via Boing Boing) ¶ 0
2005/9/13
And now something for all the moronic-cynicist fashion-goth hipsters in the audience: How to embroider skulls on your iPod socks. Because as everybody knows, skulls are, like, totally hardcore, especially when they're on iPod socks. Then all you have to do is make sure the iPod is full of Death From Above 1979 and LCD Soundsystem and post-post-ironic coolsie disco-rock.
(via bOING bOING) ¶ 1
2005/8/11
Momus gets stuck into what he calls "fashion goth", which seems to be a construct containing a whole bunch of things he dislikes, from the Goth subculture and BDSM to Suicide Girls to the New-York-hipster fashion of wearing clothes with skulls on them to show how hard and cynical you are and to Judaeo-Christian asceticism in general.
I'm not into Suicide Girls. I hate tattoos and piercings and the cult of self-injury. Sex is not evil or wicked. What Christian sect do you guys belong to?
Japanese people tend not to be fashion goths, or into kitsch. Even the black lace Gothic Lolitas in Japan are something else, really. They're human mille feuille cakes, not goths.
Can you imagine a fashion goth soaking in a sento and then playing pachinko and then eating a hearty meal at an isakaya, chatting away and laughing at the comedians on TV? "Where's the agony?" he would cry, meaning "Where's the beauty?" He'd miss the beauty in the food, and in the water.
When I was in New York this time all I could see on everyone's T shirt was skulls, skulls, fucking skulls. How can you protest the Iraq war if there are skulls all over you, fucking fashion goth?
2000/8/9
Some clichés never die: Wouldn't you know it; the first place winner of the QuakeCon "coolest case" contest involves a glowing skull. (via Slashdot)