Walter Benjamin called fashion the eternal return of the new. And like all things fashionable, irony is old news (at least as old as Revolutionary France), but each generation gives it its own little spin. In part one of this piece I discussed a particular strain of irony in fashion that pervaded the early to mid 1990s. That incarnation was different from previous and later eras because it grew out of a working class sense of alienation from mainstream culture. It was a conscious rejection of the consumer culture that excluded us—er, I mean them, and a playful re-appropriation of middle class cast-offs.
***Let me pause here to promise that this is not a rant about how much better things were back in my day. Like I said in my first post on this topic, it wasn’t a very effective rejection – it was still rooted in acquisitive consumer culture after all. ***
Today, irony in fashion is, as it maybe always has been, generally considered the terrain of “hipsters” (who are just young people interested in fashion rooted in subcultural and street styles rather than corporate brands). They also use irony and deliberate ugliness to reject mainstream consumerism. But today, doing this is expensive.
If you use the word “creative” as a noun or as your job title, if you are dropping out of the rat race to start a business making hand-tooled leather anklets, you are a rich person. That 1950s Pendleton coat in the previous post now sells on EBay for about a hundred dollars. If you just bought one? You’re probably a rich person. And that’s fine. I love old stuff and locally made jewelry too. And I obviously think there is great (though not unproblematic) value in seeking out ethically and sustainably produced clothing and accessories.
The trouble is, just as vintage and alternative consumption got expensive, mass-produced clothing got really, really cheap. And real wages have been in decline for the working and lower classes since the 1980s. So most of America works at places like Walmart and Target (Retail is our largest employment sector. Walmart is the largest private employer in the world), and because they don’t earn a living wage, have little choice but to buy clothes there too. And most poor people in the US are women and people of color. So that’s what “hipster” “alternative” consumption ends up deriding and rejecting: not “The Man,” but poor people, most of whom are marginalized in several ways at once. And then they’re imagined as not having the learning or taste (rather than the funds) to buy right, which is the most bourgeois attitude of all. The people who get painted with the label “hipster” are seen as annoying partly because of this hypocrisy; this perceived elitism and self-satisfaction with their superior, progressive choices that do absolutely nothing to change the conversation about consumerism or structural oppression.
But this criticism is also a problem. Because you know who’s a really easy target to pin society’s problems on? Middle-class girls, that’s who (I purposely am not limiting this to white girls. Society at large is happy to simultaneously celebrate and condemn fashionable, middle-class young women of all races and ethnicities!). Of course, middle-class hipster boys get shit too, but the stakes aren’t the same. And it’s the girls we really love cluck our tongues at – in their high-waisted short-shorts and their boxy, unflattering caftans and their Birkenstocks. They’re obviously spoiled, lazy, shallow – and no lady with any class would wear leggings and crop tops in public like that…for more on why this attitude is a problem see my post on maxi dresses.
Friends, amidst this fog of contradiction, I’m here to tell you there is hope. As evidence I submit for your consideration one Ilana Glazer, star, with friend/co-star/co-writer Abbi Jacobson, of Comedy Central’s Broad City. If you haven’t seen it, the show portrays a fictionalized, hyperbolic version of Abbi and Ilana’s life and friendship.
Too roundly dysfunctional to be a new Odd Couple (although it does capture that pair’s simmering sexual tension), too heartfelt to be the next AbFab, and too middle-class to be a 21st century Laverne and Shirley, Broad City is a classic buddy comedy that is also its own thing. In sort of contrast to Abbi who works hard at her thankless job and at least tries to consider the consequences of her actions, Ilana is portrayed as everything that is wrong with kids today. She comes from a perhaps too supportive, middle class Jewish family, has some kind of vague e-commerce job that she never does any work at (in season two she finally asks her longsuffering co-worker what it is the company does. Ilana, along with us, is denied an answer), smokes copious amounts of weed, is endlessly entitled and has no awareness that her laziness and self-absorption have an effect on others. And she dresses absurdly inappropriately for every occasion.
Irony is when the explicit meaning contradicts the implicit meaning. Broad City represents, I hope, the next wave of irony. It’s irony that looks inward and as well outward, that asks us to ask uncomfortable questions and change our conversations about gender, sexuality, race and class. And it’s irony that doesn’t set itself in opposition to sincerity. Much of the show’s humor stems from the characters’ painfully earnest striving to be progressive and “broad” minded. The irony comes in as the show also portrays the hypocrisy and myopia that often result when middle-class, twenty-something, white girls position themselves as The authority on marginalization and injustice in America. If self-indulgent earnestness is the explicit meaning, self-awareness is implicit. Do they ever miss the mark? Oh, yes. Of course they do. But the combination of these elements makes for characters that are different from most TV fare because they are willing to be wrong and eager to learn; traits that often seem to go dormant when Americans reach their mid-twenties.*
Now, let’s explore these ideas through a few of Ilana’s ensembles. I’m obviously not the first to analyze Ilana’s style. When you see her outfits, how can you not want to talk about them? Ilana’s character displays a variety of “making fun” of fashion that is a breath of fresh air in a world where most women on television are styled to look like they’ve been whittled out of wax and triple-dipped in shellac. (For more on Broad City’s costumes, here is an interview with costume designer Staci Greenbaum.)
Exhibit A: “Working Girls” ensemble
The title of this episode is ironic because it’s about both Abbi and Ilana working harder while not doing their jobs than their actual jobs demand. Possibly the title is also an homage to the Lizzie Borden film about high-class prostitutes…but more likely (please let this be true) it’s a nod to the 1980s classic about a working class woman who can’t get ahead until she learns how to perform bourgeois femininity. She can study business all she wants, but until she steals her boss’s wardrobe and WASP’y accent, all anybody can see is her “bod for sin.”
Ilana is also judged based on her fashion choices, but Ilana doesn’t care. When her boss hands her the employee manual and reminds her about the section on appropriate workplace attire, Ilana looks down and notices her bra is visible above her crop-top. She pulls the shirt back, and the bra is visible from the bottom. She says, “oops. Bit of a Sophie’s Choice.” And then announces that she’s going to poop and will be back in a few hours.
Sure, the stakes aren’t the same for her as they were for Melanie Griffith. She doesn’t need this job. But she’s still a young woman in a world that will constantly evaluate and base her worth on her appearance. This outfit is fun because it does so many things at once. This is “making fun” of fashion with a mission. It’s overtly “sexy” but in a way that is also overtly sloppy. The exposed men’s underwear and military belt confuse whatever signs the bra and bare midriff usually communicate. Ilana’s character is equally attracted to men and women, likes sex, and likes feeling sexy, but in a way that still allows her to fall asleep comfortably in a bathroom stall or spontaneously become a dog-walker. Her version of sexy has little to do with the lingerie catalogue variety of hotness that saturates the media.
It’s fun because, while over-the-top it’s also familiar. She looks like people I’ve known, or want to know. It’s cool without seeming affected. She’s just dressing for herself, playing with signs in ways that amuse her or give her pleasure. And her total lack of concern for how others read her freaks people out.
Exhibit B: The “Latina” earrings
In her “Dear Television” series, Sarah Mesle discussed Ilana’s earrings thusly:
“Broad City is smart about race, but sometimes a little (more than a little?) perplexing. Ilana, with her love of 90s hip hop, her liberal pieties and her belief that the whole Carter-Knowles family is in deep with the Illuminati, always seems to be indulging in a fantasy of her own racial positioning. Whiteness, as she seeks to experience it, is grounded in its very special appreciation of minority cultural richness. That’s a little weird! Ilana’s Latina earring (like, too, the brief shot of a taped-up Janet Jackson photo) gives us a shorthand for that fantasy and lets us know that the show is in on the joke.”
I’m less certain about the success of this scene’s self-reflexivity. I think this specific piece of adornment acts differently than some of Ilana’s other appropriations.
Let’s do a commutation test. What if, instead of Ilana in “Latina” earrings, the scene had, let’s say Marnie (Irish/English-American Allison Williams) from Girls wearing earrings naming Ilana’s ethnicity: “Jewess.” Think for a moment: what are the connotations of wearing an accessory that names this particular ethnic category? Hint: what if that accessory was yellow? How would such a scene be received? But it also just wouldn’t happen, because the stereotypical associations with Jewish women aren’t “sexy.”
Meanwhile, the association between Latina women and sexual appetite has a very troubling, colonizing history. Sorry to have to put on my Feminist Killjoy hat, but adorning oneself with the connotations of an Other’ed population that one selectively finds desirable, and which one has the privilege to remove at any time is a problem. I see Mesle’s point, and agree with the general sentiment, but in this case, I don’t know. Yeah, it’s ironic, but sometimes a knowing wink isn’t enough.
Exhibit C: The White Power Suit
This jacket is what happens when Ilana tries to play grown-up. Buzzing from her realization that the city is full of over-qualified people willing to do her job for free as interns, and giddy with “success,” she buys a “power suit” that is white. She obliviously refers to it as her “white power suit.” That is funny. When Abbi points out that she’s exploiting her workers, Ilana returns to a white liberal nightmare in which, among other things, the Black woman intern scrubs the floor and sings spirituals. This scene upset a lot of reviewers, but I agree with Yohana Desta’s assessment that it’s just kind of lazy.
To me, it’s the outcome of the scenario that’s interesting because it hints at the structural nature of the problem. In a panic, Ilana fires all the interns and tells them to be “free.” But the interns actually need the unpaid labor Ilana offered because, in the current system, that’s how people without connections get jobs (the same intern who was singing “Swing Low Sweet Chariot” complains that she just got her business degree from Cornell: “the worst Ivy”). Ilana benefits from her privileged position either way, but her liberal awakening actually only serves to make her own situation more ethically comfy because she personally doesn’t have to witness the exploitation anymore.
This is important: almost as soon as Ilana put that white jacket on, she spilled food on it. When she wears it again in Citizen Ship the stain is still there. Instead of cleaning the mess, Ilana has covered it up with an American flag pin. THAT, my friends, is how you do a knowing wink.
Broad City isn’t a perfect show, and it isn’t a totally radical show (although its portrayal of real, supportive, frenemy free, non-competitive female friendship remains unforgivably rare). But it represents qualities I see a lot in my classrooms, and that I hope is the next making fun of fashion phase: Smart, politically curious women clumsily but diligently trying to change themselves and the conversations that shape their world. Sometimes they’ll miss the mark, but at least they’re aiming for a good target. And I can’t wait to see season 3.
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