Written for a physical arts publication in New York, these articles take an anachronistically measured approach to issues of expression, communication, and identity.
Put Your Self in Color
by Shyama Johnson
Coloring books have returned to the cultural forefront, not as playthings, but as brain trainers, modes of expression and symbols of an essentialist life.
You remember coloring books. Those floppy, physical facilitators of limited self-expression you would find in a dentist’s office; always infuriatingly pre-filled. Those days are gone, but the value of these books remains in adulthood.
When last you colored within those sharp, black lines, you may have felt a sense of calm and carefree fulfillment. Like you could show your true colors without the any real risk of failure. Like you were expressing yourself in a safe space.
The confined creativity of coloring seems to soothe the soul, and the Journal of the American Art Therapy Association teems with research to support that notion. Simple crafting activities like knitting, stenciling, and coloring have all been found to reduce anxiety and depression while improving mental focus. Like meditation, these hobbies feature extended repetitive action that guides the modern mind out of its torrential stream of consciousness and into focused self-awareness. The ability to stem the tide of thought and replace it with placid awareness makes coloring books a valuable tool of mental health. They are worth celebrating for that reason alone, but there are deeper dimensions to this flattened format.
Standing out by filling in
When Barbra Streisand first brought her legendary voice to the Ed Sullivan Show in 1962, she sang a strange new emotional ballad: My Coloring Book. Through the song, she asks her audience to color her longing eyes gray, her saddened heart blue, and her lonely arms empty. This is, of course, a poetic metaphor, but, at the time, it also reflected a burgeoning industry and a nascent cultural touchstone. Adult coloring books had started mass production only a few years prior and, by 1962, had already caused mass hysteria. During the books’ initial time in the zeitgeist, they were political, anti-conformist harbingers of the hippie era that was soon to come. They covered issues of the day like national security, the red scare, technology, sex, and mental illness. Topics that hold an eerie resonance in 2018. The most famous example comes from the very first adult coloring book, The Executive Coloring Book. On one page, the caption reads “This is my suit. Color it gray or I will lose my job”. This provocative bit of reverse psychology mocked the “squares” and “suits” of the 1960s, daring the careful conformist to break out of their life-long limitations; to color outside the lines, as the saying goes.
As they matured, adult coloring books became less about commentary and more about creativity. The books of today feature intricate images and picturesque patterns, not of society, but of physical things and abstract visions. They’ve gone from modernistic parody to romantic escape. What remains unchanged, however, is the core encouragement: Express!
Coloring is essential
When we first encounter coloring books in childhood, it is often as a side show; a filler activity for the times when real toys are scarce. Good kids dutifully stay within the lines, because those are the rules, and we are taught to fear breaking such rules. As adults, coloring books take on a different, deeper purpose. Now, they represent indulgence in rules and nostalgia for a time when our path was staked out by parents, teachers, and coaches. The represent a return to essentialism.
Plato and Aristotle had a famously contentious mentor-mentee relationship, disagreeing on the very nature of knowledge. What they did agree on, however, was the metaphysical idea of essence. The classical philosopher pair both believed every single thing to have an essence that makes it what it is. A defining feature. Rocks are hard, bears are dangerous, and each human has a pre-ordained purpose. The essentialist belief in predetermination is central to everything from astrology’s horoscopes to Taoism’s Path, and even the invisible hand of free market capitalism. To any generation living before the philosophical upheaval of the 20th century, essentialism would have been the default world-view.
As kids, we live as essentialists. We believe in society’s order and dream of our own destiny. But, as we grow older, learn new schools of thought, and experience life’s turbulence, many of us change our minds. Through cultural osmosis, we wake up to the chaos of reality and our own insignificance. Via social suggestion, we realize our agency in life as well as the responsibility that power entails. Just as modern western philosophy prescribes, we slowly change our tune and become existentialists.
You may know existentialism from skimming Sartre in college, but you probably know it more intimately as the philosophy you live by, knowingly or not. Beginning with Sartre’s Existentialism and Humanism in 1946, existentialism holds that life has no set path, no predetermined purpose, and no invisible hand. Rather, it’s all up to us. This idea is the stuff of revolutionary feminist scholars like Judith Butler, who first posited that even something as basic as gender is performed and not born. With no inherent essence to guide or limit us, the search for meaning itself becomes the purpose of life. If this sounds familiar, it’s only because every generation from Baby Boomers on down is driven by this individualist quest for self-actualization. Once provocative social constructionism is now gospel. Finding yourself is both the goal and the prize, and modern discourse doesn’t make it easy.
For all their talk of mindfulness, modern urbanites hold on to their busyness with a grip as tight as their yoga pants. Websites dictate diet, apps track exercise, and smart watches remind the wearer to breathe, as if they’d somehow forget in the rush of it all. This busyness theater is reminiscent of the security theater we love to hate at any given airport, but with one important distinction: Ego. Fetishizing the busy among us is a natural extension of celebrating the important and popular. So, to exaggerate one’s busyness is, more fundamentally, to exaggerate one’s importance. The dark side of this egotistical coin is the stress and the strife that comes with the constant pretense of occupation. When we structure fun and schedule sex, we manage to make anxiety sources out of otherwise mundane and pleasurable activities. A return to the simple, the grounded – the essential – could well lighten the heavy existentialist load we impose on ourselves.
The liberty of limits
Adult coloring books are a way to craft something tangible, to be physically creative, and watch one’s work materialize without the paralyzing pressure of “ruining” pristine paper with the first line of a drawing. In a world of endless options and constant decision-making, having the Paradox of Choice erased can bring much-needed relief. Relief from responsibility, respite from rumination, and freedom from too much freedom.
Beyond its nostalgia and its well-documented therapeutic value, coloring offers a controlled creative outlet that, to many, is an analogy for the ideal life. One where only exciting decisions about hues remain to be made, and there are no wrong answers. Coloring books symbolize free expression within boundaries, and what could be more liberating? Finite choices have always been more manageable than infinite, and herein lies the essentialist draw of coloring books. Limited liberty is the “essence” that defines these books. By providing a pen to play in, coloring books function as a visit to the childhood fencing of essentialism and a vacation from the horizon-less range of existentialism. A re-living of our previous life – and the lives of previous generations – when the world was one of guard rails and training wheels, and all you could do about anything was pick a new color and draw within the lines.
Tailoring a Better You
by Shyama Johnson
Fashion is a front line in our rapid culture. Design and production speed ahead as consumerism continues to grow, but might there be a better way to use the medium? Might we be able to put fashion to work driving social progress and personal evolution?
New York is a city of ignorannce. We know nothing of our neighbors, we ignore the homeless in the street, and we can hardly fathom of life without 24-hour access to iced lattés. On top of that, the generation to which I belong is known for its square-eyed focus on everything digital to the exclusion of social interaction in the “meat space”.
What both youths and New Yorkers excel in, however, is commitment to uniqueness. I’ve retired a shirt after seeing it on a single passerby, and I know I’m not alone. For many neo-New Yorkers, it’s precisely their ambition of standing out that pulls them from Midwest to melting pot. In light of this, it becomes starkly apparent that very few of us invest in our apparel. We know our appearance speaks volumes about our identity and affirms our attention to detail. Deciding factors in many social and professional situations. Why, then, are so many of us dressed in throwaway Fast Fashion? Why do we eschew niceties like greeting cards and necessities like eye-contact? It seems we could “hustle” smarter, not harder, by making some alterations to our own design.
Fast fashion has lost the thread
For decades now, the overriding trend in consumer fashion has been Fast Fashion: The high speed, high volume production of low quality apparel. As some of us learned in Meryl Streep’s cerulean blue monologue in The Devil Wears Prada, these penny-a-dozen products function as accessible pastiches of the great fashion visions of the day. This top-down dictation from the elite to the everyday is commonplace across the arts. Arthouse movies influence Avengers, experimental music becomes pop, and so on. It’s how pop culture is made. But, when the bottom of the industry expands to the point of stretching thin, we’ve all got problems.
As global consulting firm McKinsey & Co. reported in November 2017,
“Sales of the traditional fast-fashion sector have grown by more than 20 percent over the last three years, and new online fast-fashion players are gaining ground. To keep up, leading fashion players are accelerating their speed from design to shelf.”
Ironically, McKinsey’s report is titled, Renewed Optimism for The Fashion Industry. Rightfully, in a sense, since growth means more money for the corporations in question. But what of sustainability, refinement, and craft? When the larger part of a creative industry paints itself into a corner of purely reactionary production, where is the space for thoughtfulness?
“After a single season, many of my recent purchases will be worn out and downright embarrassing to look at.”
These speedy tendencies control our behavior as consumers as well. I, for my part, have been cycling through clothes as if they were all underwear. Into my dresser one season and out with the garbage the next. Indeed, the mindless consumption has gotten so profuse that I rarely bother to donate old clothes anymore. There are too many to carry, and, strikingly, too few that seem worthy of even giving away. After a single season, many of my recent purchases will be worn out and downright embarrassing to look at. Fast Fashion is cheap, which is why I buy it, but with the constant replacement taken into account, I very likely end up spending more money as I hurt the environment and forgotten, faraway textile workers. It’s a shameful lose-lose that continues to thrive on our ignorance.
Style tip: Practice presence
Emotional detachment from our clothing items as well as their origins mirrors current social trends. Self-reported loneliness has skyrocketed as new automation and communication tools have made in-person interaction all but obsolete. As people feel close personal connections becoming distant and slipping away, there is dire social need for making some of the old ways new again.
Losing a friend’s attention to their phone feels like an all too vivid preview of the Great Robot Replacement to come. An especially egregious example happened to me while getting drinks with a younger friend recently. Throughout the evening, he largely refused to engage in one on one conversation with me, instead opting to face the floor and the phone in his hand. Feeling like an accessory to Twitter was obviously infuriating, but the uncaring behavior is by no means isolated to him. Generationally, we have forgotten that attention is a currency we can pay to either things or each other. Snap out of the chat, look up, and listen. This is where all the fun is.
Slow sewing adds value
With the modern insistence on instantaneousness, dedication to craft is routinely scrapped for speed. Cookie cutter designs turn into one-size products, which beget increasingly uniform populations. There may seem to be a sea of options between various clothing megastores online and off, but the reality is that their ideas of fashion overlap so greatly that they sometimes sell each other’s products without any risk veering off brand. Something that doesn’t exactly scream originality.
So what way forward is there for us as consumers? How can we recapture the aforementioned thoughtfulness lost in much of fashion? The answer may have come with the advent of Slow Fashion. Companies like Patagonia and Mango represent a wave of designers backlashing against the overwhelming flood of flimsy clothes churned out by the industry at large. Their new, old way of thinking about attire puts quality and sustainability ahead of speed and volume.
“The goal of the company is to increase the percentage of sustainable fibres used in its collections, with a commitment for 50% of MANGO cotton to be of sustainable origin by 2022.” – Mango
Slow Fashion brands employ human seamers instead of mass production machines. They prefer timeless designs to passing trends, and stitch their quality materials with care. Oftentimes, these brands offer buyers (not consumers) control over sizing and design details for their purchase, giving an even greater sense of personal attachment to an already rarefied product. These shifts in priority all add up to emotionally weighty pieces that endure in every sense.
Bespoke tailoring, being a wholly handmade craft, is the pinnacle of personalization. This intricate art involves the invention of brand new patterns for the piece and requires several fittings throughout the arduous process. But, the end result is a truly one of a kind item that goes beyond fashion to become a full interpretation of the self – a symbol of one’s individuality. For anyone with the means, a few custom pieces of either kind go a long way in tailoring a more honest persona while helping the world to sustain.
Style tip: Practice gratitude
Gratitude is a common mantra in the yoga pant-wearing segment, so it only makes sense fill your life with things actually worthy of gratitude. Buying a carefully personalized piece instead of five printed out clothing-like objects goes a long way in adding back in the emotional ties missing from modern consumerism. Spending more on something that means more makes it inherently more valuable and personally more treasured.
In the social sphere, gratitude is more noticeable, and so, even more impactful. We all know to say “please” and “thank you”, but going an extra few feet if not a mile can set you apart as truly grateful and genuinely likeable. Write a heartfelt note or compose a personal message of appreciation. Small favors and big gifts alike are opportunities to show that you value the person as much as their kind deed. Even with this extra effort, an empathetic response will likely take less time than whatever you were given in the first place.
Enclothed expression
“Whereas music, film, and visual art impress ideas upon an audience, fashion offers a mode of expressing our own ideas.”
Enclothed Cognition is a term that has been batted about the pop-science arena in recent years. Its essence is the old adage that, “the clothes make the man”. This bears out in two opposite but simultaneous effects. Partly, we make fashion choices based on our mood, means, and identity. And partly, our outfit informs our momentary mental state. Studies have shown that subjects feel a greater sense of authority and expertise in a lab coat regardless of their actual profession. Anecdotally, you’ve probably felt the confidence boost of a flashy suit or a particularly stylish pair of shoes. This internal cycle of influence from mind to clothes back to mind is what constitutes Enclothed Cognition, but, to the outside world, it comes across more as Enclothed Expression. That is, we read each other’s exteriors as representations of the hidden inner life. Sometimes, this interpretation is accurate – often, it is not. Even so, it benefits us greatly to recognize this human tendency and play into it. That means dressing as we’d like to feel and who we’d like to be more than reflecting our current state. It’s not just dressing for the job you want, but looking like the person you’d like to be in life. Dressing aspirationally brings us closer to that aspiration both through internal psychology and external sociology. It’s dressing up in a deeper sense, and Slow Fashion fits right into this concept.
“So long as minorities of every stripe find themselves put upon from the highest seats of power, it is the responsibility of anyone culturally conscious to break social barriers in whatever small or significant way they can.”
Whereas music, film, and visual art impress ideas upon an audience, fashion offers a mode of expressing our own ideas. Seeking, selecting, mixing, and matching clothes is its own artform. Akin to the work of superstar DJs who sample and spin existing music into new hits, a wardrobe is at least an attempt at creating art from art. Whether we are conscious of it or not, we all express certain philosophies and priorities through our clothes. To excel at it, though, one needs a hawkish cultural vigilance. It is far too easy to surrender to the hegemony of the H&Ms of the world. “Not caring” is the highway to a uniformity that is isolating to outliers as it is dulling to creatives. So long as minorities of every stripe find themselves put upon from the highest seats of power, it is the responsibility of anyone culturally conscious to break social barriers in whatever small or significant way they can. That includes daring to show flair.
“Any town with a scrappy art scene, eclectic nightlife, and proud multi-culturalism becomes a kind of creative laboratory.”
In New York, it becomes obvious that clothing doesn’t have to be made-to-measure haute couture to feature uniqueness. On the contrary, I’ve seen many of the boldest bodily expressions of personality come from the city’s financially strapped underground scenes. It is in these low places we find the roots of the genderqueer movement that is just now bursting into the mainstream. From casual gender bending to drag as performance art, the boundary-seeking bohemian youth continue to tear at the bonds of our traditional gender binary with nothing but looks. The frontlines of this movement are fully mobilized in other hubs of expressive subculture, like Tokyo and Berlin. Any town with a scrappy art scene, eclectic nightlife, and proud multi-culturalism becomes a kind of creative laboratory. Cosmopolitan cities like these allow wild experiments in expression to arise, adapt, and spread across the world. From the underground to the sidewalk, urban life feeds – and feeds on – Enclothed Expression.
Legendary Harlem designer Danial Day a.k.a. Dapper Dan
As a fixture of American urbanity for the last century, Black culture has been famously influential in all arts including fashion. In the 1920s, young African Americans lit a fire on the world stage by inventing the Charleston. An unprecedently aerobic dance at the time, it took shorter dresses and a divorce from corsets for women to join the shimmy-shake fun. She would never admit it, but it is more than likely that Coco Chanel was inspired by these homemade Black dresses for her iconic little black dress. From then until now, Black culture has popularized staples like acid washed denim and created whole new categories like Athleisure, which turned practical sportswear into enviable streetwear. The ties to music didn’t end with the Charleston, either. In the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, the “Hip-Hop Tailor of Harlem” known as Dapper Dan would stitch together heavily branded designer pieces into whole new expressions of excellence worn by the likes of Salt-N-Pepa and LL Cool J. Refusing to acknowledge his logo-covered creations for the original art they were, major fashion houses sued Dapper Dan, who even had his shop raided and shut down by federal authorities. Bringing the story full circle, Gucci co-created a collection with Dan in 2018 that featured a design straight from his work in 1988. This small recompense hardly makes up for a hundred or so years of intellectual property theft from African American creatives, but it does serve to remind the fashion industry of its core function in the 21st century: Facilitating self-expression in any socio-economic reality.
In a time when identities are scrutinized and fluidity is normalizing, our outward statements hold more importance than ever. By making more careful clothing choices and engaging in the composite art of dressing up, those on the forefront of fashion can break social restraints and affect greater freedom throughout society.
Style tip: Practice generosity
In bustling hives of humanity like New York, there are different norms to those observed elsewhere. Don’t hold the subway door. Do ignore the panhandler. Similarly, today’s youth operates on a separate set of manners involving tagging others in photos and responding to seen messages. Neither ruleset is sufficient, and neither makes an affable person on its own.
Self-expression can be more than a selfish performative act. Done thoughtfully, it is a generous gift of trailblazing. Likewise, giving a struggling stranger a train seat or giving a friend uninvaded space to vent their frustrations are steps toward everyday grace that also light the path for others to follow. Remember, all of these are free to give.