Credit: ‘Carsten Yesuanjagala’ by William Kane Olwit
The sophistication and layeredness of a people’s art can often be a reliable indicator of upward social mobility. After all, it’s often the case that if a significant portion of a society’s art class have the time and inclination to produce sophisticated introspections into their cultural condition, it’s likely because they’ve been freed from an existential chase of lower basic needs. To drive the point further, there are knock-on effects that naturally proceed from this state. For one, layered, culturally potent art then gives rise to thriving subcultures, which themselves widen the spectrum of possibilities within individual cultural fields like, say, fashion.
Credit: Insta – @julius.sese
It’s worth noting that there’s a symbiotic relationship between the existence of artborne subcultures & said sophistication of art in a society. This happens in the sense that as expressions (like fashion) of a subculture grow, the art that birthed it narrates its evolution. In other words, rich expressions of artborne subcultures sophisticate the very art that gave rise to them in the first place. Bet you can see the cycle, we had to indulge in a bit of seemingly vain repetition to make the point
…All this background to assert that in a reverse engineering sense, expressions of subcultures, for instance fashion which is this piece’s interest as you can perhaps exasperatedly tell, have the potential to add conceptual depth to a society’s artistry.
Put another way, as opposed to waiting for decades of economic growth to spur social mobility, which would then spur sophisticated art, a rather ambitious shorter cultural bypass can be pursued by beginning at the very end: force-feeding society on keenly curated fashion-centric expressions & linking them to art genres as a narrative force
Credit: Insta – @elijah_kitaka
Now you might go, “Yooo, isn’t this all a bit too reductionistic?” Well, pray tell how’d you expect us to have at it? It’s not like we’re an academic journal or something…had to make this digestible for the culture, even then it’s still a tad nerdy (we know), but someone had to do this work for the masses (messiah complex much, you say?
) Anyways, away from breaking the fourth wall, there’s already pre-existing seeds of what we’re going on about in this piece, save for the likelihood that it’s by accident. We’ll rely on two examples, both with shortfalls that we’ll highlight to make our point. Take for instance eccentric Afropop sensation Elijah Kitaka (pictured in the still image above), whose music we’ve admittedly not dwelt on as a team for reasons to be detailed whenever we’ll soon get a chance. Bro’s made a fashion template of himself. I mean, the term “Kitaka shorts” is pervasive enough as to be overused at this point. And yet, all his attention-absorbing quirks haven’t, more so in terms of narrative and cultural potency, amounted to a subculture. Tbf, it’s rarely a singular artist’s narrative to amount to one.
Elsewhere, bet y’all know of some hilarious culture-savvy bloke who’s dubbed himself Real Homie Quan.
Insta – @_real_homie_quan
Dude does this delightfully unlikely combo of a fashion-forward fluid aesthetic along with colloquially accessible verbal expressions. The result is an elastic conceptual exploration of carefree masculinity, distilled to masses who’d have otherwise had their guards up. The downside is the lack of a formidable art force to link it to and narrativize it. And we get it, perhaps, that’s not bro’s end goal, but we have our aspirational frame we’re working all this into. We’d have loved to dive into the two mentioned shortfalls of our examples—that’s to say, gaps between fashion potency and narrativizing it into a subculture or linking it to another art form. But that’s too heavy on its own, and so we plan to take it up separately in an upcoming piece. ’Til then, busk in this intro, if we can call it that!
