Liz,
Thanks for that. Interesting to hear Melbourne is the same, given Canada and Australia’s similar colonial mythologies. Has anyone written anything similar for Australia? I’d be very curious. Glad you found the original; I had to clean up the language and snark a little for Briarpatch Mag (always a good exercise). – Lindsay

Dear Buddy: I’ll make a few observations here, even though I’ve made a number of them already:
1. There was a need for someone to point out the problems with this romanticization of early colonial/pioneer/settler dress. I know this because before I wrote the essay, I had heard many expressions of irritation with that whole historical fantasy (usually not from from white men, but from every other group). And after I wrote it, the was a flood of people with the same feeling about this, especially on social media. I couldn’t track it, because you can’t with Facebook, but it seemed a pretty big chunk of the positive responses were from women and/or people of colour. 1500 shares on Facebook weren’t mostly posted by trolls or critics of it, let’s put it that way. I specifically heard a lot of appreciation from indigenous people in Canada and the U.S. Which leads to the second point:
2. The only complaints (that term is putting it mildly, given some of the extremely abusive trolls this essay has attracted) I’ve had about this post are from white males, as far as I can tell (there was chronic author anonymity but I’m assuming based on the arguments made or outright declarations). As a friend of mine said: “makin’ the point.”
3. Fashion, like most cultural phenonema, means something, whether people like to admit that or not. Meaning is developed socially and somewhat consensually – we have broadly understood (if vague and unconscious) agreements about what things mean, sometimes across the culture at large, sometimes only within a subculture. But I think people have to expect that on occasion meanings will be contested and not everyone is going to make the same reading as they are. Either they’ll disagree on a style’s meaning, or over whether a style is positive or negative in some way. Based on my experience posting this essay, which was admittedly somewhat polemical, I have discovered there are extremely strong opinions on this style and that they predate my essay. And they hold whether people are thinking about gentrification or not – it’s a thing unto itself.
4. I guess it’s pretty obvious I’m not a fan of the rapid, brutal gentrification we’re seeing here nor the sort of entitled swagger it’s being carried out with. But you’d be mistaken if this essay was about something as narrow as gentrification in one neighbourhood or even a single style. Everyone has focused on the attack on the one style when clearly the attempt was to find an instance of the still-colonial structures dominating our country, province and city. People defend the style but interestingly they won’t touch its root history, and that seems like an admission to me. We are plagued by this colonial hangover in numerous ways but Canadian society seems stubbornly and deeply unconscious of this fact. My point here is that many Canadians (and N. Americans) are deeply attaching to some founding national myths – brave pioneering myths so appealing they can be exported to any country. I think the colonial hipster style is an example of “the return of the repressed,” wherein problems emanating from our early origins keep resurfacing into consciousness, to be worked out. Why focus on hipsters? I simply chose one instance of our colonial inheritance or haunting to discuss, partly because its nostalgia seems the most blatant and because it was near to hand. I could have chosen any number of other signs and symptoms of this colonial hangover, though. Maybe it could have been a list. But it wasn’t, and for me it was interesting to go down the rabbit hole of one particular cultural fantasy to see what it would yield.
5. Like you I don’t mind some of the objects of Canada’s past, but quality and tradition are one thing, and I think whitewashed nostalgia is another. Dealing with a few objects isn’t an entire lifestyle. I really recommend everyone go back and watch Altman’s McCabe and Mrs Miller again, to get a sense of what 1899 in the Pacific Northwest was really like, even when mostly white. We need to get out of our moose/mountie/lumberjack fantasy in this country and province and start devising a different historical imagination to get ourselves on a path to decolonizing both our economic structures and our relationships with each other.
6. This essay isn’t painting all male persons in Vancouver in the late 19th C as racist abusers. That is not its point and it wasn’t ad hominem, except perhaps in the case of the tosser who owns that restaurant. It is talking about an era of colonization that is being referenced in a particular fashion style. And it is taking on the stubborn, persistent colonial structures in our economy, political structure and culture. I’m just trying to flesh that history out a bit less romantically, using an example that happens to be at hand. I’m just not a fan of the nationalist myth that our “hewers of wood and drawers of water” Canadian trope props up. And the US is similar. And much of the world outside the New World has appropriated that fantasy. See the Monty Python sketch.

Michael,

Hey thanks. Re: irony: yes, but I’d say that the objective irony of Baudrillard, or Benjamin too for that matter, is nowhere near the debased and supposedly self-conscious irony we may or may not be seeing in mainstream hipster fashion. (Not that the self-conscious part is the sort of irony you’re talking about.) The term “irony” now comprises so many things along such a long continuum, but I barely even consider many of the items found there to be any form of irony (this is a longer discussion). Anyway, if that fashion is self-consciously ironic I guess I feel it’s nothing more than the posture of “I know this is a joke” even if the joke seems ill-understood (and may reside entirely in the fact that the version of lumberjack we’re seeing comes down to us from the colonial era through gay bear culture, and that’s its excuse). As for the structural iron(ies), I guess over time we’d find out if this code’s internal instability was going to go somewhere. In any case my mention of irony in the essay was an aside – I didn’t have the time or space to deal with that whole other kettle of fish. But I agree with the position that it’s the only spiritual form in the modern world; I just don’t see the hipster thing as even approaching irony in that sense.

I guess it’s in dispute what popular codes mean or how they function, and I did appreciate Roy’s willingness to rebut even if we disagree. But I agree with you. I always want to ask those who think that, say, Nazi codes can be unmoored from their origins: “So, how is that rehabilitation of the swastika going?”

“who are they performing that irony for, exactly?”

B makes the case for an ‘objective irony’ arising from symbolic objects themselves; a reversibility belonging to the secret binary core of the socially constructed system of values/symbols which must always function against itself by virtue of its differential structure. The total codification of the world leads to a volatility/reversibility inherent in the code itself, and “the more that [socio-symbolic] systems advance towards their own perfection, the more they deconstruct themselves.” Irony, according to B, is the only spiritual form in the modern world, and ‘objective irony’ irrupts as a counterpart to the insistent ‘reality principle’ of modern society, to its reification, and to the loss of illusion.

I’m surprised that Roy A. couldn’t agree that aesthetic values are necessarily part of the system of social codes (…of conduct). I couldn’t agree more that they are inherently political/value-laden.