C’est moi 🙋♀️ on the
@eater front page! Been stewing on this analytical medley of fashion, social media, identity, and capital a WHILE.
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Though ostensibly about merch and our pandemic-fueled anxious restaurant attachment issues, this piece is also tbh a Trojan horse to talk about why we look for shorthands for selfhood—astrological signs, introverts/extrovert labels, Enneagram types—so much these days. Repping eateries with hip design is just one of many ways we carve out our identity, efficiently tell the world who we are—but why do we need to do that so bad? Why shorthand, when we could speak in long? When we could be nuanced, be complicated, be multitudes? Which is what we, after all, actually are.
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Forgive me for using the tools of the oppressor to drag the oppressor, but what it boils down to for me is this app, which has trained me (us?) to single out the most postable item in any space, mindlessly. It comes from the brain stem now. I clock these symbols without effort, my frontal lobe flooding with a chorus of meme-speak one-liners (“A thing about me is…,” “I don’t know who needs to hear this, but…,” “Show me ____ without showing me,” that whole Roman Empire thing) until the proper one for the moment steps forward, in some tawdry memory match game. It has legitimately changed how I see a room.
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Merch is just one of these ways we look to signal, to align ourselves with something that will give us a fleeting feeling of belonging to something. My closet is decked out in these tokens, my feed full of these hieroglyphs. I am not above it. And I’m not naive enough to think calling it out will do much! But if it gives any of us even a moment of pause next time we wanna assume we understand who someone is based on when they were born, or the fact that they can afford to spend $200 on tinned fish and an embroidered hat at Cervo’s…well, then, that’s something.
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p.s. swipe to see Brady enjoying Big Green Salad mentioned in penultimate graph.
