- What I do know is there are a group of people living in Western society who share a belief that the clothes you wear and the objects you own are the single greatest defining aspect of your personality and your very self, and that’s why you should reject all of it. These people, in my experience, are the people who hate fashion and will not hesitate to ruin a perfectly good cocktail party by telling me why. It’s an incredible disconnect; no one seems to step back and wonder if their overwhelming hatred is as powerful as the reverse, the people who believe so strongly in fashion that they attempt to buy themselves better. Fight Club might be used by its fans to justify this belief, but actually, if you do watch it as a satire, the wardrobe features one of the most satisfying sartorial punchlines of all time.
I don't think I ever saw Fight Club as "be more like Tyler Durden by rejecting one type of fashion for another type of fashion with just as many rules." I think I always saw it as "the norm may not be what's best for you and rejecting it in favor of what you actually want is ok." No doubt there were people who bought thrift store jackets and floral shirts and pink tinted sunglasses, but I do think there was a middle ground between "I want to copy Tyler Durden" and "The first rule of talking to me about movies is do not talk to me about Fight Club." What's the tragic misunderstanding of The Virgin Suicides? That's another movie I've enjoyed, though I definitely haven't seen it in years and years.I don’t hold Sofia Coppola responsible for the tragic misunderstanding of The Virgin Suicides that I see on my Tumblr dashboard
Full disclosure: I hate the shit out of both movies The basic gist of Fight Club is "beware the dangers of nihilism" but the general consensus on Fight Club is "fuck yeah nihilism." The argument put forth by the author is that the protagonist's fantasy life wasn't just wild'n'crazy, it was tacky and that while the film itself plays up the tackiness in order to make it more aberrant, the average Fight Club fan instead embraces the tackiness as refinement. Know how I found this essay? I need a new leather jacket. My casual day-to-day is a J Crew from 1996 and the lining is thrashed (and it's a J Crew). While looking for a new jacket I discovered the "car coat" which seems to be a nice compromise between the completely-impractical duster I've always wanted and the basic bullshit "jacket" that everybody wears. I then discovered that Schott makes a car coat; I have a Schott Perfecto (have done since '91) and it's dope. So I'm looking for Schott Perfecto car coats on eBay (they're $900 new) and find one that has the phrase "fight club" in the description. Thinking "please god no" to myself I look up "fight club jacket" and discover that there are an easy two screens' worth of results that are nothing but people selling replicas. Then going "oh god this is awful" I try "what is Brad Pitt's jacket in Fight Club" and find this essay, but also this unholy page in which it is revealed that it was a thrift store find that was then replicated a half-dozen times over by a costume designer but the thread then continues for 2300 posts and eight years. Which is batshit insane. The "tragic" misunderstanding about The Virgin Suicides is that it's a book about society's inaction in the face of individual tragedy but it's a movie about cool girls who angst themselves to death. This is because Sophia Coppola is a shitty filmmaker who managed to make a "sympathetic" movie about Marie Antoinette that was so resoundingly hated by the French that they booed it at Cannes.
That's an interesting take. I've always thought a lot about what I wear. In my youth, I used to mix styles and clothes up, cut, grow and dye my hair. I typically avoid heavily branded clothing, and I suppose that's because I don't want to create the impression that I think that brand has any usefulness; quality and style do. The pressure to look like the person within the bounds of expectations is something that I resent a bit, and thoughtlessly supposed that was what Tyler was all about. I don't resent people for applying this pressure. It's not their fault. I resent the effort required to overcome the friction of breaking fashion expectations. It's more like resenting the weather because it's too hot to wear your favorite jacket. Brad Pitt is a handsome dude that looks good in just about everything, and I think that's part of the joke. My wardrobe is simple, but it is purposeful. It's impossible to hate fashion, people just hate different kinds of it.
A wise man once said, "any clothes you wear, you should be willing to burn if it adds to a good time."