Quick Sketch: Mina Le On Everything

Fashion is an eternal wellspring, perhaps the best and most intangible embodiment of the hedonic treadmill. Seasonal fashion, the implied necessity to alter and update ones wardrobe with the changing of each season* was invented by King Louis when he moved his court to Versailles and it was designed to keep the noble class impoverished. 

*Seasonal fashion was a tool of suppression if not outright oppression - and not even in the sense that the iPhone (n+1) is an upgrade of the iPhone (n) but basically solving the same problem of portable communication and documentation, next seasons winter look need not be a simple evolution, an improved solution to the problem of cold and wet.

Fashion is a big visible phenomenon. Sir Ken Robinson in his TED talk, perhaps the TED talk of peak TED when TED was the height of fashion, asserted his observation that he thinks everyone is interested in education, and I would assert somewhat hyperbolically of course (there's all those programmer types who literally need someone in their lives to prevent them from wearing sweatpants and crocs everywhere) that everyone is interested in fashion.

Despite basically dressing the same way I always have for 26 years give or take, since I first gained the agency to have some say over what I wear, I am interested in fashion. For me it is definitely an eternal wellspring for generating one of my favourite obsessions - good things needlessly discarded.

Fashion is fraught, one day something is a rooster strutting and crowing, the next it is a feather duster. In an ideal world that we don't live in, fashion would be inextricably linked with merit. The world we live in links, I think, fashion inextricably with popularity a concept I do not understand because sometimes the dog of popularity appears to wag its tail, other times the tail of popularity appears to wag the dog. Popularity always seems somewhat detached from the subject it is applied to. Begging the question is not fallacious in my opinion when someone explains that something is popular because it is popular.

Popularity can be subdivided into merit and etiquette. In that sense I can get some traction on it. It is vocationist (people who want to do the work) or careerist (people who want the esteem). Fashion ultimately though isn't about scaling mountains, it's about buying stuff. It is not going to be a meritocracy where careerists can't succeed at attaining the esteem they desire by doing the work vocationists do. (A very visible example of a careerist failing in a meritocratic environment would be Lebron James in his pursuit of the esteem lavished on Michael Jordan. We see the NBA and it's affiliated media quite literally lifting heaven and earth to try and give him the same esteem as Michael Jordan and these efforts are collapsing as I type.)

Merit is where the suit is wearing you. Etiquette is where you are wearing the suit. I think seasonal fashion is an over-revved unmerited cycle because of etiquette. 

So manners and etiquette, continuing this break down of a garment, a beloved garment like a t-shirt given to you by the great white buffalo you let get away; etiquette is distinct from manners because manners regards the esteem we give to strangers, outsiders, that make civil society possible. Most manners in wealthy industrialized nations are invisible, we only think of the tip of the iceberg like looking at someone when you speak to them, responding when someone says hello, shaking everyone's hand not just the mens.

We might question anachronistic examples of manners like "elbows off the table" that had some historical point but now verge on manners for manners sake, especially when so many people type now. But there are many invisible manners so ingrained that we take them for granted, only children get them wrong like not spitting food up onto your plate. At some point, society had to be taught not to defecate in the corner of a room where people are eating, not to piss on someone else's house not to stab someone for stepping on your shadow.

There's a reason leaving your house is not a similar experience to playing a 3d shooter where anything that moves is probably an enemy and that reason is manners - the benefit of the doubt we extend to strangers. 

Etiquette, etiquette can be mistaken for manners, but is ultimately characterized by its exclusionary character and curiously, it's vacuity. In a real (as opposed to ideal) meritocracy, someone gifted with the necessary athleticism and dedication to something like parkour may be able to run up a wall and haul themselves onto a rooftop to reach a level unattainable to the mediocre masses. That's their privilege.

The mediocre need a ladder, which is to say a tool that pretty much anyone barring a disqualifying disability could use. This way anyone can prop a ladder up against a wall and climb up to the level one previously needed a certain athletic deviation and practiced technique to ascend to. But etiquette isn't the ladder, etiquette is pulling the ladder up so other mediocrity can't imitate your empty achievement.

It has to be vacuous, because if the only people who attained the pinnacle of social esteem merited it, then we wouldn't need etiquette and it wouldn't exist. So etiquette is always going to take the form of too many knives and forks and knowing to start at the outside and work your way in, it's going to take the form of five different glasses for five different types of alcohol...

And etiquette is always going to produce a body of literature attempting (by necessity) to simultaneously unlock its secrets and justify them. For example, I can bet there's an article on why wine is served in wine glasses and whiskey is served in tumblers. Someone will have figured out why it's necessary and useful to have a stem on a wine glass by which one can swirl the wine within the glass to oxiginate it which simply isn't necessary for whiskey, but whiskey shouldn't be served in a juice bag because the mouth of the tumbler allows some important quantity of air in around the nose that changes the flavour profile for the better. 

There will probably be some truth to it, but that is to buy into the premise that if the experience of drinking alcohol isn't optimized, then it is a wasted experience of some significant consequence.

Two impulses at least must drive the etiquette of being fashionable. One obvious one is a capture-the-flag impulse, the fashionable want to stand in the spotlight and keep it on themselves, it isn't a egalitarian democratic impulse that would want the house lights brought up so everyone equally can be seen. An ambivalent feeling where people want the flattery, insatiably but tire of the imitation quickly. Perhaps, to be sure they are still the subject of imitation, and hence the object of flattery, they need to change up styles to see if the mob will follow.

The second obvious driving impulse is the adolescent impulse, where the young seek to transit from dependent infant to independent adult and start actively resisting, going contrarian if need be, the model of their parents to assert their own identity. It permits a level of arbitrariness, a mere need to be different to create the illusion of libertarian self determination. It's why we can see youth movements that clearly just suck - Mods, Maximalism, Emo, Nu Metal, Barbiecore. It doesn't matter if it sucks, what matters is that the youth (now probably expanded from 12-35, thanks to Boomers arresting generational turnover) feel it is theirs.

Part and parcel of the adolescent impulse is a reluctance to relinquish it. The ubiquity of mums trying to be their teenage daughters best friend producing the ugly ambiguous messaging of mother-daughter gym bodies where both are wearing bodycon athleisure wear with g-strings integrated into the spandex as if to ask a stranger like me: "what would you like, too young for this look OR too old for this look?" Ugly, ugly collisions of the social desirability of being 21 (probably now 28).

On which point, I walked past one of the many campus gates of Methodist Ladies College here in Melbourne and saw a sign directing visitors to various destinations eg. library, chapel etc. stuff one would expect on a private secondary school campus, and a sign to a cafe, which one would not expect on a secondary campus at any point in the 20th century. 

Back in my day, morons were excited to graduate into the senior class for access to a common room - a space afforded to students that suddenly had "spare" periods in their schedule, ostensibly so they could hit the books in a relaxed homelike environment where they ostensibly studied out of school hours. These common rooms would be equipped with a kitchenette and a commercial sized can of instant coffee because morons need stimulants to cope with the stress of studying largely arbitrary content in order to excel at exams designed to provide justification for discriminating among applicants in allocating scarce university places.

When I learned my high school was building an on-campus cafe, because moron senior students don't just need coffee to study the largely bullshit subjects, those moron senior students need "good" coffee. I did not approve, it smacked of etiquette that would inevitably involve graduating future elites even more out of touch with the vast majority than they already were. My mum pushed back arguing that kids were "maturing" faster now and simply appreciated coffee. Even if having an on-campus high school cafe has become standard practice at elite private schools and perhaps selective public schools now, the argument is still idiotic. It simply suggests to me that women who have aged out of that 21-28 "ideal" are capable of sympathising with women who are impatient to age into that 21-28 "ideal" and perhaps that it is vice versa in terms of sympathies, that little girls are understanding, perhaps even deriving their own impatience from observing their mother's desperate attempts to claw back the clock.

I presently feel the opposite impulse. I feel a need to distance myself from the youth, a strong desire to save mostly my time and everyone else's by making it as clear as possible that I do not care what the young folk are doing. That it is irrelevant to me. 

I want to craft a specific communication through the medium of attire, one that says "Please don't tell me about your self diagnosed ADHD." or "Please, don't tell me about that show everyone is watching." in trying to do something short of just having these slogans printed onto white t-shirts, a penny finally dropped shedding light on an enduring mystery.

Consider this next speculation a draft for my forthcoming illustrated polemic, but I had thought the point of low-rise jeans were to emphasise a woman's midriff - a toned flat stomach and pronounced waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) necessary to pull off the look. A look innovated really by Mariah Carey and popularised by Brittney and the other mouseketeers that ruled the charts in the early 00s. Yet when I attended university, my first educational institution without a uniform, low-rise jeans appeared to serve the purpose of showcasing a woman's spare tires, and arse cracks; turning a university lecture into a Magic the Gathering tournament.

Similarly, I had assumed the purpose of athleisure was to showcase if not exaggerate the taught and muscular physiques of a woman, showcasing not just WHR but well developed glutes and thighs, a fashion trend to emphasize thick women. But in practice appears to serve the purpose of emphasizing a lack of variagation in the transit from ribcage to knees, women proudly displaying the rectangularity of their frame, the flatness of their butt cheeks and the poultry like condition of their legs.

For all I hear about unrealistic beauty ideals and the pressure it places on women, the psychological and emotional burden of Sisyphean persistence that women labour all their lives under, my life in Australia (very much a consumer, less a producer of beauty standards, importing those standards from the Americas, Europe and Asia) has been but a testimony that women too often don garments with the practical effect of emphasizing how far they are from those beauty standards - like the real but rarely remembered phenomena of "Whiggers" when white suburban males discovered hip-hop way too late via Eminem. 

The point of low-rise jeans is not to emphasise the abdomen and WHR. The point of athleisure is not to emphasize thick thighs and asses. The point of both these fashion trends is to signal relevance. It is about relevance and belonging. It is purchasing the team's new uniform for the new season to renew one's membership and let your teammates know that you are still a team player.

This translates to me, as most fashion journalism (I don't know if it's 60% or 90%) takes the form of an archetype. Generally it is "something new is relevant and how to jump on board." A story that only needs one or two lines of copy, if it was okay to be brazen about the crippling need to belong, if that could be admitted the story would just be "go to the store that sells jeans and buy what they tell you to. In fact, they probably don't even stock any irrelevant cuts."

Most of the expenditure is going to be about what to say to strangers at parties when you suddenly appear in cropped t-shirts that reveal your bra straps to people who aren't in the know. People whose thumb is not on the pulse.

Allow me to use something as an analogy for this archetype that I've been sitting on for a while:

exhibit A

exhibit B

Now, I'm sure a real astrology girl, one that can do a full moon chart could explain how these memes are non-contradictory, contentful demonstrations of a real personality science because both Virgos and Geminis are air signs or something and both have a fierce and empowered independent streak in low agreeability trait. Here's one for Taurus, one for Leo, one for Libra, one for Capricorn, one for Scorpio makes 7 out of 12 star signs thus far with the simplest explanation being that Astrology works on Barnum statements, not that over half the population share a defining fierce streak. I'm confident I could do the same with MBTIs given that basically the MB crowd and the Astrology crowd pretty much produce the exact same concept, they just both probably look down on each other as deluded.

I think I stumbled across Mina Le's Youtube channel while looking to understand the utility of the manufacture of garments. Very much on a journey to expand my agency and step out of dependency on others to produce garments I want to wear. I just wanted to take the first step on the Dunning Kruger curve to understanding how little I know about the clothes I wear every day, and I first watched her video on some wool jumpers that I personally would never wear:

It was a deep dive into the history of the production of clothing and evolution of the market that just happened to use an "iconic" look I have never lived in a climate to give two shits about. Furthermore, while I could be absolutely persuaded that in 2023 one can obtain a machine knitted polyblend take on an old utilitarian jumper from some windswept craggy rock on the northern isles of the UK that was stitched by hand straight off a sheep's back and the new mass produced articles are objectively worse, for the purposes of a photo shoot, it does not look objectively worse unless one has been trained to care.

How long does one need to be informed that polyester doesn't breath and irritates the skin? 

I never finished that first video, because once it got into the weeds of tips as to how to avoid the Australian farming practice of whatevering sheep to prevent flies from parisitising their rectums or whatever, I just couldn't care. But as the internet including Youtube is want to do, you know, I get bored and I listened to a few more of Mina's video essays on fashion topics.

These quickly moved away from my interest in fabrics and how to stitch them and what possibly indicates quality vs slavery, to just well...the archetypal story about fashion - what are women doing now and how to jump on board.

Mina Le is interesting, charming even, she'd probably be welcome in my friend zone. I don't want to overstate it though, she's on the cusp of people I would forget existed if they were in my year at high school. I think with her memorably raspy voice and lack of grace and poise, she probably would have grabbed enough of my attention from time-to-time to not triage out the memory of her. But she's not that interesting as a grounded host of a youtube channel. Just to look at the thumbnails, I get a data set from which I can induct that if Mina Le is somewhat of an expert on fashion, there is no fashion expertise. That she is someone with an interest there is no doubt, that many people share her interest is attested by her subscriber count and viewership, that the content is interesting...

Well, I certainly reached my saturation point. This channel is an analogue to the channels on the subject of basketball that do a deep dive into the latest trend of floor-spacing/pick-and-rolls/iso-plays/reversals etc. that miss the big picture of Kobe won 5 championships while you obsessed over Yao Ming's footwork, or James Harden chokes every post season while you were having your minds blown by the way he was revolutionizing NBA offense. Both fashions on the streets and tik tok, and fashions in sporting tactics and strategies both have the common feature of setting aside the tricky and nebulous variable of human psychology in order to emphasize what is easily controlled like behaviour.

Much of Mina's content takes the forms of explainers: "explaining the hyperfemininity aesthetic" "explaining the gen z maximalism trend" "explaining the old money aesthetic" "everything you need to know about Japan's kawaii industry" "everything you need to know about the courset trend" "explaining the ballet trend in fashion. (balletcore)" "why do we wear impractical shoes?" "Celebrity courtcore: How and why celebs dress up for trial" "why are we so obsessed with scammers."

I am not fit to judge the actual content of most of those video titles, given I reached my saturation point with Mina Le, relatively quickly, which is a shame because I like to have something on in the background while I draw and am often looking for interesting and informative content producers. The titles I've shared by themselves, likely function mostly as clickbait to get undiscerning fashionistas to give the channel a try, they likely sound more vapid than they are.

My saturation point however, was watching "explaining the hyperfemininity aesthetic" and feeling like I was watching one of those miraculous machines where no matter what you put in the top, once you turn the handle the stuff that comes out the bottom is always the same. Specifically, Mina often in her deep dives finds thoughtful articles written about aesthetics to go along with historical precedents, origins, cycles etc. Those articles invariably conclude that whatever women are doing it is something to the effect of "stepping into their agency and defying the mores of the time that keep them under patriarchy." A conclusion that can be reached whether women are dressing up as infant girls with pig-tails in barbie pinks sucking on pacifiers with frilly skirts that reveal underwear that says "spank me" or whether they are getting short androgynous haircuts, wearing minimal makeup exaggerating their eyebrows and wearing blazers with shoulder pads. 

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, I think drawing on Nietzsche admonishes his readers to not confuse the unintelligible for the unintelligent. The inverse is also I feel, a worthy caution - do not confuse the intelligible for the intelligent. 

This appears to be women's video games. Where one can certainly be diverted for hours at a time by "understanding" why "we" "all" dress like little girls now, but it's likely just the same behaviour - adolescent women broke off and found some way to express a distinct identity to their older siblings and parents, then the older siblings and parents tried to imitate them necessitating some new iteration. Or some highly esteemed popular person started doing something, so plebs starting signalling their allegence by imitating them necessitating them doing something to distance themselves from the prole-drift which the proles were eagerly anticipating as the next thing to do.

It is much the same as somebody beating a video-game 100% completion 0 hits. It's not a real achievement, they bought into someone elses game which diverted them from creating something of their own. 

In the sense that the medium is the message, both fashion blogging/vlogging and livestreaming games, reacting to red carpet televised events like the Oscar's carpets or the Met Gala Ball, now make being a hobbyist potentially lucrative. The Far Side cartoon of parents imagining all the job ads for a kid that plays video games has not aged well, though it could potentially out live the influencer economy when we all look back with chagrin at that period of history where people worked hard to transfer money to hobbyists they lived vicariously through.

Lastly, Mina Le does strike me as someone self conscious, someone who is uncomfortable with asking her viewers to sustain her financially. She seems like an okay person that I would not have taken the time to ridicule in highschool unless she had walked into a rake or coffee table in my presence and the ridicule came easily. She is, amongst the videoessayists, one of the better ones. 

I write out my thoughts, because that confusing an interest with something interesting, confusing the intelligible for the intelligent has broader implications. I see it as societies path away from being broadly right to exactly wrong. 

Mina, I can actually stand. The same I cannot say for Big Joel, Basketball Break Down, Gil's Arena, Lindsay Ellis, Patrick H Williams...pretty much most video essayists and cultural commentators offer painfully extracted opinions bloated out to 30 minutes or more pulled straight out of their arses and presented as authoratative and researched takes. It's a genre popularized by a medium that society has not yet learned to interact with any discernment and it has lead to a pandemic of people acquiring beliefs believing themselves to be acquiring knowledge.

Mina Le is one of the better ones, and if you read her bio on her page "just a gal who likes fashion and movies" we get an honest disclosure of her qualifications to explain any of the social phenomena that form the subjects of her videos. It may not be a sufficient or necessary counterweight to the presumptive titles of those videos - where someone like Prof. Tim Snyder of Yale who criticized Putin for writing an essay titled with the word "On" because "On" presumes that something is. Titling something as "explaining" might presume possession of a definitive and solitary explanation, where the content is usually post hoc rationalizations offered by other observers of a phenomena (the consensus is that Alexander McQueen brought back low-rise jeans, where I feel Mariah Carey is a much more credible explanation for why it hit big at the turn of the century. Muffin tops and arse cracks are a credible explanation as to why high-rise jeans came back for women rather rapidly.) 

Yet, just as there are likely real reasons to drink wine from a glass goblet with a stem and whiskey from a tumbler, Mina Le probably shed's some real insight into historical facts and what not. Hence I could watch Mina Le for a while, without hate watching, I mean I never hate watched. I don't think Mina is fashionable, but I also don't care. Like I don't need someone to own 6 properties before I deem them qualified to tell me about property investment. 

Big Joel on the other hand, I do hate watch. He's like the bob's burgers of youtube. I can watch infinite Bob's Burgers and never spot a joke or gag, yet understand it to be beloved, Big Joel however much of his content I've watched, I've never spotted any actual insight, yet understand him to be beloved. Like beloved like a show that actually makes people laugh, or beloved like a commentator who shares actual insight.

I recommend Mina Le as a valuable example of a content creator that can be watched in order to extract the content archetype and stop watching. Mina Le on everything is talking to the story of reconciling the need to fit in, with the person who needs to fit in. That's fashion.