Trend Strong

A few years ago, you couldn’t walk down the street without being trampled by a crowd of yellow wristbands. Lance Armstrong’s cancerous testicle not only inspired a nation, but won Sheryl Crow over, and created a fad.

I was around the first time rubber bracelets became a big deal, and they had far less pretentiousness. The 80’s were great, not just because I got hair ‘round my junk, but because a guy could wear a silly skinny black bracelet and the only bandwagon you were on was being fashionable. The New Romantic, MTV asexuality ruled, and being trendy was purely for aesthetic, shallow reasons.

The second grand revival took almost twenty years, but it came around, bigger and badder than the first time. The difference was a massive wave of smug superiority, crass capitalism, and blind conformity. It’s hard not to take up the cause against cancer, unless you’re a tobacco CEO or a complete prick, but there’s a difference between supporting a cause deliberately or trying to keep up with what the buzz is and inadvertently causing support.

Swatch watches, Air Jordans, Stussy, Oakleys, Z Cavaricci. - all trends, all the hot fashion at the time they came out, all indicative of your level of coolness and Q. But all of them lacked a crucial component…a non-fashionable statement. Birkenstocks enjoyed a nice revival over a decade ago and they had both trend and an image based message: “I’m hip, but I’m also environmentally conscious”. What possession of a thing said about you became the fashion and trend, not just the intrinsic look of an object by fashionable standards. Of course, every other cause in the universe soon made their own colored variation of the bands, but the little yellow entity was omnipresent.

I never got on that bandwagon, and I’m happy to say none of my friends did either, because that shit looked stupid. Besides that, the dopiest, dullest dregs of society found a cheap trend that made them included in the same circles as any other person who was not a useless as they. On one hand, that’s a beautiful thing, to see people of different classes and social spheres equalized like that, especially when some Beverly Hills trophy and a La Puente chica both have Louis Vuitton purses that are virtually the same except what was paid for them. But trends of fashion don’t work like that, and the grossly widespread proliferation of a style makes it lose the unique quality that made it special in the first place.

I don’t want to get off subject and turn this into the style police hour, but hopefully you recognize the practical issues of trend-bursting this little rubber gimmick created. And now that you do, factor back in the additional overtones of what the bracelets stand for. The crushing weight of the symbolic adherence to following the crowd is too much for me. The same mentality happened when every other car in LA had a Lakers flag on it during their early decade dynasty, and when pro-soldier yellow ribbon stickers started showing up on bumpers everywhere. And though being anti-trend is novel in itself, the real triumph is in avoiding the group mentality and choosing to migrate away from trends as a principle rather than as a reaction, because hating something for what it is has to be primary to hating something for what it is because it’s widespread.

Example: UGG boots. What has to be the ugliest contraption you could sink your tooties into, they look like fur lined buckets. Hardly every seen on a woman who isn’t wearing sweatpants or tracksuit bottoms that likely say Juicy across the ass, they are nothing more than outdoor slippers. Furthermore, they are a small component of an outfit, nay, uniform that says, “hi, my fashionable side was permanently stunted and never grew beyond what a co-ed wears down to the dorm cafeteria”. Of course, now they’re as widespread as herpes at an ASU sorority house, but disgruntlement at their weed-like propensity to propagate is secondary to loathing their basic existence.

These days, I don’t remember the last time I saw one of those stupid yellow idiot tags. Even adults have taken them off. And it was their absence and retreat into fad obscurity that took a long time to notice, like how some people don’t immediately notice if a man with long standing facial hair shaves it off. One day, I just noticed they were gone. I know they didn’t cure cancer, so what happened? That was rhetorical – I already told you it was not just a fashion trend but was also sparked (and later driven) by conformist behavior. At least many of you now know how to recognize fashion based lemming-like behavior and prepare for whatever socio-significant statement gets loaded into the next hot object. It’s only a matter of time…