Fashion And Doomer Culture: A Pessimistic Outlook On Mankind’s Future.
How two different cultures reflect our current view on society and the future.
I’m always drawn to anything post-apocalyptic or dystopian-related stuffs. Be it literature, motion picture, stills, music, and even clothing. My personal style is hugely inspired by something like ‘Blade Runner’ (both original and the sequel), William Gibson’s works, 1984, Ray Bradbury’s ‘Fahrenheit 451,’ and even something like Rush’s ‘2112’ concept album. Somehow the way I wear my clothes is as if I’m a character traversing a wild wasteland filled with ruins of modern civilization if that makes any sense.
Throughout the course of this decade, we saw a rise in technical wear that can withstand extreme temperatures and weather like the iconic Acronym and Stone Island (especially the “Shadow Project” line). On the avant-garde side of things we have many designers like Tatsuo Horikawa of Julius with his distinctive anarchist outlook reflected on his garments. Few of my favorite collection from The Soloist (helmed by Takahiro Miyashita formerly of Number Nine) FW18 “Disorder/Order” (still in line with Undercover’s own show “Order/Disorder,” another favorite of mine) and the recent FW19 heavily emphasizes on the bleak future with buckles, zippers, black boots, and extra compartments to increase the rate of one’s survival in the world where nothing prevails. We also have Samuel Ross’ “A-COLD WALL” with his vision to destroy social barriers and the industrialist youth of Great Britain. Everything seems bleak yet presented beautifully through mismatched cuts, drapes, and monochromatic colour palette.
The Internet plays a huge part on this. With the endless surge of information that we received on daily basis we learned everything almost in real time. Every crisis, every insurgency, every political issue in the world, everything be it bleak or somewhat good news all mixed in one huge stream of information that we can barely digest in one go. All that results in the rise of a new internet subculture: Doomer.
If you are active on the internet especially the meme community, you probably have stumbled upon the characters known as Wojak. Doomer is a part of a series of Wojak that conveys a male (though a Doomer can be either male or female) in his mid-20s working a dead-end job with a pessimistic outlook on life. The endless stream of pessimistic news especially on late 10s gave rise to this subculture where people believe that life is meaningless and not worth fighting for. As the result, this generation becomes the most interconnected generation ever yet also ironically the generation that dwells in self-isolation knowing that somehow everything is meaningless. Doomer is a byproduct of the Internet culture, and to a certain extent this generation’s zeitgeist.
Both fashion and doomer culture is interconnected in a sense that they are reflecting our views on society and mankind’s future. With every single person sharing Greta Thunberg’s speech on global warming and another news of war breaking out somewhere in the world feeding our ever-growing pessimism towards the future resulted in the rise of the culture as we know it. For now, our doom seems imminent and the current worldview towards it is justifiable in my opinion. Only the Internet really exaggerates everything to the point of mass-paranoia and no one is able to stop the endless stream of pessimism coming from it. And as always, fashion as byproduct of the time reflected it in a pragmatically beautiful way with every draped shirt and asymmetrically cut blazer.
The future might be bleak from our point of view now, but at the very least we get to dress like someone from Mad Max and Blade Runner.
