Why millennials love Yeezy and The Hunger Games, but hate capitalism

I suspect fashion is a lens through which we can understand some of our own anxieties and fears for the future.

I’m going unpack some of that by focusing on Kanye West’s Yeezy projects, and drawing parallels to images of the future in popular media. But first, why is fashion as a medium so important?

1. Why fashion matters

Fashion is one of the tools we use to construct our identity. Clothing is how social creatures like us form our self-image and perform it (to others and to ourselves). This “performance” isn’t just evident in runway fashion, but the everyday clothes we wear too. For example: dressing in a suit is a performance of professionalism when work to a job interview. That suit is being used as a tool to communicate the identity and values of the wearer: “I am smart, capable, and respectful.”

Note: this is especially true in wealthy, consumerist cultures like that of North America — which is where I live and the explicit context for this essay.

Even “anti-fashion” and “un-fashion” dress performs for others an image coded with values and judgements. Trends such as normcore capitalize on that. A plain black t-shirt is never just a plain black t-shirt: an idea William Gibson explored in his novel Pattern Recognition, wherein the protagonist spends a great deal of emotional (and financial) capital trying to avoid communicating through fashion.

I’ve linked to sources above that explain futher how to “read” fashion; I encourage you to dive in if you’re interested. In short: fashion reflects who we want to be, and what we want others to see in us. Our fashion choices reveal what we’re feeling about our world, and I suspect they reveal how each of us envisions the future as well. In the aggregate, fashion trends speak to our fear about what’s to come.

Now let’s look at what those fears and anxieties actually are (by seeing them revealed in popular books, TV, and film), so we have the proper context for analyzing Yeezy.

2. Context: Millennials and dystopia

A healthy body of work has been established examining the popularity of dystopian and apocalyptic fiction among “millennials” (a term I hate, and only use here to characterize folks who roughly: grew up with computers, came of age with the repercussions of 9/11, and entered adulthood during the Great Recession).

However, not much work has been done connecting this trend with real anxieties millennials have: worries about retirement savings and mortgages, vast under-employment/unemployment and rising debt, and the fact that we’ll soon be driving to work on the Fury Road.

Amidst studies, papers, and articles outlining the coming upheavals of climate change, it’s safe to assume that yes—it is very much top of mind. A smart person would bet on a correlation between anxiety, despair, other symptoms of “pre-traumatic stress disorder”—and the mass popularity of YA fiction that features critiques of modern industrial capitalism, the breakdown of society, environments in various states of decay or regrowth, and ultimately revolution.

3. Back to fashion

Fashion throughout the twentieth century has reflected popular media, so it’s not breaking new ground to examine the aesthetics of post-apocalyptic fiction—how as a culture we extract from the mashup of anxiety and escapism an aesthetic for the future that we are comfortable with in the present. Emulating the fashion of these speculative futures is at once play-acting the dystopia, and also grappling with our own predictions and fears.

Can Kanye West’s fashion brand Yeezy help identify our expectations of environmental damage, overall human welfare/wealth, militarization and privacy, and technological progress in the future?

Kanye West’s collaboration with Adidas is famously pessimistic, deliberately crude, malformed, and ill-fitting—and one of the most formative visions guiding contemporary street fashion.

The inspiration for Yeezy comes explicitly from military and humanitarian sources: invitations to the Yeezy Season 2 show were printed on Rothco “army surplus” shirts, and included in the press packet for Yeezy Season 3 was a real photograph from a Rwandan refugee camp.

Kanye’s aesthetic vision of the future has parallels in many examples of dystopian, post-apocalyptic media: in the dress of free humans in The Matrix trilogy, citizens of District 12 in The Hunger Games, and desert scavengers in the CW television show The 100.

The future presented by Yeezy is on the extreme end of a spectrum of despair and pessimism. The distressed sweaters don’t communicate a lived-in comfort like pre-ripped Levis do—they imply a profound poverty and lack of resources, as in The Hunger Games. The drab colours and military silhouettes reflect a society either dominated by warfare (The Matrix) or defined by salvage rather than the production of new goods (The 100). In every case the collapse of modern society and the inhospitality of our environment is inevitable—and the aesthetic vision picks up where the apocalypse left off.

Yeezy is most successful not financially (in fact, it may be a cost centre for Adidas), but by its impact on contemporary fashion trends. Oversized fits, distressed or “destroyed” pieces, and the iconic sneakers (which require a high level of precision and automated technology to create, but are designed to look crudely constructed with vulgar stitching) have trickled down to fast fashion.

Consuming Kanye’s vision of the future requires us to wrestle with issues of mass production and the exploitation of labour, artificial scarcity, the end of economic and industrial growth, and global poverty. Why are destroyed sweatshirts so rare, and expensive? Who’s making them? And who are we pretending to be when we wear them?

Contemporary anxieties about the limits of endless growth and the realities of endless war are what connect this aesthetic to our psyches through fashion and fiction. Perhaps we consume Yeezy because play-acting this broken future is how we grapple with accepting it? Because we feel powerless to stop it? Do we embrace this aesthetic because we recognize it from our dreams?