RIVERDALE: Trashique, Sincerely
‘Oh, that’s where you’re wrong Jughead Jones. I’m all about the beast within.’
“Everybody is hyper self-aware, thoroughly ironic.”
That’s The O.C.’s creator, and Gossip Girl EP, Josh Schwartz in an ’05 interview with Anne Becker, explaining his smarmy-sex, soap-edy tone with the glib of one of his characters, “we live in a post-everything universe.” He describes an elitist (californian) trojan horse. The beautiful fashion, sun, mansions and parties are a superficial hook to lure audiences into his emotionally sincere series. Cringe if you gotta, but RIVERDALE can’t be bothered to hide its syrupy intentions.
Take note, establish ~ a e s t h e t i c ~ early.
Once your fanbase starts hedging bets on palette mainstays, they make haste tracking relationships via micro-blog fandoms. A gif-set dynamic digs in deep grooves.
If WB’s millennium-turn as The CW champions anything it’s the costume-drama. Reign for Philippa Gregory stanz, The Carrie Diaries, Berlanti’s nightly-superhero-serving, The 100’s survivalist-grunge, Gossip Girl, The Originals, etc. Beyond curating retro ennui, RIVERDALE’s costumes bring us the remedy to Generation Y’s projection of millennials, self-aware camp that doesn’t play its tropes for irony’s sake. Rather, it’s proud to be tres chic and trashy. An operating mode for unironic text.
Trashique: a concept of disruption, a marker for deviation sui generis, an invisible movement we can start circulating around Pop’s Chok’lit Shoppe. Based on multiple overlapping flows, trashique presents itself in blips: an art-runway show repurposing recyclables, Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers, Grimes & Hana’s finsta, and the Americana pastiche haunting Kanye and luxury fashion brands like Balenciaga, yet it came to be without a manifesto or authorship. Trashique takes cultural cliché and gladly removes its self-importance, industrial logic resisted. Pulpy in this way, loud DIY giddiness. The miniskirt of the 60s had something to say by design, like the pop art of the same era, power plays inspired by the politics of the time, against the jadedness of cynicism, misanthropy, bad irony, and shitty one-upsmanship of the straight world’s authority. An American Werewolf in London + Animal House, the double feature Jughead and Betty go to, represents this tonal tightrope, where noir and teen-film tropes are repurposed into a near-storybook world. The town lawyer’s name is Mr. Sowerberry.
For Hala Bahmet, who costume designed the pilot and developed its color palette with Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, “every character is based on either a composite or a decade of the actual ‘Archie’ comics.” Like a collection designed around Atemporal America, her designs are classic silhouettes, rather than detailed designs — the elite notched blazer, a biker cut jacket, post-war-minimalist dresses. These are cuts that come back season after season and, on screen, exemplify the genre’s archetypes. Bahmet ordered authentic whoopee caps from the Depression era to try out on Cole, but it looked too silly, so they went with the knit beanie.
In an interview with Vulture, Cole’s defense for RIVERDALE’s teen-dread tone gets at this sincerity: “Even the idea that it’s being called ‘teenage’ is a notion that it’s being reduced to a problem that’s not quite adult. That’s a problematic thing to say about a narrative that could actually be dangerous, could be hurtful, could be upsetting. Things could go wrong. That’s what we’re going for.” When your sense of identity starts to slip, it’s easy to hold on to a stereotype. There’s danger in all the ways society will reject your new real. But if you can debase yourself along with the norm and find the fun in that, you’re, like, glam garbage!
Fast fashion retailers like H&M imitate catwalk trends en masse, producing luxury brand looks with low quality materials in a bid to satiate the mainstream market, hooked to logo rather consistent voice or quality. The ethics of fast fashion’s model highlights differences between owners of the means of production and the workers themselves, brand boom bubble as the result of a toxic socio-economic structure. Low-tier rehashing is the industry norm for franchise filmmaking, fast fashion, AAA video games, Netflix TV, fast food, anywhere you look you might find inspiration reduced for profit.
Well, what about the syrup industry? That’s what you’re wondering, right? Blossom Maple Farms built Riverdale, and it’s poisoned it, too. “Thicker than blood, more precious than oil. Riverdale’s big business is maple syrup.” Like most of us, I thought this Maple War plot was funny at first, then CineNation’s own Thomas Horton put it in perspective: ‘Oil sells for $3 a gallon at best and maple syrup is like $10 for a pint.’ Yeah, huh, I see how that’s legitimately daunting…
Our current Prez, a narcissistic CEO-slash-reality-TV-star with zero perspective as to the nation’s concerns, advocates for white-hetero-male hegemony at every turn. The economy is in a bubble and standard companies, whether media or retail, find their business models unable to function, sales slipping and conventions gone stale. If we don’t push for personal expression, our friends might implode. Radicalize, get creative in your rebellion, be trashique and destabilize the industry, destroy its precious familiarity. Eat the rude, feed your subculturez. Or be its casual cousin, garbáge. A garbàge source, a true trendsetter in trash, defined this non-radicalized synonym for me as a no-fux-given “so bad it’s good” attitude in which something is so tacky and messy and fully embraces it that it becomes highly enjoyable in its gross assuredness. This includes risky dance moves, Reptar tatz, or the speech about your hat nobody asked to hear.
The chaos Jughead bemoans in The Lost Weekend’s opening narration can, in a small way, be sorted out through trends and tropes. Fashion’s increasingly communicative role as a reflection of social change is more than eye candy. Here’s a platform for ideological assertions that you can wear. Challenge traditions of consumerism, gender, enter into conversations about commodity fetishism, the limits of ‘market’ and your space in the ‘demo.’ Say fuck all that and abstain from the system. Delete your social media. Start 15 alt accounts and form a militant witch coven.
(I’m still holding out for Sabrina Spellman… Whatever, okay!)
Our agitated state’s trending, so hold onto what’s yourz. Namely, our first justification for youth, its reckless expansion into an indefinitely open future. Trash or otherwise.
