It's a Good Time to Be Weird
It's a Good Time to Be Weird
When everyone else is fighting to stay real, why not lean into letting go?
Addison Rae is fun to look at. Drawing inspiration from Britney Spears, Lana Del Rey, and Madonna, she’s been trying to turn her accidental internet fame into a pop star career. Not everything she’s done landed — this Petra Collins project is phenomenal and the Von dutch remix feature gives me goosebumps, but the Diet Pepsi music video and the 2010s Photo Booth filters take some time to get into. She is approaching this so-called “rebrand” with the innocence of a child that’s yet to know what it’s like to feel self-conscious and the skills of an amateur who committed to putting herself out there despite the self-induced cringe.
Is this the real Addison though? A girl next door from a small town in the South turned model, “budding starlet,” and LA party girl? Her transition doesn’t feel sudden or forced like Camila Cabello’s or Katy Perry’s, but it’s definitely reminiscent of rampaging through your mom’s closet and putting together crazy outfits that teleport you into the wild fantasy worlds you make up when you are bored. She alludes to playing with characters in an interview with Mel Ottenberg when she talks about her current obsession with wigs: “You can get away with anything when you’re wearing a wig. I wore a wig last weekend and it was a pink little bob moment with bangs, and we called her Ms. Lovely. I love assigning an alter ego to a wig because it really gives me the permission to be bad. I’m like, “Oh, we don’t even have the same name. She’s someone else.”
This freedom to experiment without commitment is what normcore was supposed to be about before it got widely misinterpreted as stripping away everything unique in favor of the mass retail brands and the mundane: “Normcore knows your consumer choices aren’t irrelevant, they’re just temporary. People compromise, people are inconsistent. Making one choice today and a conflicting choice tomorrow doesn’t make you a hypocrite. It just makes you complex.”
When this message got lost in translation, instead of leaning into curiosity and adaptability to navigate microtrends and logomania, we flocked to products, taglines, and cultural shifts that emphasize the importance of searching inwards and finding your real self — from makeup brands that call for embracing your natural imperfections to expert advice on how to develop a personal style. Everything real exists in direct opposition to fake, produced, and manufactured, and we are obsessed with being able to differentiate between the two and call out the posers — to the point where the main message often flies over our heads.
Loewe’s Fall Winter 2024 campaign that unveiled the “shaggy chic” side of Daniel Craig, threw the fans of his clean and polished secret agent look for a loop. The NYT Style Desk speculated whether the unbuckled belt and the messy hair are the new real Craig or a made-up alter ego created to promote his upcoming movie Queer. But does it really matter? The most interesting part about the campaign isn’t even about Craig, or Loewe, or Queer, but rather how it affects our own perception and projection of self. “A fashion picture working at its very best can tweak our sense of normalcy just a bit, can jostle our sense of safety even,” noted Stella Bugbee. “We had a fixed idea of Daniel Craig, and with a bit of exposed collarbone and some emo hair, everything seems flexible. And that flexibility makes you think about yourself — about how wearing clothes might allow you to alter your sense of self or how others see you.” In simpler words, these pictures of Daniel Craig are weird in a way that’s impossible not to look at.
Weird is the only safe heaven that lies between phony and real. It makes the mundane interesting, the manufactured forgivable, and the out-of-touch grounded. The land of weird runs off an intricate ecosystem that starts with regular people and everyday occurrences captured by someone with an eye and ear for characters and stories that exist in unlikely places, like Isaac Rangaswami of Caffs not cafes and Lance Oppenheim of Spermworld and Ren Faire.
Upstream from here are the earnest nerds who come off charmingly weird as a byproduct of caring deeply about their passions, like the award-winning gardener Charlie McCormick who harvests giant marrows and zucchinis for local fairs, or Celia Pym who documents repairs of old knitted cardigans and socks.
Everything above from here is the type of weird that’s created or curated on purpose as an artistic pursuit, commercial venture, or entertainment. It’s the chic Parisian weird that lives through businesses like outofuseberlin and Gohar World, the off-the-streets weird that manifests into brands like early Aime Leon Dore, and the high-end luxury weird that flows right out of these two — Loewe tomato purses, Miu Miu button ups tucked straight into tights, and Marc Jacobs couture. This type of weird feeds off the first two to stay novel and grounded, and at times, loops around and creates weird everyday occurrences that juxtapose luxury with the mundane.
Weird makes you pause to question whether it’s real, but even if it’s not, it still delights you with the effort it took to create. Great creative direction works like a magic trick — the audience knows that they are being fooled (hell, they are there to be fooled) but they don’t know exactly how, and it fires up their brains in a very interesting way. It’s much more fun to watch other people create their own weird worlds than constantly get lectured about how to move through yours.
Clinging onto what’s real is the knee-jerk response to the state of the world where the lines between offline and virtual, marketable and useful, machine and human have been blurred. But what if instead of fighting to stay grounded, we leaned into letting go? If social media isn’t real, why not do something crazy with it? If the machines are threatening creativity, why not use them in your art? If luxury is nothing more than a concept, why not have a little fun? The irony is that the more you separate your real self and your projects, the more space there is for free creative expression, and the more authentic and interesting you become.
IN THE MARGINS:
A couple more weird things:
In June,
interviewed Jimmy McIntosh of Dead Pubs who makes these charming, slightly eerie videos about old school pubs in London:
“The narrator’s sombre, deadpan voice layered over eerie ambient background music gives the videos a mysterious, almost otherwordly essence. As the protagonist explores dimly lit watering holes to sink Mediterranean lagers, he assesses the patrons participating in karaoke, while marvelling at the amenities and decor at hand. Sometimes it’s a decent selection of fruit machines and a framed bullet hole from a gunfight, sometimes it’s the weekly meat raffles and an admiration for the pub’s resident speed garage DJ. An evaluation on the state of the urinals is a mandatory.”
Lauren Sherman interviewed Hagop Kourounian of directorfits for Fashion People. I love what he’s been able to do with his platform. Most of the images you see on his IG are scans of photos he finds at the Margaret Herrick Library ran by the Academy. Hagop also writes a newsletter where he chats with directors and costume designers about clothes. He talked about dressing weird characters with Katina Danabassis - the costume designer for The Curse.
A few more weird links in the updated Busy Corner Reference Bank :)
“If social media isn’t real, why not do something crazy with it? If the machines are threatening creativity, why not use them in your art? If luxury is nothing more than a concept, why not have a little fun?” — I am eager to see more people adopting this attitude and join in for a shared fun 🐓
Thanks for this, I'm inspired