It was a sunny afternoon, some eleven years into my childhood, when it dawned on me that I had inadvertently joined a cult. The setting for said unexpected discovery took place in the playground. It was a “mufti” day; a day where children replaced homogenous uniformity with an expression of individuality by donning their favourite personal attires. However, for a group of average eleven year-olds, self-expression is not accompanied by Gucci or Prada but is instead limited by the depths of a mother’s purse, and playground couture was thus split into two sub-cultures: the ‘Townies’ and the ‘Metallers’.
‘Townies’ donned watered-down, middle-class versions of urban attire, pairing luxurious tracksuit bottoms with some serious Argos bling, whilst ‘Metallers’ wore studded accessories and black apparel that boasted heavy-metal band names and not-so-revolutionary slogans. On this particular day, I had decided to showcase my sartorial elegance by pairing a chunky silver neck-chain (it wasn’t cool to say necklace) with a t-shirt two sizes too big that, unfortunately for me, filed under the urban category. However, this seemingly innocent playground polarization delved deeper than our chosen aesthetics; the juxtaposing sub-cultures also enforced a set of obligatory social standards that determined the music we listened to and the people we associated with. Consequently, I found myself bound by the sartorial choices I had made that single afternoon. I – along with any other child who had been polarized into one of the two opposing aesthetics – was defined and restricted by a stringent set of rules that replaced our identities with that of the sub-culture we now represented.
Put simply, we were in a cult.
Not the type of cult that makes religious sacrifices to holy beings, nor the type that makes its members hand over their savings to upgrade to an elusive higher level of life, but rather a cult in a modern, sartorial interpretation of the term. A cult whose members live similar lifestyles, share the same influences and are united in social thought. So, we must ask, does the Utopian vision of the ‘cult’ still exist?
Once associated with religious veneration and systematic beliefs and practices, the term in today’s mainstream culture (with the exception of Scientology and outlandish groups that worship Kermit the Frog) has been diluted to the point where it could just as easily translate under the terms ‘trend’ or ‘aesthetic’. The term has thus become a commodity, where fairytale visions of Mermaid Punks and Bohemian Warriors are sold to us on the pages of fashion magazines and online blogs on a daily basis. Designers such as Meadham Kirchhoff have furthered the commodification of the cult, where each season sees a different sub-culture either championed or imitated in a satirical pastiche. Their runway shows see technical brilliance enhanced by melodramatic extravaganzas ranging from the infamous storming of the stage in the Amish inspired AW11 show to the candy-coloured childhood dream of SS12. With such an eclectic mix of cultures explored and presented each season, the daring design duo champion the ability to dip in and out of varied aesthetics, glamorising traditional cults with a visual appeal that becomes easily interchangeable in daily life.
However, with cult aesthetics being so easily accessible, do we run the risk of losing sight of the contextual connections these ‘trends’ once had? Throw on a studded leather jacket and you are instantly emulating 70s Punk, but do you simultaneously adopt the infamous rebellion and social angst of the original Punk movement? Perhaps, on some level, by donning the attire of these cultures we adopt a diluted form of the psychological state of its people (I always feel a little tougher when I’m wearing a leather jacket and menacing-looking rings) but, ultimately, the moral associations that once drove that cult’s existence become lost in our fetish for commodity. The result of such fetishes has become a world of heterogeneous influences; a world whose inhabitants can fluctuate between historic movements in the change of an outfit; a multifaceted society that commodifies reality into fad or fantasy, adopting a series of external identities in order to produce its own – a new cult of eclectic individuality.
