Note: this post engages in a series of blatant and hopefully amusing stereotypes.

My brief daily commute between Sacramento and Davis gives me some time to think about advertising – this is usually prompted by the many billboards posted along the side of I-80, which lately have included one from Heineken, a watery Dutch lager widely consumed by frat boys and which tastes about the same as Bud Light.  Heineken’s current ad campaign, centered on the rather enigmatic tagline “Give Yourself a Good Name,” has been getting me thinking of late.  I say “enigmatic” in reference to the tagline because of its odd juxtaposition of the notion of winning or maintaining one’s “good name” – suggestive of a system of values rooted in the landed aristocracy – and the numerous hipster cultural cues embedded in the campaign’s print and TV advertisements.  Stepping back from this problem for a minute and looking at the (assumed) marketing motive behind the campaign, it seems like the idea is to associate Heineken with a certain type of hip, New York-centric, twenty-something bar culture, in which the idea of “giv[ing] yourself a good name” might mean something along the lines of burning a copy of the latest Animal Collective album for a friend, introducing your roommate to that hot girl from the artists’ collective, or hopefully from the perspective of the advertiser, buying your mustachioed, fixie-riding compatriots some Heineken!  In other words, Heineken is trying to trade up, at least at the level of appearance, from the frat boys who have reliably consumed Heineken since time immemorial, to the NYC post-college crowd.

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I’ve learned a number of things since arriving in Davis, California last September – that speed bumps can be rather suggestively referred to as “undulations” or “speed humps,” that the entire state is obsessed with hamburgers, that archaic “snow chain” technology is favored over actual snow tires, and that any roadside pit stop worth its salt has espresso. 

One of the most curious things I’ve learned has to do with Uggs, those gross-looking, bulky boots that look like high-top moccasins and that were favored by youngish women in a much-derided fad that swept the country a couple of years ago.  Uggs seem to have since become a punch line for the rest of the U.S., shorthand for the sort of blind anti-fashion casualness that makes Americans look like the laziest of slobs whenever we travel abroad – witness Danny McBride’s snazzy pair of black Uggs in last summer’s Pineapple Express.  However, Uggs are somehow, for reasons unknown to me, alive and well in Davis.  While this is interesting on an anthropological level (why Uggs? Why Davis in particular?), it is, for me, nonetheless a perpetual source of annoyance, evidence of the dopiness of those about a generation younger than I am and an insult to my personal sense of aesthetics. 

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I’ve been pondering this topic for a while now. Especially since, one fateful trip back home around the end of summer, I became interested in fashion by watching my parents HD tv. One of the HD channels, ultraHD, is pretty much 24 hours a day of fashion shows, commentary and stuff like that. In particular, there was this one Emporio Armani show from Milan fashion week, that had like the best musical accompaniment. Trying to find out what the song was, I discovered style.com and was poring over their extensive collection of videos and pictures for days on my parents computer, which was like crossing a bog. I was even doing that while watching NHRA drag racing with my dad.

I never found the song, but the interest kind of stuck with me. You know, I’ve watched a lot of DVD commentaries, and heard a quote from Antonioni that goes something like: it only takes a day to learn everything you need to about film language. After searching on wikipedia, still haven’t found any explanation of what this film language thing is or where I can find the stuff you can learn in a day. However, while watching some fashion show, I had one of those epiphanies that I imagine could be an analogy for fashion to what Antonioni was talking about with film. Except in this case I can actually explain it.

As a man you watch a fashion show and you sort of have one of two kind of stock reactions, either “man, what a babe” or “what will they come up with next.” But, with a little thought, you can move beyond that. And, for me, (I know this probably sounds incredibly trite) I realized that the way to read a fashion show is to try and imagine the woman who would wear those clothes, what would you think about her if you saw her on the street. And that’s when I started to wonder about fashion in relation to my own life, and that brings me to the present and the topic of this post, which is more a question really that I’d like to pose to the RS community.

Believe me when I say I’m not trying to bait anybody with this topic (because I know lots of you hit the merch tables quite heavily) and I only write this because I’ve honestly wondered about it. What is the relationship between band merchandise, especially t-shirts and hoodies, and personal style? Because it’s always seemed, among devotees, that there’s something just unassailable about band t-shirts. For example, see the picture above or check out the do make merch. I would feel totally confident walking into a room with “do make say think” written across my chest. But what is the origin of that confidence, and is it also rooted in a certain kind of insecurity about exploring a larger style palate that leads me to go where I’m not actually forced to make any decisions about what I put on? Do I have to like preempt style by subsuming it within music?