How Jordan Peterson's Suits Taught Me Fashion

recently I made banana bread and I may yet again you ever notice how foreseeing a prophecy and setting a goal are kind of indistinguishable from each other it's the same thing just perceived as either coming from within you or from outside of you either moving forward through time or backward through time which letter of the alphabet do you think knows the best spells Q right why is that remember best spells is different from most magical because if we're talking about just pure chaotic power o obviously is the most magically powerful that's an open portal through

which Infinity is pouring Q has this line negotiating between the realm of infinite magic and the realm of mortal conscious desire the line in between is the ma magic wand Twitter is good for networking but bad for your soul you know maybe ingesting an Infinity of inflammatory opinions penned by people you do not know is not the first thing you should do when you wake up perhaps plugging into the endless anxiety amplification edutainment machine is not the final thing you should do before going to bed spending your precious Drops Of Consciousness performing your fleeting feelings

as public statements in sand blasting the wrinkles of your brain with other people's low effort intellectual excrements is not what being a person is about next time you're alone and you feel compelled to take out your phone stop for a second think about what you're thinking feel what you're feeling write down the thought you're thinking or the feel you're feeling on a piece of paper with a pen and look at it is your consciousness reflected back at you this is called having a private life maybe we could make time to do this once a day

or or once a week now with all that said let's look at some tweets that changed my aesthetic life for the better the first is when Grimes accidentally called Minions aesthetic terrorism in public minions are aesthetic terrorism this did not need to exist oh this was supposed to be for my burner account I should delete this okay I'm so sorry just like that brand deals just up and smoke the philosopher Miranda fricker coined this concept called hermeneutical Injustice this is when you lack the social language to communicate what you were EXP experiencing to other people

thereby isolating you in your experience and rendering you unable to name it understand it share it with others do something about it if there's no socially understood name for the thing you're experiencing or if you do not know the name for the thing you're experiencing you're damned to experience it alone wondering if it's even real if you even deserve to feel this way about this thing you can't even articulate the common example often cited for this is the phrase sexual harassment which was invented as recently as 1975 at Cornell University by working with women United

they were inspired to do so by the case of carita wood who quit her job at Cornell University due to constant sexual advances remarks and touches from her Superior unfortunately for wood she was unable to express the real reason she was forced to leave because there wasn't language for this thing she was experiencing so you quit because he likes you he he complimented you he stood close to you I'm going to put personal reasons here when working women United popularized the phrase sexual harassment they labeled this common experience that women across workplaces have had for

a long time placing the onus on the men in power who perpetuate this experience and thereby overcoming the Heron unical Injustice that made such oppressive experiences difficult to combat in the past so I'm saying when Grimes called Minions aesthetic terrorism that gave me the language to express something I experienced this is what's happening to me when I'm in a bar happily sipping a Mojito and writing my philosophy and then the house music shuts off and a white dude with dreadlocks plugs in an acoustic guitar and starts playing Love Yourself by Justin Bieber really loudly replacing

the word love with clearly very proud of himself for this Innovation some of you need to leave my senses alone and this is also how we all feel about Jordan Peterson's new suits this does violence to my eyes balls I feel very upset with you I don't like what you did and I don't want to see this again now fashion really isn't my primary medium I lack the expertise in verbiage to express myself within it so I can't really say why this is ugly just that I feel it is but this of course leaves me

wide open to the dismissive retort that's subjective you say it's ugly that's just your opinion Oh Say It Ain't So haven't you heard I'm the aesthetic philosophy Bridge Troll you didn't get to opt that of disagreements on Beauty with me until you've answered my riddles three admittedly as previously established I am not particularly gifted or experienced in this particular medium so I did bring back up see one man on Twitter has been Waging War against Peterson's new suits and he's been been trending there's a very painful period when you see guys start to pay attention

to clothes and they start to dress worse than they did before they started paying attention to clothes part one order meets chaos Derek guy is a man a man who likely has a face although we're not sure about that what we know for sure is that he has three health bars very long Combos and he hasn't been killed yet if you get the notification that you've been quote tweeted by at diew workware you should be concerned belt should match your shoes should wear over the calf socks wrong size you dumbass because you have your opinions

but DK guy has principles but before we explain what those principles are check out this cool portal I found who looks better here in your opinion I'm just wondering you pick one all right cool you want to take another run through the portal before we go on which of these two outfits look better to you subjectively in your opinion no wrong answers if you subjectively arbitrarily prer the first two suits to the second two suits that's fine you are entitled to your opinion if you like your thing and you're happy no one can take that

away from you you should go find the people that agree with you on Aesthetics and then you can all work on an aesthetic philosophy that helps you look like Ron de santis which according to you is a desirable thing to look like on the other hand if you're like me and you think the second two suits look better then we can now discuss amongst ourselves why we might feel this way so isn't that nice our subjectivities are perfectly intact there is no need to be upset yet we're just self-reporting and Inter subjectively sorting and pursuing

our rational self-interest as individualized atomized agents without making any assertions about the objective ideal state of reality with our subjectivities entirely intact it stands to reason that if we agree with Derek guy on Aesthetics in these two cases then we might agree with Derek guy on Aesthetics in more cases and we would benefit from hearing him out on what he believes the underlying explanatory principles are that drive our aesthetic preferences across cases so in case you're interested in what may be influencing your meaningless opinion here are a couple things that guide dereck's appraisals in these

examples if you pick the second in both examples then we have the same Aesthetics in that case here is a guiding principle a business jacket is not the same as a sport coat let's take these two examples which looks better to you if you choose the second it's because that's a sport code the business suit jacket is associated with the business suit which is a particular cultural language conventionally in this cultural language it is almost always awkward to wear a business suit jacket without matching color pants what is the difference between a suit jacket and

a sport coat well a suit is a garment where the jacket and the pants are cat from the same cloth and the two are meant to be worn together a sport coat is intended to be worn pants Cut From a Different Cloth if you wear a suit jacket on its own it has to convincingly pass as a sport coat it can't look like an orphan suit jacket which is a suit jacket that is lost it's accompanying pants these outfits look bad because it looks like the person spilled something on their suit pants and had to

change out of them another thing you'll notice is that although both of these jackets are buttoned up at the belly only one of them looks like it will pop open if you poke the wearer on the nose can't you just imagine it Ron's jacket is too tight twist more if you look at any of the professional politician businessmen that he is incompetently emulating you will see that they tend to wear matching pants with a jacket and a much Cozier fit of jacket overly tight suits are a frequent and fervent Target of Derek's incinerating ey this

is what some of you look like in your skinny suits as you can see Conor McGregor is a veritable mess on this front P so tight I can read your text messages I he looks like a Saran wrapped sandwich it's kind of common knowledge to the point of cliche that men used to dress better than they do now sometimes we attribute that to the fact that men wear suits less but even when they do wear suits they look worse Derek guy Wagers that a major contributing factor to this malaise is that we keep jamming our

men into these ultratight suits suit couldn't be tighter without being inside him of course you can always argue cultural relativism that's just your opinion your preference for roomier vintage suits is just archaic elitist nostalgia closed-mindedness in the face of inevitable changes in taste over time to which I would reply let's put it through the portal test how do we like our new tight suits compared to old Hollywood suits in your opinion you're wearing a suit you're going for classical why opt for the rural 8ighth grade graduation mod the tight suit epidemic is really just symptomatic

of an overall cultural preference for Tighter and skimpier clothes but this has contributed to our modern malaise in fashion as we've aband in the concepts of shape and drape have you ever felt like the average person dressed better in the past in my opinion the reason has nothing to do with respectability body shape or even suits it has to do with the loss of what I call shape and drape when people admire Fashions of the past they often bring up issues unrelated to clothes like respectability politics body type what they're actually admiring are the shapes

of these clothes and how they drape notice the procession of wonderful shapes here the shape refers to the silhouette what shape do your clothes create that are not just the shape of your body is there any shape to your clothes or are they all just skin suits of different colors Drake refers to how the fabric hangs and moves does it hang does it drape at all or do does it just stick to your skin slightly sweatily a favorite example of Derek guys for Perfect Clean subtle drape is this incredibly dripped out photo set of Jackie

GLE and [Music] golfing the portal moment that really cemented the centrality of the silhouette inside of my soul was this side by-side comparison between Sonic the Hedgehog and Meg Ryan devastating the the only difference between these outfits is the shape of the actual garment shape and drape slim fit shape and drape slim fit so this is all really good and fun and useful if you agree with Derk guy on Aesthetics he has tons of tips and tricks for men's wear but things get deeper and more difficult when we move away from these obvious examples towards

some finer examples we're forced to engage with the real substance of what Derek guy is saying and it's a little more than just subjective arbitrary taste preference assigned at portal which takes us to the second tweet that changed my aesthetic life when Derek guy dunked on the good doctor there's a very painful period when you see guys start to pay attention to clothes and they start to dress worse than they did before they started paying attention to clothes portal test it I don't really know about this one I'm not saying the second is better I'm

saying I don't know like they both kind of look bad in different ways or maybe it's not the close at all maybe I'm just noticing that he looks sweaty and sad in the first pick but healthy and happy in the second pick but I'm not sure that the first outfit is better than the second is it I mean the coat's too big right I've posted the photo on the left before and people have replied with the code is too big but the overall outfit has social meaning it reflects his social identity as a normal dude

in Academia the one on the right has no social meaning dress is not an art project what does it mean by that part two dress is not an art project here we begin to dive into Derek guy's full actual philosophy of fashion so it's time to stop reading tweets and take this seriously his actual writing on Aesthetics could be found on his blog die workware or in his contributions to other fashion Publications like put this on his Cornerstone piece in my opinion is how to develop good taste Part One released August 26th 2022 I highly

recommend it if you're interested in stuff or things it's a historical and philosophical analysis of what is counted as good taste over the recent centuries and it's rather staggering in its simultaneous scope and succinctness Derek defly contrasts K's critique of judgment with Pier boru's distinction and fortifies at all with a historical crash course on the emergence of industrial capitalism if you don't normally read this kind of stuff it's a little dry but informative and worth it and if you do normally read this kind of stuff it's very fun and conversational this is boring for you

Emanuel Kant at first glance seems like an unusual figure to reference in men's wear the kind of guy you hate but need he's not fun to watch Love island with but you know he's right why you Bor me you should be grateful Derrik tells a three-part Progressive story from innate taste to expert taste to arbitrary taste and these aren't Derek guys categories they are my categories that I extracted from his essay I am editorializing I'm doing an interpret for storytelling purpose I love you and we will be together forever until the frogs come we begin

with innate taste which thrived throughout the British Empire during the Enlightenment what's the sign for thriving at this time it was believed that good taste was accurate apprehension of objective Beauty the principles of beauty were unchanging Universal and found in nature according to this philosophy of pure transcendent ENT Aesthetics any sophisticated unbiased pallette can intuitively detect true beauty and true beauty never changes not everyone is as gifted or pure of conscience as to perfectly perceive this objective Universal Beauty but an unworthy judges subjective descent does not change the truth of universal Beauty and because these

true judges must be rational and disinterested the Arts are really best left to the Royals and Aristocrats as The Peasants have a tendency to muddy their aspect operations with Petty material concerns they're too caught up with the needs and temptations of the flesh to appreciate pure Aesthetics good taste is objective the queen has it the Poes don't that's why the Queen's the queen and the pors are the Poes everything just makes sense no the second era is the expert taste Epoch which is found in the 1900s in America where a strong liberal Democratic Spirit reigned

this was a time where good taste was still thought to be objective but it was less conflated with good breeding and innate intuition the law of etiquette and taste used to be kept carefully behind closed doors where the pores can't reach them but now those doors began to be uh uh lockpick and ransacked by the rap scallions the dominant philosophy of the time turned away from the idea that good taste was innate and intuitive and instead it was believed that taste was a skill that could be learned in this March toward modernity an army of

Americans mostly made of women geared up to help ordinary people dress better they were writers teachers and retailers who authored thousands of books pamphlets and magazine articles on the art of looking good they taught University classes hosted radio shows and Incorporated their lessons into weekly clothing club meetings for these style experts the message was simple knowledge not money is the key to style good taste was no longer transcendently spiritual and intuitive now it was transcendently rational the pors could have good taste we just need to explain it to them so in the early 1900s popular

Works were published like Emily post's etiquette or Harriet and Veta goldstein's art and everyday life these books rendered the principles of good taste entirely explicit insisting that taste was not a matter of elite innate intuition but of learned expert skill importantly this left the concept of objectively good taste entirely intact it just abstracted good taste into principles that could be applied anywhere for anyone finally we enter the postmodern phase the phase in which we still exist arbitrary taste towards the conclusion of the 20th century the concept of objectivity began to take a severe beating the

cultural Revolutions of the 60s signaled an ever increasing Consciousness that what the elite classes declared was objective was in fact not racism was not objective segregation was not objective sexism was not objective religion was not objective sexual morality was not objective these things were merely presented as objective to reinforce the status quo to ratify the supremacy of those already at the top of the hierarchy there was widespread realization that these social institutions were suppressing the freedom of the individual and marginalizing the lower classes this cultural revolution looked like an explosion in transgressive fashion the proliferation

of a plurality of subcultures and Rapid progress in terms of social justice we shifted from a centralized standard of taste defined top down by the elites towards a subjective standard of taste defined by every individual within their own subcultures Derek guy cites Pier board Ed distinction to summarize this subjective status motivated definition of taste for borue Taste is about class his main criticism against consp Aesthetics and the dress doctors and post-war Men's Wear writers if he had addressed them directly is that they conceal the class Origins and interests of their taste by constructing a seemingly

objective and disinterested facade in this view there is no such thing as genuinely good taste there is only legitimate taste which presents itself as the universally valid form of good taste but in reality it is nothing more than the taste of the ruling class having a sophisticated pallet for French cuisine and fine wine signals that you are a part of the cultural Elite whereas having an equally refined pallet for Vietnamese food does not confer the same status and this Cultural Revolution and philosophical deconstruction of objectively good taste is where we get the modern Mantra that

art is subjective that's just your opinion this is why nowadays when someone claims there are objective standards of beauty they are met with widespread suspicion and derision objectively beautiful don't you know art is subjective are you doing un elitism are you doing a pretentious are you doing a gatekeeping this is why now in every Anthony fantano album review without fail in the description the final line is the disclaimer y'all know this just my opinion right it's just my opinion opion and Derek Guy believes overall this has been excellent for Humanity and excellent for fashion the

democratization of fashion has been a cumulative thing first it gave individuals including the poor greater freedom in dress both in terms of personal expression and opting out the social pressure to conform has also lost much of its Force just as we accept people of different backgrounds we're more accepting today of the variety in appearance and for the fashion Enthusiast the world is a richer more interesting place and yeah I like being able to wear whatever I want non-gender conforming people feel beautiful should be allowed I like being alive today where I am however this lack

of socially enforced standards of dress has other effects like the quality of suit tailoring plummeting into the Earth brother what's that the realization that taste is subjective is a powerful tool of Liberation but it's also one that depletes the that we have to give for upholding culturally Rich standards of taste Freedom comes with decadence and disrespect for tradition it's good and it's bad but it's good it's easy to be cranky about the death of suits and probably telling that some who worship the suit also Harbor a liberal attitudes about other things but the decline of

the suit has been accompanied by the freedoms we all enjoy it's hard to imagine that men and women could have achieved the last 50 years of progress on gender and sexual equality while wearing the two-piece suits and sundresses of the 50s ideas about the fluidity of gender and sexual identity today are also deeply tied to clothing choices so what's the solution how does Derek guy enthusiastically Co sign Bo D's distinction while also still insisting that you should wear your suits properly the way the elites told us to well he completely accepts that the whole concept

of taste is just about being one of the elites to exhibit good taste is to put yourself in closer proximity to Elites if not to be within their company the difference to him is that we now get to choose which Elites we can decide that we want to Signal proximity to the Elite Class of American businessmen in the Golden Age of capitalism and if you decide to do that you better do it correctly but you can also decide to Signal like the elites of hip-hop culture in the 9s in which case you better do that

correctly or you're going to get get your ass destroyed in this freestyle battle listen my loves we need to stop we need to boycott that man's barber shop you can decide to dress like the elites of drag and you better do that correctly you're going to get red for Filth shut up stop reading me you can dress correctly in street wear or work wear or 2 14 Tumblr core tennis skirts down to the bloody knee I'm fluent notice this is still a bounded activity you can't just arbitrarily wear and do whatever you want and declare

it high status people need to agree with you or else it doesn't function as a social signal of taste good taste requires two things one proposing an identity that happens to be valued in your community of choice two using your lifestyle choices to clearly congruently and authentically communicate that identity you can spin plates with no pants on in a train station screaming the ABC's backwards at the top of your lungs and you can believe that this is an elite thing to do but no one will agree with you and eventually you'll be escorted off the

premises being high status in a community of one is not high status it's just being insane it's also no fun to be the only member of a crazy Club dressing Tastefully still means dressing Tastefully according to someone it means signaling allegiance to the elites of some cultural Community declaring yourself to be part of something and that's all Derek guy is asking you to do you have to form a sentence to communicate something and you can be creative with the way that you compose that sentence but it still has to be somewhat culturally legible so knowing

this we now can see his issue with Jordan Peterson's apparent glowup regardless of what you individually arbitrarily intuitively impulsively subjectively prefer one of these outfits has distinct social meaning and the other does not this is an academic an intellectual an educator I know this guy he's going to change my life in a classroom Dead Poet Society style this man the only thing that comes to mind is Batman villain which is why people keep saying that but like that's the only cultural language available with which to interpret this statement but Batman villain is not a real

social identity it is higher effort and more intentional than his previous Garb but tragically this only means that he has abandoned his subconscious fluency in a cultural language in favor of doing some meaningless macaroni paintings without any respect to any cultural language most creative ideas are wrong dress is not an art project it's language and you're babbling incoherently provided all that if you still don't care if you're truly self-satisfied in your subjectivity decoupled from any social identity if you are happy on your side of the portal with Ronda sanas and Jordan Peterson suits I can't

arrest you no matter how much I'd like to if you don't care about developing your fashion taste and you just want to Forever make macaroni paintings on the floor coddled by the knowledge that these are your feelings and you can't be wrong about your feelings you're allowed to do that but I believe art is about so much more than just doing whatever you want insulated inside of your impenetrable intrinsically Justified subjectivity art is also about learning language and expressing yourself through that language it's about discovering yourself outside of yourself discovering yourself inside of other people

it's not about bluntly imposing your will upon the world shielding yourself with a philosophy that says no one can tell you that you're wrong it's about becoming part of the world get me to right now us how to me to the endings of Greece and High School Musical one are very different philosophically this isn't going heart would go in Greece a high school boy and girl are in love and meant to be but they cannot be because culture one of them is a greaser leather jacket cars penis time the other is a pastel poodle skirt

prep keep those legs covered you SL greasers and preps can't be together because they have different interests and values which are explicitly represented in their clothing by the end of the film the Greaser has resigned to compromise for love transitioning from a greaser to a all for a chick what is this Halloween this is depicted as a kind of tragedy as he turns his back on the penis Pals oh come on guys you know you mean a lot to me it's just as Sandy does too but thank God the real resolution of the movie is

incoming the woman renounces all of her values and 180 transforms entirely into a bad she adopts every single Greaser cultural signal simultaneously and is immediately reborn as a sex icon with a correspondently updated vernacular tell me about it St so triumphantly our boy can immediately discard his single symbol of compromise and become a greaser once more notice there is no change expected from either of these subcultures what makes a greaser a greaser and a prep a prep is never questioned these are like objective features of the environment that must be navigated through and around individuals

must change their allegiance from one culture to another inheriting every social value and itic signifier that comes with their new selected social identity I got then they fly into the Sun and presumably die burning I ain't grow up with this movie this is not my culture fast forward to 2006 all this together in High School Musical a boy and girl are in love and meant to be but they cannot be because culture basketball and science can't be together because they have different interests and values which are kind of represented in their clothing I mean it

seems a little less distinctive now at the end of the film the characters unite and sing a song together just the same but basketball boy doesn't change his outfit neither does science girl no one changes anything he just starts singing which he shouldn't do because basketball and everyone realizes that it doesn't matter how you dress or what strange mix of interests you have across subcultures Society shouldn't keep you from doing all the separate things that you like just a generation ago enthusiastic compliance with subcultural standards was framed as a moment of Triumph now Conformity to

subcultural standards is literally the enemy of the film with a villain song and everything the status quo so I'm saying Greece is a depiction of democracy cultures negotiating between each other whereas High School Musical is a depiction of libertarianism individuals freed from the shackles of culture if this is arbitrary taste this is expert taste and innate taste would be like Romeo and Juliet that's two people daring to defy the objective laws of the universe and literally dying for asserting their subjectivity again this is probably a positive development High School Musicals moral is more reflective of

the morals of my age I do prefer people not to be punished and flattened into Conformity by pre-existing assumptions and social pressures I do but at what Point does freeing yourself from society become abandoning Society [Music] altogether in her 1999 essay the Museum of me the technologist Ellen Olman remembers a television advertisement a grim apocalyptic scene chained men crawl in the mud dragging the Chariots of their betters through a wasteland the sky is shot black authoritarian soldiers enforce conformity mythical symbols of tradition rear menacingly the protagonist waits in an impossibly long line at the bank

when she finally reaches the front of this monotonous line the bank tell teller there to help her is dead a spider crawling over his bone white petrified flesh she ages rapidly as Scarlet Gatekeepers laugh at her Eternal weight sealing the vaults we peel back as this awful city is shown in looming scope inaccess ible impossible oppressive but we keep pulling away until we escape the city into Green Hills a cozy colorful home and inside your computer now you can do it all from home with the world's number one selling home computer Packard Bell wouldn't you

rather be at home there's a shocking disgust with Society displayed here and a promise that the internet will hold you inside of yourself declaring in no uncertain terms that culture and Society are a burden isn't it disgusting how you used to have to go into the bank and talk to someone to use your money you had to go into a library and ask for help to get information wouldn't you prefer to do whatever you want to do whenever you want to do it without talking to anyone isn't it awful to rely on others the ultimate

suburbanization of existence a retreat from the friction of the social space for the supposed Idol of private ease it is a view that depends on the idea that desire is not social not stimulated by what others want but generated internally and that the satisfaction of desires is not dependent upon other persons organizations structures or governments it is a profoundly libertarian vision and it is the message that underlies all the mythologizing about the web the idea that the Civic space is dead useless dangerous and the only place of pleasure and satisfaction is your home in this

sense the ideal of the internet represents the very opposite of democracy which is a method for resolving difference in a relatively orderly manner through the mediation of unavoidable civil associations I'll get mine and you'll get yours there is no need for compromise and discussion I don't have to tolerate you and you don't have to tolerate me no need to care for my neighbor next door when I can stay with my chosen Neighbors in The Ether my email friends and the visitors to sites I visit people who think as I do who want what I want

we each click for our individual Joys and our only dispute may come if something doesn't get delivered on time wouldn't you really rather be at home no longer will your taste be limited or influenced by magazines or critics or stores or tailor or theaters or offices or arbitrary etiquette imposed upon you by Society now you've got it all at your fingertips infinite access to whatever you want no rooms with rules and biases no Gatekeepers between you and yourself tell what I'm feel right now I don't know what I'm feeling right now in 1969 the feminist

artist merly ladderman ukis published the manifesto for maintenance art 1969 that's part of the title this Manifesto wrestled between her two conflicting social identities at the time one of an artist and one of a mother nice as an artist she felt compelled to innovate distinguish her self invent deconstruct social norms Rebel assert her individuality but as a mother she felt compelled to care for things already in existence maintain preserve endure so she decided to name these two competing compulsions the death Instinct and the life Instinct the death Instinct separation individuality Avent guard par Excellence to

follow one's own path to Death Do Your Own Thing Dynamic change the life Instinct un ification the eternal return the perpetuation and maintenance of the species Survival Systems and operations equilibrium the life Instinct sheep cares what other people think it goes along with the status quo uncritically it mimics the crowd repeating patterns of old trusting that what exists is already what needs to but the death Instinct individual rages Against the Machine it challenges Authority it asserts its own subjectivity in defiance of of the arbitrary social norms that have been set before it this Manifesto was

part of a proposal for an exhibit at a gallery and it intended to resolve the conflict between her death Instinct artist duties and her life Instinct mother duties by just fusing them instead of trying to satisfy these two instincts separately she would just perform her motherly duties at the gallery as the art she would show up to the gallery every day and just take care of it I can Collide Freedom into its opposite and name necessity art why because I am the artist and I say so now I ask you are you more of a

death Instinct person or a life Instinct person me I'm death in I whether I like it or not uh have difficulty following tradition I am uncontrollably socially disruptive out of loyalty to my own perception I have an abundance of personal goals a very strong sense of internal value and uh martyr complex if I was born one generation ago I would have been that guy in Dirty Dancing bucking against the oppressive establishment so I can express myself in my glorious subjectivity but I wasn't born back then I was born in the late '90s it's my birthday

today as I'm recording this I never struggled with being shoved into a boxy category that limited my choice and self-expression I was raised on the internet I grew up with a brand new thing called an iPod touch and the personalized news feed that came with it I fell in love with hip-hop music and Hip-Hop culture not because any of my friends in real life shared that interest not because I had friends not because I had any peers or mentors from that culture there was no real life social experience in my day-to-day that could real time

refine my sensibilities in that culture as a participant I experienced the culture as a passive Observer as a spectator an isolated agent consuming one post at a time because I was lonely and weird the only Brown kid in the all-white town I lived in at the time the white kids at school called me the n-word soft a affectionately but effectively I ended up pouring myself into the internet more and more consuming fragments of cultures that weren't mine searching for identity meaning and belonging that wasn't coming to me in this embodied mortal coil as a result

I became an awkward ambling cultural Nomad split between 24 Indie poop grunge Tumblr datpiff.com and suburban American Protestant Christianity and Lego Star Wars how does this person dress I'll tell you incoherently I was mentally ill striking out socially in my real life being fed culture in shattered fragments allak card through a device that neither I nor my mother understood and I hated being told Art is subjective because it felt like people were giving me permission to be unique or weird or eclectic but I never struggled to be any of those things I struggled to connect

with people I struggled to belong I was attracted to Art not as a tool to distinguish myself further from others to me it was a tool to understand and be understood cuz not to flex but I was born with the death Instinct then raised in algorithms with the death Instinct programmed into them and I feel special I just felt alone as you noted you know the suit used to be governed by time place and occasion that if you're going to a certain kind of event and you're of a certain kind of social standing you're expected

to wear certain things that essentially broke down as we move forward through that kind of 20th century dress history and then we have all of these proliferations of subcultural dress so if you're a punk you dress Punk and if you're you know skater you Dr skater and now as you noted we don't really have those things anymore which makes it very difficult for people to know how to get dressed when I was growing up even if you weren't interested in clothing you were essentially kind of guided on how to dress by virtue of being part

of some kind of subcultural group and to me those kind of gentle guidelines were no different than the guidelines that people that wore suits had in the early 20th century they knew that if you showed up to a certain place and you're of a certain group you had to look a certain way and we don't really have those those guidelines anymore which I think has made it very very difficult to know what to wear how to combine things and the market has become much more bifurcated if you go all the way back into the early

20th century you know many people just went to a tailor they had clothes made in the home and then over the course of the 20th century people could go to Levis to get a workware look and they could go to Brooks Brothers to get Like An American Tail look but now you buy shirts from shirt companies and jeans from jean companies and socks from sock companies and you often buy them online where you can't try them on you can't feel them they arrive at your door and then you're expected to not only put together a

beautiful outfit you're also expected to build a whole wardrobe through this kind of weird kind of like Magpie system um and I think it has made getting dress so much more difficult and I think it's partly the reason why we have this kind of like ecological disaster of people cycling through so many clothes because we are essentially playing with identity we don't know what we want to express we don't know how to get dressed we don't know what to wear to certain things I struggled with medium of fashion for my entire adult life I didn't

understand it and I didn't understand what I didn't understand I'd ask my friends who dress very well to take me shopping and help me out and they would constantly say make a mood board what do you like just try things out see if you like them there's no rules express yourself I'd be like but I want to do it right and they'd be like there's no right no wrong it's all subjective this didn't help me at all the impression that I got from these friends was that they were fluent in a language that I was

not but they didn't know it they had a baseline familiarity with a bunch of different Aesthetics and styles and traditions and Customs but this was invisible to them and culture had been telling them again and again artst subjective don't be elitist arst subjective don't be elitist so they thought the thing they're supposed to tell me is do whatever you want no wrong answers work it out for yourself it's don't let me tell you what to do unfortunately for me someone who does not speak these languages intuitively this is not helpful my right to say whatever

ever I want is worthless if I don't speak your language I don't need freedom of expression I need ESL I'm out here alone and open water without a life jacket drowning in choppy ways begging for a boat to throw me a life raft and the people on the boat are like there's really no objective difference between being on a boat and drowning it depends on what you prefer try swimming in any direction see what you like don't let me tell you what to do I want to be on your boat I want to stop speaking

gibberish and start speaking in actual sentences you know Derek guy often cites the sentence written by by linguist and wise old tree gome Chomsky colorless green ideas sleep furiously this is a sentence that makes grammatical sense but has no discernable social meaning it is words in the right order but it communicates nothing it's words for the sake of words it references nothing real it connects you to nothing and to no one it's just noise it could even be pretty noise I guess that's in the eye of the beholder but it doesn't mean anything and that's

what I realize now made me feel this hit in my stomach as I was trying to dress myself as I wanted it to mean something and I could tell it didn't being told it's all subjective and I'm not doing anything wrong I just have to try more articles of clothing on felt like swapping out the color in gome chomsky's nonsense sentence colorless blue ideas sleep furiously colorless yellow ideas sleep furiously colorless blue ideas sleep angrily sometimes I found something I liked but couldn't shake this feeling that I wasn't doing the real thing by high school

I at least discovered I liked ey Shadow something about this felt right something about this stuck in some small way I finally felt a bit like myself I remember coming home with it on one day and my mom being taken AB back for a second then being like you look like Adam Ant I love Adam Ant so I Google Adam Ant I listen to Adam Ant and I do not love Adam [Music] Ant not my thing I remain on this side of the subjective portal and I move on with my life I am borrowing my

female friends clothes constantly feeling particularly free to do so when I am performing music on stage after one such performance a dude in the audience walks up to me and goes so you like Bowie and I said what and he said Bowie and I said like the thing they put in the water so that boats don't get lost and he said no like David Bowie you don't know David Bowie and I said no sorry I only listen to what Tumblr in r/ hiip Hop Heads tell me to listen to do you like Marina and the

Diamonds and big crit so I Google David Bowie I listen to David Bowie and I do not like d Bo I move on with my life as I get older I dress better but purely on a trial and error basis my wardrobe is overflowing with single articles of clothing that I never wear because they tickled my fancy once but never again and they don't work with anything else I didn't know why I bought them I still haven't found whatever it is I am looking for I still feel the emptiness the yearning the yearning yearn do

I yearn and that's point I'm reading status and culture by David Marx with a bunch of Derek gu sociological theory of dress swimming in my mind and it hits me stop thinking about what you like and don't like and just look at what you are is there a place in society for androgynously dressed histrionic flamboyant freaks with obnoxious eye makeup yeah Adam Ant all of these 80s pop and punk artists that my mom loves she subject ively enjoys these artists and I don't but what I like doesn't matter I occupy the same social role as

them I love hip-hop I study philosophy but as soon as I started Dawning makeup daily I was already counter signaling both of those identities I do not look like the elites of those cultures those cultural allegiances of mine come as a flavorful surprise in spite of my appearance they are conspicuous esthetic absences what I don't look out of place as at all is a musician in particular a new romantic 80s pop musician that has a surprising amount of privileged knowledge about rap and Academia these with their big hair and glittery eyes and tight pants and

big jackets this is me this has always been me I'm part of [Music] History I remember being in church with glitter on my face and an older man eyeing me suspiciously until he learned I'm a musician then he relaxes completely he can see me now I remember being told on multiple occasions that I remind someone of Jack Sparrow in affect and appearance and I remember being uh annoyed and kind of offended but now I just think Jack Sparrow is like Adam Ant and I am like Adam Ant in 2019 Euphoria dropped and people started telling

me that I'm like Euphoria Vibes and I found this annoying because I was wearing makeup before Euphoria dropped but now I think yes fluorescent lighting pills mental illness internet addiction and glitter that's my general generation that's my culture hell yes I have the eirl bleach stripe that's my generation that's my culture I remember shortly after these brain crystallizations were all happening I got invited to a black tie party and they provided instructions on how the men should dress and I found that uh offensive as one of those they them type people and so I uh

did the men's uniform I dressed appropriately but added the makeup a tiara high heels and a purse I'm speaking language I think my one advice is really to just think of dress as social language you can develop personal taste as a person that's informed on culture and art and society and not pay attention to Trends but also dress in a way that is a reflection of both culture and your own taste and your kind of how you see yourself in in culture um I think when you dress in that sort of way when you think

of dress as social language it both becomes more legible and more interesting um and it also allows you to ignore trends that's absolutely perfect answer thank you so much Dereck it's a pleasure to speak to you yeah thank you folks I am still not that good at Fashion there is so much that I do not know but even though I'm not fluent and I'm certainly not fluent in multiple languages I at least know I'm learning to speak rejecting the question what do you like and instead turning to what are you socially was such a relief

for me I see myself and the rewired cyborg of my generation as in a crisis of Life Instinct we too often feel like we are not part of History we feel disconnected from the world physically subcultures no longer assist us in learning how to dress or learning how to think about ourselves dress for me is not something I want to end with me I I don't want it to be about what I want I want it to be a religious performance that signals my allegiance with something bigger than me signals my standing and belonging in

the world world I want it to be something that sticks me back in history after Silicon Valley unstuck me recently I was walking in a new city that I ain't been in before and uh some rough looking dude perhaps unhoused was on the curb on his like third 11:00 a.m. beer and he called out to me as I walked by hey it's like Duran Duran or something and I said exactly exactly like Durant Duran the internet ideal represents a retreat not only from political life but also from culture from that tumultuous conversation in which we

Tred to talk to one another about our shared experiences as members of a culture we see the same movie read the same book hear the same string quartet although it is enormously difficult for us to agree on what we might have seen read or heard it is out of that difficult conversation that real culture arises whether or not we come to an agreement or understanding even if some decide that understanding and meaning are impossible we are still sitting around the same campfire part four but really these suits are satanic one more thing about Jordan Peterson

a staunch embittered defender of Jordan Peterson May Fire back against this comparison between Jordan Peterson's suits and gome chomsky's nonsense sentence cuz Chomsky sentence is supposed to be meaningless but Peterson suits do technically mean something they were handcrafted for by the lgfg fashion house which I can't really read as anything except for let's go go so lgfg from what I can tell does nothing but stunt styling for seist celebrities much of their work is similarly garish to Peterson suits just obvious and obnoxious and awful like take a look at this random crypto millionaire he seems

like a totally standard Shady man he looks like a friend who will betray you in a heartbeat and he is dressed well culturally legible exactly as he should be solid gold made by Ben Baller of Los then look what this evil man does to him oh yeah this is great put it back undo control Z restore to factory settings immediately say it with me aesthetic terrorism the end of this episode is deeply maob this Grim Reaper of beauty leaving the scene of his crime looking like absolute himself off to cause another credulous buffoon to dress

infinitely worse his name is Dimitri and he will never be my friend and the lgfg Fashion House official YouTube channel that he runs is incredible desperate for clout starving for clout we never have clout we made this jacket and it went viral 67 views nothing one month later it's almost hit 160 views mostly because I can't stop watching it Dimitri made these suits for free as a gift to Jordan Peterson to try to get his attention and attain free marketing through Shameless pyop fantic flattery the reason Jordan Peterson wears these suits now is not because

he subjectively thinks that they are beautiful he wears the suits because they are specially made for him they're free and they are about him they made me a dozen suits one for each rule from 12 rules for life the idea was to make it meaningful to him they sent a little deck of creative ideas Dimitri literally gave Jordan a picture book that explains which rule from his famous self-help book each suit represents and the tacky methodology they employed to evoke this this suit is based on rule two which is about treating yourself in a way

that either takes you to heaven or hell so it's Heaven it's Heaven or Hell the red means hell the blue means Heaven you can tell cuz Hell is Fire and Heaven is clouds Heaven hell and this by the way W from a sheep and this is R from a goat of course sheep like Jesus go like davil this piece of what alleges to be formal men's wear is severely disinterested in the medium of formal men's wear instead of even attempting to speak any coherent cultural language it just uses Cinema sin's Easter egg logic to justify

its existence it's fashion for people who don't know anything about fashion it's like someone going oh I don't listen to rap music but I do like Eminem cuz he talks about real things and I can understand what he's saying it's worse than gome chomsky's nonsense sentence it's someone screaming in public at the top of their lungs and when you ask them why they screamed all they say is I am feel uncomfortable when we are not about me the blunt stupidity of these clothes is so offensive to me why is this suit so ugly oh cuz

it's his logo just printed on himself why is thisit suit so ugly well because he talks about Orthodox Christianity so they just took Orthodox Christian paintings rendered them into 2D pngs and printed them grid style in a dinner jacket like that's what fashion is you're like tattooing the word that you want people to say about you on your forehead look at this suit where they just print your full name into the suit like that's it so no guessing here who whose's might it be it's actually written on the suit if your name is written on

it how great is that greatest invention when it comes to suit another one of Peterson's self-referential free suits that you might recognize is this powder blue pimp suit with the Elon Musk heads on the tie really intentionally was supposed to be like a pimp suit these are tiny Elon Musk Heads This is called Jordan Peterson's Twitter suit obviously this has pretty much no social meeing outside of a self- congratulatory explanation that it invites you to ask them to tell you that's what these suits are for right it's for you to go what are you wearing

and then they go it's actually it's about me you have a a two-tone suit going on you're a wild man Su please do okay why don't we take a listen to Dimitri himself explain it from his repugnant podcast set for a show that no one will watch the the Jordan Peterson Twitter suit uh that was that one has a really great story behind it you know if you have any sort of impostor syndrome that you deal with in your life I just want to point out to you that this man is employed in aesthetic design

that's the most controversial let's say suit that I have made for JP here's what's interesting about it so the suit was a gift for me I didn't edit that the audio is just broken I wanted a suit that really infuriated like really infuriated JP's haters inside of the suits are actual screenshots of Twitter comments all these hateful comments from these leftist idiots we put inside the suit you know to kind of make fun of them because I I kind of figured like if if this suit goes out in public if he you know decides to

show it off then these people are going to like start you know being ah but they're already inside the suit so we're just making fun of them so first of all this is literally the arser comic I did something ugly and obnoxious that's ugly and obnoxious got you but deeper than that to think it's a good idea to walk around in this literally draping yourself in resentful childish masturbatory memes about yourself and then going to work I'm reminded of that clip of Logan Paul is weird I don't know anything about Logan Paul but from the

big Joel thing I think about Logan Paul where that clip where Logan Paul is just standing on the street pointing at a billboard of himself to strangers going like he finds out there's a billboard with his big old face on it so he goes and stops people and is like look at that that's me do you know who that is that's you I mean that's really all of these suits but the Twitter one in particular is literally designed from a place of resentment for people you don't respect for people you hate I wanted a suit

that really AG grieved the woke I also wanted it to be like resoundingly aggravating to the left this is horrible aesthetic and spiritual practice celebrating degeneracy honoring half-hearted hatred identifying yourself with your ability to intentionally upset people by being ugly on purpose dancing in the ashes of culture not out of loyalty to your Divine death Instinct but only because you like that this is about you and now it will continue being about you instead of learning and speaking cultural language this is how you're going to use the medium of fashion walking around in a portable

Shrine to yourself like a baby it's immature it's antisocial antisocial yeah it's really like literally it's antisocial it's like who you know your clothes aren't exactly for you for someone who's grown increasingly comfortable using the word luciferian to describe your enemies you should consider aing more conservative with things that you don't understand what could possibly better fit the idea of luciferian postmodern nihilism than literally wrapping yourself in a self- celebratory Shaw of your own subjectivity justifying it by saying I like it I like it it makes sense to me it's about me someone made it

for me and it pisses off my haters JP dawned the suit he thought it was so funny Jordan you're letting this tasteless Worm tongue temptress beguile you into dancing on the grave of your ancestors because you're so weak to flattery go talk to someone who knows what they're doing go talk to an actual tailor through a Biblical lens fashion is at least as old as the emergence of self-consciousness and is somewhat inherently tied to it after Adam and Eve bit the fruit of the knowledge of Good and Evil the first thing they did as the

self-conscious human beings that we are today is cover themsel you see how there's some humility and sacred purpose and identifying with a human Community there you understand how that is how you announce that you are different from God instead of building a Tower of Babel that has your face on it with all of your intellect all of your takes on Art all of your supposed respect for tradition you will to bask in a pool of your own semen in public like this you hear me if you care about art and God and connecting men to

their cultural Traditions like you say you do per chance you should wield your considerable resources to draw attention to something that isn't yourself get some tailoring for grown-ups you look ridiculous I think I'm an addict the world and I'm a Hab it I'm so dramatic got all my bones up in the attic and I dance them all around like a [Music] Maran there's something really attractive about about this particular era of um fashion history of art history overall honestly this kind of arts and crafts movement throughout Britain in the late 19th early 20th century and

in America this dress doctor era where everyone's just treating to make the small things in life beautiful coste efficiently by adherence to Universal principles uh like as a moral good as a democratic good I really believe this like I believe it's um a real Democratic value a real social value to like do your part to make things beautiful to use shared language to make things beautiful and not just stubbornly you know use art and expression creative freedom freedom of speech to like defiantly childishly do whatever you want and justify it endlessly without any respect towards

tradition or others or communication coher um I mean it's one of those important things about art living democracy becoming an adult is realizing it's not all up to you and that you have to change in response to society you have to change in response to that which appears outside of you and realize you know who you were the whole time is really more connected to everything that's outside of you who you are isn't necessarily exactly up to you this makes you part of the world in this expert taste era was just this moment where we

were really just writing it down like here's what to do um here's what it is and so what I was kind of suggesting basically I I I kind of advocate for a return to the experti ERA with this kind of revivified postmodern Spirit I'm calling it The existential expert taste you know it's like an actual like philosophical existential conundrum I'm not existential like we might die but like existential like kard and like God Is Dead uh we now we now know that beauty is not objective and as such we have infinite choice and the burden

of meaninglessness and so like the solution is essentially like a leap of faith um pick who your Elites are pick your experts but then care about what the experts write down even though we know we might be constructing these rituals arbitrarily you know um still know that there it matters a lot to commit yourself to one of these Gods it matters a lot to become part of something to be um someone identified with culture to have culture to be part of culture and that it's not stupid and gay and lame for you to do stuff

because your friends do it or do stuff because you want to be liked or because you want to be cool those are okay reasons to do something so long as that you know nebulous cool factor is tied up in some sort of meaningful identity some meaningful social identity some meaningful Shard of culture that you're like I want to be part of that what do they call it it's like something about love where it's like love compels you like kind of forces you to act against your own valtion love calls you to be something other than

what you are it challenges you and yet you want to be compelled by love you want to be subsumed into something larger it's also like religion it's like what God is right it's like God is like I identify you as part of me you're a child of me you're not all up to you you are under my dominion and yet we're supposed to be happy about it or we are happy about it has this been out of focus for like the whole time I can never tell