Authenticity by Charlie Hartley Hall
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I was sat in a booth by one of the lecture halls in Uni the other day when I saw a friend rush in late to a lecture. He does liberal arts and looks the part. He does look good though; he usually wears pretty tattered clothes with holes in them and frayed hems, etc. He skates so all of his clothes have a quite short life-expectancy anyway, regardless of how often he deliberately ages them with sandpaper. About half an hour after I saw him, everyone in his lecture shuffled out the room, single file. They were in a 2 hour lecture and had a 10 minute break, in which to get a diet coke, roll a cigarette, and smoke it. I waved hi to my friend as he and almost everyone else made a beeline for the vending machine, foreign airport duty-free 50g Golden Virginia tobacco pouch in hand. I think there’s a certain look about an arts degree student. Not dull, but not as garish as an proper art or fashion student. Someone who has thought about how to dress so they are fashionably distanced from micro-trends, careful not to give the impression that their clothes are new, a generation Z shabby chic that sits safely within the bounds of middle-class acceptability. The caravan of Liberal Arts students queued up in front of the vending machine all had the arts student look. In fact, they had refined and universalized the look so well they looked like they were paying some stylistic homage to the soviet breadline.
You’d have been forgiven for thinking you’d walked in to a cast
of extras for a bleak BBC 3 docufilm on the Hillsborough
disaster or something. Sporting their uniform wardrobe of
adidas, torn denim, floral headscarves and big musky leather
jackets. Eventually they emptied the machine of diet cokes,
finished their cigarettes and filtered back into the lecture, to
return to learning about whatever it is that Liberal Arts students learn about.
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While that’s a slight exaggeration, they did look pretty funny. What I think is weird is you can see pictures of first year students in north village from the 50s and they all sort of look like how you would imagine students from the 50s to look like. Their well combed hair and tweedy blazers have characteristically varsity look. But nowadays there’s something referential about how a lot students at Bristol look. Basketball shoes from the 80s, track tops from the 90s and hoodies from the 00s. A sense of authenticity is gone. Perhaps that’s just a kind of fashion-reactionism. It’s certainly an observation that’s grounded in a very homogenous conception of a British university student. Either way, fashion always changes; there’s no fixed ‘authentic’ way to dress.
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Despite this, people do prescribe certain rules of dress along lines of authenticity. The idea of cultural appropriation might spring to mind; one that has recently entered the common conception that expresses disapproval of those who dress in the clothes of certain cultures in a manner perceived as disingenuous, or mocking. Similarly, transgression of class expectations in fashion garners real anger in some people; middle class people ‘cosplaying’ as the working class is an idea plenty of our generation are conscious of. I don’t know what the collective noun is for a group of Liberal Arts students. A gaggle of Liberal Arts Students. A Surrey of Liberal Arts students maybe. A battered air-force-1 of Liberal Arts students. A vogue cigarette and iced coffee at U1 bus stop of Liberal Arts Students. Whatever it is, you might imagine this kind of ‘cosplaying’ claim, fairly or unfairly, has be made about some of them. An equivalent not dared expressed in conversation by self-considered class conscious individuals is the kitsch-rich, uber branded get-ups you might see in Bristol city center. In a stag do or outside a Pom Pom club at like 3pm. So we have two groups: spurious toffs and trashy chavs. To assess something as ‘spurious’ or ‘inauthentic’ or even ‘trashy’ is to refer to the idea of authenticity.
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To describe something as inauthentic carries a huge number of unexplained judgements. Firstly, there are different modalities of authenticity. If someone calls something authentic, you might ask…
Inauthentic as in derivative? Like the many works Damien Hirst stole from his friend John LeKay.
Or Inauthentic as involving some kind of nominal forgery? Like Van Meergeren’s ‘Supper at Emmaus’ which he passed off to be a genuine work by 17th century Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer.
Or maybe the kind of authenticity we are interested when we talk about the way people dress is a kind of ideal. One involving tethering outward appearances to some kind of inner self. To call someone inauthentic in this way is to identify a dissonance between the someone’s publicly recognizable identity and how they choose to present themselves.
The Tate is exhibiting some of the works of John Singer Sargent, one of the
most celebrated portrait artists of the 19th century. Wherever it is relative to
this ‘below’ or ‘above’ is a portrait of the socialite Pauline Astor when she was
18, commissioned in 1898. The Astor family are an immensely wealthy family
who made their money in the American Fur Trade in the 18th century.
Members of the family moved to England from America in the second half of
the 19th century to deliberately establish themselves in the English
aristocracy. It’s something they did with great success. Members of the family
still hold noble titles today; refer to Hereditary Lord Astor’s Mr Burns-esque
parliamentary portrait. Part of their integration process into the aristocracy
included the commission of this portrait of 18 year old Pauline Astor, done in a
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style that was 100 years out of fashion when
it was commissioned. To have a portrait
painted by Sargent would have been a
symbol of huge status, like getting an
Ocado delivery, but to commission a work
in such a style would have been a deliberate effort most likely by the Astor family themselves, to embed themselves in the canon of the British aristocracy.
Sargent paid homage to the ‘Grand Manner’ style, specifically that of Thomas Gainsborough, which depicted the gentry in idealized settings in nature, often with objects belaying their status. This style was popular among the nobility in the 18th century, but by the time the Astor family commissioned this portrait, it was ubiquitous in portraits of the nouveau-
riche and emerging wealthy middle class.
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Perhaps, like Pauline Astor, it’s the proclivity of middle class liberal arts student to dress they way they do to cover up their background and assimilate into a different identity group. Like Pauline, they engage with a historical fiction in an attempt to reify a false self-conception for social ends. Except the social atmosphere the liberal arts students are entering is the reverse of that which the Astor family had to pry into. People like the idea of a working class hero, people don’t like the idea of a trust-fund baby, so they dress down, attempting to attach their recognizable identity to a caricaturized notion of working class-ness.
This hypothesis belongs to a very common narrative that spurs the ‘cosplaying working class’ criticism. And it’s not unfounded; I think you can see examples of it and its corresponding mindset if you look for it. Drake always talks about having his money up, escaping the trenches, etc like he wasn’t a Disney actor, for example. To criticize someone as ‘cosplaying’ is a way of caling someone inauthentic.
How far this judgment is applicable I won’t attempt to assess. But maybe it shouldn’t be taken too far; after all, as we established, attitudes towards dress have always been fluid. Maybe people aren’t making such a conspiratorial effort to masquerade their background. Perhaps the increase in scale of
mass production and changing attitudes prioritizing things like comfort, practicality and simplicity have changed people’s fashion choices such that there is an ever decreasing gap between identifiably ‘working class’ and ‘middle class’ dress senses. People who accuse others of being fake, or imitative are maybe holding on to a bygone set of tastes.
After all, things can and often do change status, from nouveau to established all the time. To evaluate something as authentic often involves situating it within some established history or canon. While you might hear a jazz freak say authentic jazz only existed for a short period during the first half of the 20th century, most people accept that things comes to be established within a culture and gain a sense of acceptance therein. Once it would have been unthinkable to wear denim jeans, a distinctly American, heavy duty workman’s trousers to a university lecture in Bristol, it obviously would made no sense within that culture. Now it’s everywhere.
This phenomenon happens everywhere. I found a pretty interesting example is in
Denis Dutton’s essay Authenticity in Art. The Igorot are a people from Luzon which
an Island in the north of the Philippines The Igorot have a traditional practice of
placing bulul statues, which are small wooden carved figurines, near rice granaries.
The wood eventually takes on a maroon patina from animal blood that is poured
over it. During the 20th century, local businessmen tapped into the growing tourist
industry and began producing the bulul statues cheaply for tourists. These imitations
were deliberately stained red with dye to achieve the same effect as the originals.
These came to largely replace the original bulul statues, with the result being that farmers have started using the souvenirs for their own rice granaries.
Authenticity is fluid, it takes possession of objects, styles, language and all things human regardless of anyone’s efforts to preserve previous ideals. Yet, at the same time, it’s an ideal that’s entirely reliant on all sorts of relative human judgements. What strikes one person as crass, spurious and false may invoke genuine emotion in another. Similarly, what someone might judge to be trashy or kitschy, might represent an entirely different set of aesthetic values that would garner very different responses from other people. Tolstoy thought that art was principally a communion of feelings both between he artist and the consumer and between the consumers. If we grant fashion to be a kind of art in this way, even if it’s doubtful that Tolstoy would have done so, then we can understand authenticity to be a relativist idea that attaches itself in one group but not another with regard to the same object. But it seems unlikely that every time someone labels something authentic it is equivalent to an expression of purely aesthetic, relative approval. Afterall, we have already said that something can have a nominal inauthenticity like a forged artwork, in which sense it is objectively ‘inauthentic’. Again, turning back to the kind of authenticity that it interested in an individuals’ personal style; maybe there is some kind of self-mastery involved in this authenticity involving a discovery of and connection to the inner self, thereby granting the person some kind of autonomy. How close this last kind of authenticity is to the type that forgeries and genuine originals belong to or how close it is to an type that involves an aesthetic connection with an inner sense of self I won’t make a judgement.
Authenticity is a massive idea. It is strange and refuses to fit into discrete categories. It is used in everything from throwaway comments and aesthetic evaluations to powerful political protestation. A perceived lack of authenticity can be absurd and funny, or cringey and offensive. It is a concept that is used all the time in judgements, even if not explicitly, which I don’t think people gets the serious consideration it deserves. Next time you see the masquerading Etonian or the bouged up builder think about where you fit into the canon of style. Are you holding onto obsolete values where people look exactly how they ought to or are you pioneering modern attitudes, totally blind to class?
