The Melt is a newsletter by, about and largely to entertain Jason Diamond. Hopefully you also like it and will consider subscribing and sharing this post.
Something I realized earlier this year is that I spent the second-half of 2020 doing Zoom events and talking to media outlets about the suburbs since I wrote an entire book on the topic and it happened to come out in the middle of everybody wondering if the cities would empty out and everybody would migrate back to suburbia or how the suburbs would vote for one presidential candidate or the other. I was happy to talk about those things, but at some point during one interview, I started to get a little wistful after one interviewer asked me what I remembered the suburb I lived in looking like when I was a kid. I’d been so tired of talking about the pandemic and Trump that I was taken sort of aback by the question. I paused for a second and just started rambling off a bunch of things: Volvo station wagons; my friend’s mom taking us to hockey practice in her sweats and a bug mug of coffee in her hand; this one guy who used to go to my synagogue who had a hoop earring, a donut ponytail (donytail) and always wore really cool, colorful ties; the Bill Clinton “jogging chic” of the early-1990s that people considered “embarrassing” but that I rather like; this picture of my in-laws on vacation that I love:
I don’t think there is any one particular strain of “suburban style,” but over the last few years with our cultural fixation on chunky sneakers and dad hats always leading back to city culture like Seinfeld or Friends, the whole style conversation in these post-normcore 1 times has really overlooked the suburbs influence on the whole thing. I mean, who amongst us has not thought of “childless yuppie scum” neighbors Margo and Todd from National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation and thought, man, that’s the vibe of vibes?
So you can imagine my surprise a few weeks ago when the designer Rachel Antonoff, whose stuff I find really fun, posted on Instagram about her Fall collection that she dubbed “Carpool Fashion,” a style inspired by going up in New Jersey in the early-1990s. According to Antonoff, the look “is really cut from the same cloth as pandemic fashion; it exists from the waist up. It favors garments comfortable for sitting. In fact, it doesn’t even want to know discomfort in any form. It often requires a rushed add-on of a “funky” (my mother’s go-to term) earring or conversation print blouse.”
As far as I could tell, this is the first time I’d seen a designer say they were directly influenced by the suburbs. It’s always the other way around: New York, Paris, London, Tokyo are the cities that influence the way people create. It’s never some exit off the Jersey Turnpike where people tend to fo for inspiration. People come from the suburbs, but they don’t often go back looking for inspiration, at least not in a way that celebrates where they come from. It’s usually fodder for some tale about the dark side of the American Dream and how a family’s inability to finish building a deck outside of their McMansion represents the coming apart of the suburbs family or something like that. Everybody is trying to recreate Cheever’s “The Swimmer,” basically. And I get that. I understand maybe better than anybody why people love picking apart suburbia (again, I wrote an entire damn book on the topic), but it’s nice to sometimes see the opposite. To see somebody like Antonoff say this is where she’s from and this is what she took away being from there, and here’s how she is using that to inspire her these days when so many of us are lacking inspiration to do anything.
Normcore has been supposedly “dead” for a few years, but the short-lived obsession with the term did help kill tight jeans and got Balenciaga to repurpose a pair of Asics and call it “fashion,” so it seems normcore is definitely around, we’re all just too embarrassed to say it. So I’m just calling it all post-normcore.