Kids Find Authenticity Away from Home
The average American teen has it all, right? Middle and upper class families are more prosperous now than ever. Affluence gleams conspicuously on the hood of every SUV and on the bow of every yacht. The private plane industry can't keep up with orders. The kids have dough, too: a median weekly allowance of $50, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. Much more for some, of course. Lavish birthday parties, private athletics lessons and an unprecedented number of kids receiving expensive psychiatric therapy. The New Economy has resulted in fantastic amounts of money and many are wearing it on their sleeves. So why do so many trend-conscious kids look like they just got off at the factory?
Though some kids may dress like princes and princesses, this is not the dominant aesthetic of the time. Today, more kids look like they just came from the set of a rap video than an elite boutique. Canvas carpenter's pants and jackets, over-sized hip-hop jerseys and disco-era threads the likes of which haven't been made in 25 years are making serious inroads where once mall brands ruled uncontested. The youth fashion phenomena of workwear, urban street clothes and thrift store apparel reflects a growing fascination with the working class and inner-city. The New Consumer identifies, or wishes to be identified, not with the conspicuous consumption of their parents, but with a different social and economic stratum entirely.
Some middle class teens see their situation as "unreal." Now overwhelmingly residents of suburbs, many of their hometowns are not much older than they are. The sameness of their schools, their backgrounds and their general expectations has an artificial feeling, like a virtual reality simulation of life. For the suburban malcontent, often at the cutting edge of mainstream trends, dressing outside of one's social group is a form of protest against middle-class prosperity and predictability. Working class and inner-city lifestyles, in myth anyway, have a legitimacy born of blood, sweat and tears, an ability to make do with little and values based on family and community rather than individual merit and material success. Through apparel, kids hope to co-opt some of this legitimacy for themselves.
To teens, a key aspect of these styles' appeal is that they're not being sold to them. Recognizing that they are a marketer's holy grail, Gen Y is suspicious of brands that target them or are overly prescriptive about who's supposed to be buying. For many high-minded young consumers, the glut of manipulative advertising used to seize teen dollars has gone too far, and the challenge of detecting a fake commercial come-on is such that all youth advertising gets rejected out of hand. These people are buying, but brands and businesses that don't need them are getting their dollars.
Dickies, the largest workwear manufacturer in the world, sells durable, functional clothes with a distinctive style. But Dickies's experience with young customers suggests their product's popularity is not just its look. According to Mark Krautner, creative director at Reel FX, Dickies's in-house agency, the company's foray into "streetwear" appealing directly to skateboarders and other youth segments was a bust. Dickies has refocused its strategy on the workwear market, realizing that it was selling to kids not despite its non-youth focus but because of it. "They don't want to be a target," Krautner says. "They're looking for the real thing." As Krauter suggests, it's not only that the clothes are not targeting young people, but that there is something "real" about them, and those who wear them.
This phenomenon is also at work with so-called "urban" street wear. These clothes do not reflect the values, backgrounds or environment of the white suburban teen, but within this group the clothes are selling like the new Eminem CD. This stems from a variety of factors, one perhaps being a desire to live a life more edgy and glamorous than their own, and seeing this pizzazz in hip-hop culture. These clothes, this music, is not made for them (or so record companies, in a breath-taking coup of indirect marketing, have led them to believe), and is, therefore, authentic.
FUBU, whose clothing is popular among high-profile hip-hop artists, went from $75 million in sales in 1997 to an estimated $350 million in 1999. Chris Delprince, the owner and operator of three urban clothing stores in Buffalo, NY, which sell FUBU, says his customers are primarily African-American and Hispanic between 15 and 30 years old, but that a striking number of white faces have become regular customers, people who clearly do not live in the area. In response, Delprince has opened his first non-city location in a suburban Buffalo mall, speculating that for every kid from the suburbs who makes it into one of his inner-city locations, there are twelve whose mothers wouldnąt feel comfortable taking them there. It remains to be seen if the hip-hop shopping experience is cheapened by having it down the street, but for kids outside of the city the market for urban "reality" clothing is growing.
Another indication of this search for authenticity is thrifting. Kids looking to distinguish themselves reject the mall entirely to create a look which resembles anything from flower child to disco scenester to aerobics instructor—just not the look of here and now as prescribed by the Gap and Banana Republic. Thrift stores present their wares even more innocuously than workwear manufacturers. The selling concept of the thrift store is almost anti-marketing: "Buy it or don't, it's worth almost nothing," or perhaps closer to the mark, "Clothes for poor people." By purchasing apparel secondhand, kids can get more, look less like their peers and parents and feel entirely free of the burden of being sold to. Thrift clothing can be altered and made unique without losing any value, inspiring the DIY ethic of many young people. Rifling through piles of old clothes and interacting with shoppers who really appreciate the value is gritty and real, providing an experience you just canąt get at the mall.
Looking and shopping authentic doesn't mean looking like trash, but looking like trash is undeniably authentic. The greatest blow-off to American consumer culture is looking like you couldn't care less. Punks and skinheads have been adhering ragged bits of fabric to themselves like gutter hermit crabs since way back, promoting a "fuck all" agenda that also appeals to those outside the city limits. If marketers could stitch or bottle this attitude, and make it look like it's not being sold, perhaps leave it out to be stolen, they will have secured a place firmly in the realm of the authentic, and kids from both sides of the tracks will beat a path to their door.