HOARDICULTURE 007
HOARDICULTURE is a series celebrating hoarding as a modern malady of collecting so much research and claiming it as a cultural trend.
“Hoardiculture: Collecting so much junk there are piles of random shit cluttering everywhere possible and then claiming it’s a cultural trend.”
(Urban Dictionary)
A selection of the past weeks’ insightful treasures, amassed from our constant research, that signal social-cultural change.
Since its inception in 1990, the Movement Research Performance Journal has shed light on the issues of dance and performance. Its Issue #60, Gender Disarray, revisits the archives and critically engages with the exploration of “gender performance,” “explicating a contemporary impasse while also theorizing alternatives, opening up other ways of rehearsing a relationship between gender and contemporary performance of all kinds.”
As the 2024 Olympics spread their dopamine effect throughout the host nation, Louis Vuitton's creative director Pharrell Williams advocates for the return of the art competitions — sculpture, architecture, and visual arts — to the games in 2028.
“Is Nike still cool? […] Maybe it’s not that [brands such as Nike, Vans, and Supreme] have lost their way — it’s that ideas about what is and isn’t cool are just radically different than they were five years ago.”
In a sea of sameness driven by the concerning impacts of generative AI, human good taste, creativity, and handmade craft will emerge as premium currencies, according to Squarespace’s CCO David Lee.
“Every luxury brand looks remarkably similar these days” observes SOTA, deciphering the “paradox of an industry supposed to be fostering creativity but simultaneously protecting the status quo.”
Kyle Matthew Duckitt, head of Cultural Strategy at BBH, celebrates necessary abnormality in his newly-launched newsletter Not Normal, “exploring the people, brands, and ideas that are shaking up the norm.”
Our nonsensical realities and personal mythologies are turning imagination into hallucination, as nothing feels real anymore.
The music industry is scaling down towards mediocrity, just as any valuable ideas are in short supply right now. On MusicX, Maarten Walraven praises accepting niche as a metric of success to restore music’s value.
In The New Yorker, Kyle Chayka also agrees that music is not disposable content.
The multidisciplinary team at teenage engineering caters to our craving for extreme nostalgia with the newly-launched EP-1320 Medieval, the world’s first medieval electronic instrument, which unleashes the magic of the darkest of ages’ sounds.
Recently announced by London’s Fashion and Textile Museum, Outlaws: Fashion Renegades of the 80s, centred on Taboo, the legendary nightclub opened by radical performer Leigh Bowery, reminds today’s youth of the true essence of subcultures.
The 2023 American Menswear Designer of the Year, Willy Chavarria, embraces grimy hypersexuality with his own luxury sub-label, DIRTY WILLY UNDERWEAR, inspired by the “erotic notions of queer fetish culture.”