The god of the bees is the future.
--Maurice Maeterlinck
Designers, whose
success commonly depends on the ability to guess the Next Big Thing, often
agree how odd it is (and what a relief!) that they manage to guess right,
consistently and in unison. This
fall, for instance, every apparel designer showed
bronzy gold fabrics and leathers, sequins and herringbone; and not because
all are slavishly following one secret leader. In direct contradiction to
the widely held view that visionaries lead and society blindly follows,
we will show in the following paragraphs that visionaries are, instead,
those who give form to the nascent desire of the hive.
The Next Big Thing is taking shape already, in your own mind. You won't be shown it; you'll identify it. The real shock of the new is not in its newness but in its familiarity: it's the shock of recognition. The subtle progression of culture is taking place continuously, in business, politics and university life, as well as in the arts. As you read this, fashionable young people are piercing their navels, venture capitalists are working in shirtsleeves on wireless deals and the slaves of the film industry are wearing baseball caps and rumpled cotton togs courtesy of J. Crew. What's next? If you're there every day you develop the radar, it becomes apparent, you can feel it coming. Wireless will give way to the battle cry of "small business". Teenagers will scoff at Britney Spears, and continue to imitate her every move. The attractively messy new Charlie's Angels will have their moment in the raw, gritty light of Hollywood's anti-fashion movement. Someday soon California's answer to Christian Lacroix will be bringing back the excesses of the 80s, and many will return to scrupulous grooming, excessive perfume and shoulder pads.
This benign but implacable force is the mass hallucination. We're like a flock of birds knowing instinctively and in mid-air which way to turn, a myriad of minds synchronized in the communal flow of time. Great stylists understand and use this force to shape the future, navigating the strongest currents that can give expression to their inner purpose.
Likewise, no matter how brilliant, those anarchists who seek to go against this force might as well be trying to stop a tidal wave with their bare hands. Their works appear freakish rather than original; they don't relate, and so they fail.
Visionaries from Poiret to Miuccia Prada (to Dali, to Joyce, to Terry Gilliam and indeed, to Plato and Darwin and Freud) give form to the evolving consciousness of the world. They do not "create" so much as interpret, elucidate, make intelligible. The evolution of culture is gradual, delicate and elusive, but no less compelling for being so subtle in its progress. The future is determined by the present, as we seek out and develop those directions with "legs". Thus and thus a thousand designers do not decide, but are made aware of, winter gold--sometime the spring before.
A high groove
quotient, the quality of fingers on the pulse, is a strongly personal, focused
and articulate response to the unfolding of history. It can readily
seen that those who dress divinely, whose tastes and habits are advanced
and polished, are keenly, even obsessively, interested in their surroundings;
their energies are principally absorptive; contrary to appearances, they
tend not to be performers so much as observers.
An estimate of the practical value of this insight will form our next section.
A thousand weary magazine articles center their advice on this subject around the hopeless phrase, "Follow your Own Personal Style". Bah! What hogwash. You're already you! You can't help Following your Own Personal Style. As advice, this is like telling a person to remember to breathe naturally (with, incidentally, much the same result; suddenly he finds he can't.) The hapless reader is condemned by such remarks to self-consciousness, the direct antithesis of what is required in order to be more groovy; which turns out to be the simplest and best thing in the world, namely, Love.
If there is anything about style that is not instinctive and inevitable; if there is anything at all that can be willed, it is certainly not Personal. Quite the opposite. When we choose a dress or a tie, when we eagerly describe a favorite book to new acquaintances, our decisions represent nothing less than a desire to connect our minds with others; not only as an individual, but as a comrade. Style is all about, and only about, the things we love, and love together. Those who love deeply are beautiful and exciting; they are in harmony with themselves and their surroundings by virtue of being passionately interested in everything that is going on. Wit, elegance, charm and invention are the natural consequence of awareness; of focusing the attention outward, not inward.
The Flea Philosopher inhabits the very summit of this enlightened state. Blissfully free of all the doubt and distress that accompany an excess of egotism, he inhabits an atmosphere wherein an active mind can operate freely. The practical value of ordering one's life in the manner of a Flea Philosopher is increased happiness, courage, and serenity.
Where the wallets of lesser souls are in a constant state of being vacuumed, where their weak and splenetic minds can be turned by any arrogant salesperson, by the feeblest Madison Avenue pitch, where attacks of insecurity and nerves assail them at every turn, the Flea Philosopher, instead, arranges his universe along purely logical and balanced lines. No sweaty palms hath he! No catchy slogan sways him from his path. No doubts assail him, for he enters every antique shop, every cocktail party, opium den and dentist's office, armed to the teeth with love. With ever surer tread he actualizes his destiny and creates beauty and pleasure and peace all around him. With Zen-like calm and concentration he proceeds, skillfully writing his chapter in the story of our race.
History's loveliest
and most exciting men and women have lived, and are living, in this way.
Here Oscar Wilde is united with Talleyrand and David Bowie, Josephine
Baker and John Malkovich with the cognoscenti
of the Italian renaissance, with William Beckford, Dumas, Gabrielle Chanel,
Okakura Kakuzo, Joseph
Cornell, Mrs. Vreeland, Balthus--the many great
men and women who gave form and substance to the multifarious conception
of beauty through the centuries of our shared past. The shape and outer
surface of history passes through their hands. And if this is so--and it
is--might not their incalculable contributions to the freedom and elegance
of the world, in the end, count for as much as the invention of any threshing
machine, electric lamp or calculator?
Please stay tuned for the third installment of
our series.
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