plaid

Associated with nature and the outdoors, plaid is often presented in opposition to society and technological progress. Today, it is hawked as a centerpiece in the heritage fashion trend. Popular since 2007, heritage fashion champions long-standing American brands like Pendleton, Woolwich, and L.L. Bean. It equates such labels with quality and simplicity, taking us back to a time when clothes were American-made, the Western frontier beckoned, and life was simpler. As modern society becomes faster paced and increasingly virtual, plaid shirts and heritage fashion become gateways to a less globalized, less digital world.

But heritage fashion’s promise is hollow. As tech workers wearing plaid and carrying canvas rucksacks walk purposefully down city streets, far away from the open frontier, their fashion ceases to evoke a rustic lifestyle; instead it expresses a disconnection from and longing for that lifestyle. All we see is their striving, and the clothes take on the opposite of their intended meaning.

Plaid is often a pattern of contradiction, particularly when it used to assert one’s identity as an outsider. Alienated teenagers of the ’90s wore plaid flannel to communicate their isolation; in the process, they joined together, and their alienation was relieved. Today, DIY hipsters don thrift-store plaid in a statement of iconoclasm, in the process creating a culture of sartorial conformity. In both cases, one effect cancels out the other.

-Read the whole article by Jeremy Sanders at Art:21