POWER CHIC AS STYLE AND POLITICS
Mills, Nicolaus
A decade ago Tom Wolfe coined the term "radical chic" to describe what he regarded as a trendy identification of the wealthy with the poor. Wolfe's 1970 essay focused on a benefit for the...
...Despite its seeming irreverence, it is a virtual paean to power chic...
...The upper middle class is given the right (with city encouragement and tax relief) to take over run-down neighborhoods possessing good housing stock because it can fix up the neighborhoods in a way the poor who used to live there cannot...
...What has this poetry in common with the interests of our people and state...
...A year ago Robert Reich, writing in the New Republic, described these Reagan policies as the return of Social Darwinism, but in 1983 even the concept of a neo-Social Darwinism does not offer an adequate account of Reaganomics and their appeal...
...As 1984 approaches, Reagan policy seems in fact likely to need, as never before, the imagery and gloss of power chic for the constituency it requires to remain in office...
...It is premised on the belief that the class disparities of American society are proper disparities and that even in the midst of a recession it is essential for those with status and wealth to pursue a life-style that rests on the elevation (not merely the enjoyment) of their affluence...
...Signature architecture: Here power chic is at the center of a corporate desire for architecture that will allow the public to identify its offices with a prestigious image...
...Neither energy efficiency nor modernism has been allowed to get in the way...
...Street couture is without wit unless the joke it makes at the expense of actual bag ladies is recognized...
...Basic with her are amorous-erotic motifs, interlaced with motifs of sadness, anguish, death, mysticism, and doom...
...What happens to the displaced poor...
...The couple gentrifying a decaying brownstone will not get the brownstone (or mortgage money) unless they displace the poor who have been living in it...
...The differences in status power chic is bent on magnifying cannot come into being if empathy for the unsuccessful is allowed to get in the way...
...As its appearance in stores such as Bendel's and Bloomingdale's indicates, street couture is targeted for a very distinct urban clientele, and the point it makes about fashion and power is no less self-conscious...
...Such is Akhmatova with her petty, narrow personal life, her trivial emotional experiences and her religious-mystical eroticism...
...Even a popular film such as Trading Places fails unless the street hustles of Eddie Murphy are seen as the comic equivalent of the upper-class machinations of Dan Aykroyd...
...For power chic, the self-imposed rules of success are so rigid that in the end anticompassion is the only ethic it can afford to be governed by...
...Kramer, the textured film with its emphasis on rendering in detail the lives of the affluent is now reaching a whole new viewing public...
...The success of Trading Places is a case in point...
...Where the radical chic of the late 1960s sought identification with the poor, power chic revels in the opposite...
...It is a style that parodies the dress of the poor with clothes that feature dark colors and carefully tailored rips and holes...
...The idea that "living well is the best revenge" is as old as the expatriate heyday of the 1920s...
...What it is out to draw attention to is not innovation but elevation: the ability of status to compel the sort of recognition nothing else can...
...The best of power chic, Philip Johnson's AT&T headquarters, moves back in time (like Cass Gilbert's 1913 Woolworth Building) and borrows from cathedral architecture to achieve corporate awe...
...The great irony is that the case of Adams—who remains a force when the names of Rutherford B. Hayes or Chester Arthur are scarcely even remembered —demonstrates how much more powerful intellectuals can be in the long run than even the most successful of politicians...
...This is an acute diagnosis of Adams's appeal, but there is another way of putting the same point...
...The subject-matter of Akhmatova is individualistic to the core...
...Radical chic has been replaced in the 1980s by a self-congratulatory aesthetic that celebrates social status...
...But power chic is not mere snobbism or the culture conspiracy of a tiny elite...
...The difference is that power chic has a political side that "living well" never did in the era of Harding and Coolidge...
...Let him get out of Soviet literature...
...The Reagan administration is not merely saying that in the American competitive jungle the I I I n the early 1950s, when the reputation of [Henry] Adams had fallen in proportion to the new (and short-lived) enthusiasm among literary intellectuals for our country and our culture," Lionel Trilling cautioned against reading "Adams permanently out of our intellectual life...
...It is not for us to reform our life and our social order, according to Zoshchenko...
...Its comedy rests on our laughing at what happens to a street-hustling black (Eddie Murphy) when he trades places with the manager of a Philadelphia brokerage firm (Dan Aykroyd), and at least half the film is spent showing us upper-class Philadelphia...
...If power chic has a Baedeker, it is a magazine such as Connoisseur, which, under the editorship of Thomas Hoving, one-time director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, offers monthly instruction in the decorative arts and elegant travel...
...The textured film: Once a staple of such sophisticated explorations of domesticity as An Unmarried Woman and Kramer vs...
...Only the dregs of literature could produce such "works...
...The worst of power chic, street couture, is content with taking from the present...
...Nothing whatsoever...
...From a speech by ANDREI ZHDANOV, August 21, 1946, at the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers, cited in The Country of the Blind by George S. Counts and Nucia Lodge, 1949...
...Akhmatova's creative genius belongs to the distant past...
...For what is being proposed by this Administration is that in an economy of declining expectations the poor must take even less so that others, already better off, may have more...
...Johnson's AT&T headquarters are the embodiment of corporate might, monumental proof that AT&T knows how to make its weight felt...
...It is alien to the realities of contemporary Soviet life...
...With him this theme is always absent...
...Tax breaks for the rich, bail-outs for corporations, and deregulation, on the one hand...
...It is the lure of inequity the Reagan administration is selling, and it is in this commitment that its relationship to power chic is most intense...
...In past decades we have, of course, heard similar claims for the virtues of luxury...
...On the contrary, in encouraging a bigoted contempt for this country and in subtly denigrating and devaluing the life of the mind, he has exerted so malignant an influence that, unlike Trilling, I see little of value that would be lost by allowing him to slip into the obscurity he so often boasted of wishing to achieve...
...Zoshchenko habitually mocks at Soviet life, Soviet institutions, Soviet people...
...Trilling acknowledged that there was much to be said against Adams—and he himself said it all—but there were moments when we needed him: We are at one with Adams whenever our sense of the American loneliness and isolation becomes especially strong, whenever we feel that our culture belongs to everyone except ourselves and our friends, whenever we believe that our talents and our devotion are not being sufficiently used...
...In terms of power chic as design, it is difficult to imagine a greater success...
...Let him reform...
...It was not the idea of giving that bothered Wolfe...
...The life of the mind was never enough for Adams, and if he is an exemplary figure, what he exemplifies is the self-hatred so many American writers and thinkers have felt over being "mere" intellectuals, and the self-pity they have experienced over what they have taken to be their own powerlessness...
...Its justification is the "improvement" it creates...
...Wolfe's 1970 essay focused on a benefit for the Black Panther party, and what he sought to capture was the incongruity of using a Park Avenue setting to raise money for a "revolutionary" organization...
...Those who can afford it, street couture says, can take the style of poverty and convert it into elegance...
...The epitome of such architecture is Philip Johnson's new AT&T Building with its pink granite facade, its Chippendale-like pediment, and a 60-foot lobby with arches and windows designed to create a cathedral effect...
...He depicts Soviet people as loafers and monsters, as stupid and crude people...
...411 • Urban gentrification: In this case power chic manifests itself in the hegemony it claims for good taste...
...Call it power chic...
...It is part of a much broader counterattack on the declining expectations of the 1980s, as we see when we turn to its most conspicuous examples...
...Not quite a nun and not quite a whore but rather a whore and a nun in whom fornication is mingled with prayer...
...on the other, cuts in aid to education, food stamps, and job training...
...But what is most crucial about the Reagan administration's version of power chic is that it does not stop at symbols...
...Zoshchenko, like the Philistine and vulgarian that he is, chose as his permanent theme digging into the basest and pettiest sides of life...
...Its ethic of anticompassion is more deeply rooted than that...
...It is a necessary tour...
...Her poetry is poverty-stricken—the poetry of a frantic little lady, rushing back and forth between the boudoir and the chapel...
...He is incapable of finding in the life of the Soviet people one positive thing, one positive figure...
...This does not, however, mean that Adams is a force for good...
...Thus one can say that Adams has been kept alive as an incitement to and a justification of the hunger of the American intellectual class for the power, and especially the political power, that he himself, for all that he denigrated it, could never stop wanting and envying...
...412 affluent class...
...Moods of loneliness and hopelessness, alien to Soviet literature, characterize the entire historical course of the "creative genius" of Akhmatova...
...It was the contradiction that arose when the wealthy turned radical causes into fads...
...It co-opts what punk dress, with its emphasis on rips and dark colors, did several years ago for a less Mikhail Zoshchenko takes absolutely no interest in the labor of the Soviet people, their struggles and heroism, their high social and moral qualities...
...But he does not want to reform...
...The Reagan cuts—particularly those involving loans for college students, food supplements for pregnant mothers, job training for young blacks— are not designed to promote an economic race in which the competitors have an equal start any more than its massive budget is designed for austerity...
...It has taken to heart, like no American government in the last half-century, the job of elevating the differences between haves and havenots...
...Its real argument is that in a period of economic contraction the nation works best if the poor remain poor and the struggling middle class continues on an economic tightrope...
...In Soviet literature there can be no place for putrid, empty, vulgar, and ideologically indifferent works...
...The relationship between the two is apparent in the symbols of the Reagan administration: a president who enjoys being photographed in jodhpurs, a first lady preoccupied with White House china, a Veterans' administrator who decorates his office at a cost of $50,000, a Treasury Department that spends almost $60,000 on chauffeur overtime...
...On the contrary, for power chic to be significantly original would be counterproductive...
...Street couture: Also known as "bag-lady chic," street couture is perhaps the crudest example to date of power chic...
...WHAT IS MOST TI.I I INO about these examples of power chic is how few claims they make for being truly original...
...That is not a question gentrification is concerned with...
...Certainly nothing else, neither a belief in classic laissez-faire nor a genuine conservatism, will do...
...That power chic should take so little interest in originality is not, however, a sign of diffidence...
...The Reagan cuts are made in order to be sure there is money available for those at the top of the economic ladder, who are the major beneficiaries of its programs...
...For in Trading Places, as in the current new wave of textured films, there is no story line, unless an audience can be convinced there are worlds in which the surfaces alone are so dazzling that no one would turn down a chance to live in them...
...In the 1980s power chic is presidential politics...
...NORMAN POOHORETZ, in the New Criterion, June 1983 413 poor go on being poor because they are unproductive...
Vol. 30 • September 1983 • No. 4
