Trends and Syntax

Articles of Interest is a podcast about fashion, but it’s really about design… history… economics… and the stories of people floating among those overlapping forces. The podcast’s writer and host is Avery Truffleman, who previously contributed to the design podcast 99% Invisible and a series on utopias and the design of the home, Nice Try!

Your first reading for this class is actually a podcast.

Required Listening

Listen to American Ivy: Chapter 1 in your web browser, or search for “Articles of Interest” in your favorite podcast app. (You can stop listening at the second commercial break, at minute 27, if desired.)

Episode transcript:

articles-of-interest-s03e01.pdf

This episode explores the nature of trends, including some fun interviews with trend forecasters who survey vast datasets to predict consumer behavior in the near and long-term future. Truffleman then introduces the topic of Ivy fashion (aka “preppy”), which she claims has become the default style of clothing, in the sense that khakis, oxford button-downs, and other elements of the Ivy look are no longer seen as specific signifiers, but as “classics,” “basics,” or “just clothes,” to quote the episode. We will revisit this idea in an upcoming lesson.

But the most important part of the episode, comes around minute 22:

“An outfit is a sentence that says, ‘This is what I am doing today, this is what the weather is, this is who I am.’ So, as menswear writer Derek Guy puts it, a lot of fashion references archetypes. The punk. The cowboy. The raver. The blue collar worker.”

This applies to artwork and visual design too. As with fashion, it’s impossible to invent something totally original, therefore much of what we do as creators is to remix archetypes and stylistic references into new combinations.

If you don’t have those cultural references, you’re doing what Noam Chomsky does with his sentence: “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” As Truffleman explains, “that’s what its like if you’re wearing a fireman’s jacket and a feather boa. You can wear clothes but sometimes they don’t make sense together.”

Chomsky’s sentence came from his 1957 book on linguistics, where he separated syntax (grammatical structure) from semantics (meaning).

This is a significant idea that we will explore over the coming weeks. In visual art and design, can you separate syntax from semantics? What is the syntax — or grammar — of visual communication?

That’s a rhetorical question for you to put on a post-it and reflect on, but I have some actual questions about this episode in this week’s exercise file…which I’ll introduce on the next page!