I was walking around Lake and Hennepin in Minneapolis with my girlfriend back in the 80s and we watched an expensive BMW come around a corner. The trunk popped and a young man, dressed in ratty shorts and t-shirt with old flip-flops, and shaggy messy hair, jumped out of the passenger seat, opened the trunk, pulled out a beat-up skateboard and skated off.
A while later and a block away that same young man came skating up to us and asked, “Hey, man, you got a quarter?” I said, “Hey, man, you got a ‘Beamer?” And he rolled off.
Was it the hippies who inaugurated what my dad referred to as, “faux poverty”? Dad was a surgeon back then and he just loved to mock the very idea of people with plenty of money dressing like they had none at all. He had a field day with the new trend of pre-torn jeans, produced, marketed and actually torn by huge, multi-national, highly profitable corporations.
I’m guessing it was the hippies, but no doubt it was a statement about poverty and our consumer society for them. Hippies liked to make statements and if you look back over time, they were pretty much always right. But they made it cool and it made its way to artists, musicians and the like, who were then aped by those who adored them.
Like me. The surgeon’s kid. That’s how I dressed as a teenager (and I still do on occasion but mostly when I’m painting). The only difference back then was that you couldn’t yet buy ripped jeans so we had to wait for ours to fall apart or wear the oldest pair we had. It staggers the imagination just how quickly a teenager can wear out a pair of jeans, by the way. You could have a properly ripped knee in a few months. On another note, it was the seventies and I had jean shorts that were cut so high that the only thing between my legs was the seam. The pockets, often filled with bubble yum (or a film canister and pinch hitter), would hang down and out from beneath the material. Lovely.
And it’s still going on, of course. But you do grow out of it. You realize you look kind of stupid (unless you’re in a rock band) looking that way. I wonder just how many rock bands shot their gritty black and white photos in industrial areas, junk yards and abandoned buildings. (I was involved in a shoot like that, too.) Then you skedaddle back to the shag-carpeted, split-level home with a comfy bedroom featuring a Marantz stereo system with glowing blue dial, Magnaplaner speakers, black lights and rock posters of poor looking, exceedingly wealthy rock stars.
Why do we do that?
Luke Soiseth 