ASK A DELUSIONAL GIRL: NO. 1
THIS WEEK, YOU ASKED:
Do you think the pervasive feeling of nostalgia that plagues our generation is related to the 20-year trend cycle? People who want to be unique look to past trends for fashion inspiration, and when those trends become mainstream, they reach even farther back until a feedback loop is created. In regards to this, is it really possible for someone to feel as though they were born in the wrong generation?
The trend cycle is a heavily contested topic right now, seething through a million hot-take substacks and indie mag think pieces. Critiques of fashion trends always seem to involve a personal resentment about the paradox of authenticity, which transposed over the horrors of industrialization develops an awesome moral quality that requires the iron heart of an expert navigator to survive in. I think Shein clothes are horrible but that’s probably because I also think they’re ugly.
I have to admit that I am the sort of person who will dump a clothing item I once said I’d wear forever as soon as it goes mainstream because I can’t stand to be perceived as subject to the forces of marketing. Paradoxically, this exposes me as the most deeply spontaneous-market-driven person there is. Fashion’s hell to deal with because it’s the most important thing in the world stuffed into one of the worst economic and cultural systems to ever exist.
The reason that fashion is so unshakably important is because it’s the language for the body to relate to society with. This is immense and incredible and untouchable by even the most compelling critique of industry. Never listen to anybody who says that seeking a new style in response to the current cultural moment is morally wrong. In fact, it’s good if you can agree that goodness involves pleasurable play between the constructed and experienced aspects of human totality. The blatant evil of the trend cycle comes up as the mechanism that commodifies this pleasure. In introducing capitalist logic it blackens the earth, tortures women in developing countries and converts the body into a consumer, thus alienating it from the very linguistic pleasures which constitute fashion’s goodness.
But before all that bad, modern stuff, back when there was different bad stuff going on, fashion had the same circular structure it does now. The most Fun Fashion Fact is how silhouettes repeat themselves through centuries. The beginning is slim (from regency to flappers to skinny jeans), the middle accentuates curves (bustles & housewife crinolines), and the end is tailored (like powersuits or Edwardian corsetry.) Fashion is sex, and sex forces a rebellion of each generation against the one before them.
The trend cycle also takes a lot of heat for nostalgia, but the two are pretty distinct. Unpacking nostalgia is an endless academic process which nothing worthwhile has ever come out of, but its pre-eminence as a subject of study shows not only nostalgia’s resonance but its resonance predating the existence of the internet, accelerated capitalism, and Gen-Z. The ailment of nostalgia is, however, suffered more massively in our generation because of the new possibilities presented by both the sheer amount of accessible information and the new prioritization of visual information. Nostalgia’s contents are reshaped by subtle emotional perceptions of the ongoing restructuring of visual language, which is both an undirected process of the collective unconscious and a directed shaping of the public impulse in the interest of power. Nostalgia relates woman to her past as fashion relates her to her present.
We can only say with certainty that the languages which connect our bodies to time and the relationships these languages have to each other and to power, are in flux. How to make sense of and cope with that flux is the question of the times, one I’m not prepared to answer. Luckily I don’t have to since I am an advice columnist and not a philosopher. Sure, you can be born in the wrong generation and fashion is the only thing powerful enough to bring you to the one you’re supposed to be in. Just not in a linear sense, dress all sexy in a wormhole or something.
How does a girl’s first crush impact her perception of love in the future?
The idea of direct transference is difficult, I think, because the first crush is not an overly specific thing. Rather it is an amalgamation of adolescent experiences: images, passages of text, real boys and girls, older siblings, authority figures, mass media messaging. The first crush is a collection of sensations – shame, cruelty, acceptance, frustration, pleasure, peace – and the seminal moments which evoke them.
There are a few characteristics we can use to identify any crush as such. First and foremost a crush is a fixation and involves all the accompanying pathologies of obsession and compulsion. Of its own volition the imagination engages in exercises of contextual transference, injecting the adored into fantasy situations they have no business being. In the age of the internet, the crush is almost always accompanied by intensive information consumption for the sake of feeding these fantasies. We want to know as much about them with as little risk as humanly possible and unfortunately for our own sanity we all too often can. In the conventional sense we can call the first crush the first conscious object of romantic obsession.
Little Manhattan (2005)
More than this, a crush evokes physical pain in the body. A crush dispels such a state of anguish in the poet that he eats roses until he vomits. A real crush, a proper one, is life threatening. It destroys past notions of love, calls into question the world one wants, sodomizes morality, kickstarts old addictions and, for a moment, appears to absolve the sufferer of all sin. In its potentials arrive that dear myth of martyrdom, everything, everything was for this moment! On decades of suffering one writes love poems suddenly.
The first crush is a morphological epitome because it is so unavoidably limited by the dependence of adolescence. A crush is precocious: it happens before you can act. A crush exists more obviously and painfully than most real things but belongs so entirely to the hidden recesses of the mind that it may never be set free. When the crush escapes interiority it has consequences which morph it into something more concrete and lacking its ephemeral specificity. Every crush thereafter reinstates childhood frustration in ourselves and we return to that seminal one.
The first crush in the conventional sense is only slightly more consequential in the grand scheme of life than, say, your relationship with your father or the way you played house. You always did it, it’s just, this is the first time you really meant it. The first crush is something of a death sentence in this respect: within it you learn how it feels to really mean something. In the first crush the whole potential of love and libido collapses in on the self, hangs doomed over one’s head marking her resigned forever more to the state of lack that is humanity.
The reductive nature of the crush marks it as feminine, which is as limiting as youth is. The crush must be humiliating enough to spur the masculine past its cowardice! The most painful part of female puberty is the development of psychic awareness of woman’s status as the other. In order to function in any coherent sense as a sexually mature woman one must discover a strong sense of the external to invent herself through. The reputation of the young girl as fanatically boy-crazy is unfair for obvious reasons, but for the young girl the crush is a survival necessity. In the heterosexual sense, the fixation on a certain ‘type’ of male involves a reconceptualization of those forms of personhood which have been withheld from us so that they are still possible to absorb into our existence. Lesbian desire functions similarly (do I want to date her or be her?!), only in this case masculinity is either more expressly embodied or more directly desired beneath the artifice of compulsive heterosexuality. It’s an old adage in Girl World: we become the men we once wanted to date. A crush, any crush, is an inkling of self-actualization which includes but extends beyond mere potential for love. It is the pre-individual being at its very moment of activation, as with childhood, with puberty.
A girl’s first crush impacts her perception of love in the future because it establishes the rhetoric with which her identity materializes in relation to desire. Ignore the object of desire himself, what is consequential is the fundamental innocence lost in the first act of objectification, the one uniquely non-artificial virginity to the destructive capacities of our own eroticism. The first crush is a deftly felt approximation of the whole of externality which invigorates us, which draws us ever closer to death and acquaints us with the will to live.
If I give any you any real advice let this be it: take care to not let the projective nature of the crush ruin it. There is a popular and rather miserable therapy-culture notion that every crush can and should be discredited by the realization you are projecting yourself onto him, but of course you are! One should be so lucky to be capable of such things! The greater the distance between the reality of the adored and the delusion of the adorer, the more productive energy is involved in the phenomenon of the crush. Never mind the depth of suffering she inflicts on herself in the process. The more thought and passion the adorer wills into the world, the more this fervor realizes her own existence, bringing her into being as a force of good and beauty.
In the end and the beginning— love will be a mirror you can’t see shit in.
Maya Chambers is a writer and advice columnist for Delude Magazine. You can read more of her work on her substack.