A few years ago a lot of people came to the same conclusion: the path to modernity was to put an exposed brick wall in their businesses, a light bulb vintagewhite tiles. The cities were filled with clone shops, regardless of the sector, so I spent some time asking for bread at the optician’s, glasses at the bar, and a drink and a psychologist at the bakery. They were all the same.
Today, the trend is for “specialty coffee” shops with a design so cold and minimalist that one feels like drinking a cappuccino in the canteen of an ultra-security prison in El Salvador, one of those where Bukele puts the gangs.
Thus, the interior design hipster It not only reached sophisticated, elitist, alternative or undergroundbut everywhere: from the luxury restaurant to the neighborhood bar, from the service area to the bingo hall, from the suburban hair salon to the main street franchise. Practicing snobbery became not only more difficult, but also more ridiculous.
In addition to the confusion when ordering a croissant, we discovered that this massive desire for modernity had turned modernity into something vulgar. We are still in that situation. The butcher shop on my street stopped being a butcher shop a few months ago and became a butcher’s shop. And the butchersthat is, the butchers, now sport long beards and horn-rimmed glasses, like the barbers in the barbershop, which, sorry, is now a barber shop. Bakeries-confectioneries, almost all of them franchises, are now bakeriesand one, while swallowing a chocolate napolitana (now also described as pain au chocolate), cannot help but be surprised by the masses of people who see modernity in using English words for things that have names in Spanish: I go down to the bar and they offer me food & drinks.
We could understand modernism (not to be confused with historical Modernity) as a Leninist vanguard within the cultural sphere. A minority, a revolutionary elite, that conspires on the margins until it takes power. But when the underground takes over the Winter Palace, it becomes establishment and is starting to be sold at Inditex. A couple of decades ago, fans of “independent” or “alternative” music suffered in their bedrooms due to the lack of compression, now the mainstream Indie festival music has displaced light songs and urban rhythms have entered deep into Triumph operation. Modern youth does not aspire to the distinction of underground monastic, but to make it big on social media like Rosalía.
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The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu theorized about how the adoption of certain tastes and lifestyles serves to obtain the distinction with which the dominant classes justify their dominance over the dominated classes. Good taste, sophistication, cool. Now modernity has been democratized, so it cannot be asked to continue providing distinction. That is why those who try to distinguish themselves by adopting the same aesthetics as the rest are guilty of naivety, when bearded men even appear in bank advertising, the State Security Forces and Corps have tattoos and the entire stylistic package is marketed and exploited by large companies. Thomas Frank called it “the conquest of the cool”.
He cosmopolitanism It is emerging in fashion, in the hospitality industry, in the tourism and real estate sectors: a development on the banks of the Manzanares is called Brooklyn, as if it were the other side of the East River in New York. cosmopaleto: trying to capitalize on foreign cool by arriving too late. Hegel conceptualized the idea of the universal man who summed up his era in his person. In his time that man was Napoleon; in ours Amadeo Lladós: he influencer who personifies digital and consumerist success mixed with the gadgets of countercultural modernism, chicken hair, and massive tattoos.
It is the contemporary paradox: we want to be different, becoming uniform. In our desire for difference, we are camouflaging ourselves through consumption. Capitalism boasts of innovation, but it is based above all on crude imitation. There are those who argue that what is truly disruptive now is not wearing tattoos and dressing to go unnoticed. What is modern as what is normal, what is normieit normcore. No colored hair, no fluoride, no piercings of any kind, no Deleuze quotes. Lentils, not Hawaiian poke.
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