Written by Georgia Smith
“Fashion is something you can buy. Style is something that you are”
Fran Lebowitz
Writing in 1977, Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron articulated a critique of modernity which understood the tie between aesthetic choice and social class. In the Bourdieuian conception, taste functions as a form of capital which can be used or – to maintain a more appropriate metaphor – be spent within social situations. This notion of cultural capital, incessantly invoked yet often misread, underpins Nathalie Olah’s thought on the politics of aesthetics. Bad Taste: Or the Politics of Ugliness, published by Dialogue Books last November, toys with the very “ideas of taste” around which we form our aesthetic sensibilities. The idea that a superior aesthetic sensibility is something innate, which one either possesses or fatally does not, has been used to excuse a long history of ostracism defined by a capacity to emulate good taste – to exercise the virtue of class, to be (in the strictest ontological sense) classy. Olah positions this history as a form of convergence – between ideas of taste and the politics of social class. As she writes: “to have taste, was to have class, was to have understood the social codes enforced by the protectors of money and opportunity.”
Olah’s writing is sanguine: expressly confident in its radical politics, in places sardonic but marked by her eye for subtle distinctions – possessing a persuasiveness which lies in its attention to what are typically understood to be the trivialities of politics. Her reading of the intricacies of cultural capital is attuned to the fact of class identity as an emotional experience – tracing the implications of capital for both mind and body. As she makes clear, acts of assimilation can too constitute matters of survival – there is a subtle violence encoded in the dictates of good taste. This is no place more apparent than in her sympathy for what she calls the “more ambient, but no less crucial” themes of the cinema of Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar. His features All About My Mother (1999) and The Skin I Live in (2011) are rich with a sensuality defined by a vision of beauty as a form of “self-actualisation”, not one of unadulterated perfection.
To Olah contemporary aesthetics, and indeed the historical legacies which form their exact contours, are defined much less by what they encapsulate and more by what they come to reject.
Olah’s first chapter underlines the intellectual histories which have produced the notion of taste with which we are familiar – her epigraphs forming a subtle but immediate dichotomy between matters of order and the extremes of excess. The choice to note John Ruskin’s thinking on the “laws of choice” which govern the art world is intentional, especially in opposition to John Waters churlish insinuation that “if someone vomits watching one of [his] films, it’s like getting a standing ovation.” Olah and her two John’s are symbolic of the sense of opposition which defines contemporary aesthetics, and indeed prevailing perceptions of social class. To be classy is to be ordered or restrained, it is to understand the subtle yet absolute codes which make the fixation upon good taste a form of violence. And as Waters image of vomit suggests, to be in possession of bad taste is to be excessive or prone to vulgarity, it is to be in possession of an unruly (or perhaps simply a poor) body. These aesthetics are then, in a sense, a set of anti-aesthetics. Evidence of a preoccupation with a particularly virulent form of minimalism, marked in the fashion of normcore and the architecture of Vervoordt, which Olah dates to the fetishisation of a scarcity economy after the 2008 global financial crisis.
There is a singular thread one can pull through Olah’s writing, intrinsic to the fabric of her argument that contemporary aesthetics are predicated on a rejection of maximalism and the image of overt indulgence. It is by this point clear that “a virtue ha[s] been made of emptiness”, but in instances in which consumption is necessary, what should it look like? The tendency which underlines the various trends Olah notes is an attempt at inconspicuousness: a return to that which is natural. See also: artisanal, hand-made, one of a kind. This set of aesthetics is particularly insidious as it ignores the privilege inherent to the capacity to consciously reject consumerism, to have the material wealth necessary to make ethical choices, while equally engaging in the commodification of hand-made goods. Olah’s mastery is her ability to show that there is a complexity inherent to plainness or the idea of something being natural – her third, fourth, and fifth chapters on the subjects of fashion, beauty, and food provide a particular image upon which to exhibit such thinking, being so interconnected as these three subjects are.
What is overlooked when detailing a politics of aesthetics in its broadest sense is not only the explicit acknowledgement that the politics of aesthetics are a gendered politics – it is not only the lower classes but women who are handed down the requirement of a “conformity to ideas of tastefulness” – but that there is something inherently pleasurable about consumerism. The performance of gender permits (or in fact necessitates) an exclusive, and often deeply pleasurable, kind of consumerism. While Olah does not explicitly mention the Clean Girl aesthetic by name (perhaps not quite yet in vogue at the time of writing), her allusion to elaborate multi-step skincare regimes speaks to one of the fundamental tenets of the Clean Girl philosophy. Purporting to be health-driven, the aesthetic is at best beauty-centric (how much beauty does it take to move from a plain girl to a clean girl? Why is the clean girl ostensibly a white girl? Why is thinness a mandate for joining the clean girl club?) It is in its aspirational quality that this aesthetic is both deeply seductive and equally excusable.
The emergence of athleisure, particularly in spaces devoid of athletic opportunity, is uniquely telling. While athleisure is undeniably comfortable, and often flattering (to the slim bodies it primarily caters to) it is too a style of dress which is not only about comfort – but the insinuation that one has just come from, or is about to engage in, exercise. In a semiotic sense, the wearer is allied to a culture of wellness, and crucially to its associated idea of thinness (and to a lesser extent beauty – fundamentally distinct from the manufactured nature of sexiness as Olah makes conceptually clear and notes of her libidinal urge to the 1977 feature Barb Wire). There is, to Olah, a “very real and present horror” of there being both tasteful and distasteful human bodies, producing a hierarchy in which “a very particular type of body [becomes] a status symbol and item in the wider ‘asset’ portfolio.”
On beauty, Olah takes Emily Weiss’ Glossier as her point of reference – but it is Glossier’s sexier, more sophisticated older sister rhode beauty who interests me. This interest is perhaps motivated less by the almost unbelievable sense in which rhode is to the clean girl what Freud is to the psychoanalyst (see the recent rhode beauty and Erewhon collab) but more so my own obsession with owning every single peptide lip treatment. A success predicated on the beauty of its super model founder, Hailey Rhode Bieber, rhode’s philosophy is one of efficacy and intentionality – offering “Curated skincare ESSENTIALS” which are “EDITED, efficacious, and INTENTIONAL”. Rhodes lip treatments come in sleek grey tubes, and as I’d argue are more significant as objects than they are as lip glosses. It is almost self-evident to note, in an image saturated culture, that owning any one of these items is primarily about being seen to own it – about being the kind of girl to use it. A perhaps uneasy acknowledgement that modern identity has found itself based, in part, upon a carefully curated set of aesthetic associations. As Olah writes herself, this obsessive and deeply particular form of consumerism underlines “the idea that our identities might constitute an ongoing performance” – a performance which depends on consumption and takes on a distinct character in line with the mandates of beauty and desirability.
It has, however, always bothered me that there is such a swift rejection of the idea that there is a pleasure inherent to conforming to such mandates. The impression reigns supreme, and what Olah offers is a clever interrogation of the relationship between impressions, cultural capital, and personal pleasure. Beside the contentious elements of such aesthetics and beyond the simple pressures of conformity, the need to fit in or be desired, is the consideration that these objects are pretty things – easy on the eye, a nice weight in the palm, often sweetly scented. Is one of the later stages of capitalism an eroticisation of the consumer object? And is this an erotics any less powerful or legitimate than any other linked to sensuality or visual perception? Beauty rituals can be gratifying in nature, finding their basis in part in beautification but too in acts of daily repetition, elements of luxury, and not necessarily reproachful acts of vanity. It is difficult to see how the excessive trivialisation of such a routine could be based on anything but a perpetuation of contempt for femininity.
Olah’s reading of All About My Mother is a fitting place to conclude. The “radical, fluid, and ultimately elusive definition of womanhood” Olah perceives in Almódovar’s work may be a parable for a new approach to aesthetics. She writes of this conception of womanhood as one in which “we are invited to see… the variety of roles and performances that we enter into both with deliberate thought, to escape ourselves and enjoy the freedom of exhibition and play, but also those that we enter into as a result of being alive and needing to fulfil the duties of circumstance.” The demand to consume, and conform, can be read in much the same way – a necessary reframing of our approach to aesthetics in light of Olah’s coupling of play and duty.
Bibliography
Bourdieu, Pierre, and Jean-Claude Passeron. 1990. Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture. London: Sage Publications.
Olah, Nathalie. 2023. Bad Taste: Or the Politics of Ugliness. London: Dialogue Books.
Uwagba, Otegha. 2024. “Fran Lebowitz: ‘Sixty-year-old men wearing baseball caps drive me crazy’.” The Sunday Times. March 2. Accessed March 3, 2024. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/fran-lebowitz-60-year-old-men-wearing-baseball-caps-drive-me-crazy-p05tq0q88.
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