Once the domain of BBQ kitsch and limited-edition Old Navy merch, American flag fashion has taken on a certain charge in the post-2016 era. What’s trending as nostalgia-tinged Americana on TikTok inspires less enthusiastic engagement in deep-blue enclaves. For progressive-minded voters, visual patriotism has been consigned to the dustbin of if not history then at least the one holding all our old skinny jeans and side parts.
The American flag? She’s basic.
The writer Lauren Sherman—the brain behind Puck’s Line Sheet newsletter—grew up around flag tees and Stars and Stripes bumper stickers. To her, the flag was an emblem claimed by the union-affiliated working class. “It just meant that you were proud to be an American, whereas if you wear an American flag now, it somehow indicates that you’re conservative,” she says. She has seen her own family register the shift. When she was a kid, everyone dressed up in American flag tees for July Fourth, she says. “I would say 85% of the people in my family would not wear one now.”
As with any style that falls out of favor, it’s not the flag that has changed. It’s the connotation that has.
In Democratic-leaning cities and towns, where fashion is a more self-conscious mode of social expression, “the idea of patriotism is correlated with isolationists and populists,” Sherman says. Like the flag waving on the front porch, flag hats and pins (except on politicians, for whom it’s a de facto uniform) are seen as accessories for them, not us. That unease has reverberations. Sherman tracks it in the care with which brands incorporate preppiness into their collections; often, it’s prep with a twist or a certain irony, lest it be perceived as old-school exclusionary. Sherman is tuned into the same Polo Ralph Lauren resurgence that Lewis is watching play out on social media, but the most popular looks are “all drawn from vintage Polo,” Sherman points out. The homage is more on-target than its wearers realize. The brand may have been adopted as the uniform of the Mayflower set, but Ralph Lauren himself was born to immigrant parents in the Bronx. Who better to market the flag than a first-generation master of reinvention?
Source link
