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Gvasalia’s “Kering” hoodie shown in his second men’s Balenciaga collection in 2017. Dolce & Gabanna, Spring 1992: a male model sports a “Sicilians are Sensational” T-shirt, complete with what today would be a heart emoji. Even Hussein Chalayan, who usually took himself seriously, sent a dress down his Spring/ Summer 2006 runway with the Absolut vodka logo on it. Other examples abound, but I will stop here. That irony entered fashion in the 1990s makes total sense — Generation X was the first generation of well-educated people who also grew up watching ungodly amounts of TV, commercials included. It was the first generation who had to dodge salesmen at every waking moment of their lives, but who were also simultaneously defined by branding, for the simple fact that it became inescapable. American writer, David Foster Wallace, the most brilliant commentator Generation X has produced, noted that it seemed perfectly normal for his generation to align brands with character traits. These were mimetic shortcuts that simply became second nature in an ad-saturated culture. Irony was the weapon of choice for those who longed to escape the mind-numbing banality of contemporary culture. But the marketing departments of big corporations and ad firms they used also hired smart young people, and the first principle of marketing is that you need to speak the language of the consumers. Therefore, irony quickly entered the parlance of TV and advertising, and so the last escape hatch was closed. Fast-forward to today and the internet seems simply like another version of TV, and the millennial generation does not seem all that far removed from Gen X in its attitudes towards many aspects of contemporary culture. The millennials are still described as supposedly hard to sell to, because they have sucked in advertising with their mothers’ milk. They still play the cat-and-mouse game with the ad men. “Authenticity” is still suggested as the main value of Instagram influencers hired to peddle product, despite the fact that authenticity and marketing are antithetical by nature. How long this cycle will continue is anybody’s guess. I would argue that it won’t be long before irony as the prevailing aesthetic and consumption attitude will fall away. Wallace rightly noted that irony is a defeatist attitude because it’s not a constructive one. Irony is tiring because there is a certain cynicism at its core, despite it’s wink-wink enthusiasm, and because humans do have a constructive mindset. But will irony be rediscovered at some point by a future generation of
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