Street photography erased boundaries between downtown scenesters and celebrity elites

Evidence

The Cobrasnake’s photos captured the further collapse of subcultural boundaries in real time. His lens gave equal attention to downtown scenesters like Kids actor Chloë Sevigny and artist Dash Snow as to Los Angeles celebrity elite such as Paris Hilton, the Olsen twins, and DJ Steve Aoki. A decade later, this aesthetic would be dubbed “indie sleaze,” a merger of creative-class sensibilities and raunch culture. Fashion trends followed suit, with LA’s garish glamour overtaking New York’s gritty sophistication: velour tracksuits from Juicy Couture, rhinestone-emblazoned Ed Hardy shirts, and trucker hats from Von Dutch. (Von Dutch was the nickname of American mechanic Kenny Howard, an open admirer of the Third Reich who used “Sieg Heil” as a sign-off for personal letters.) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 154

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Directly evidences the ‘omnivore monoculture’ thesis the reader is tracing — the Cobrasnake unifying scenes that once stayed separate is a concrete instance of taste-flattening.
• QUESTION: The Von Dutch / ‘Sieg Heil’ aside is a striking tangent — worth chasing whether the label’s Nazi-adjacent founder complicates the ‘blankness’ reading, or whether it’s just forgotten detail.

Related

• Downtown scenester and celebrity cultures fused into one flattened scene (similarity 0.93)