We Can Tell Your “Swag” is Performative

Written By: Mylène Dominicus @myld.ac

The relationship with no swag gap, the nichest “fashion MF’ you know, and the girl who cried chic — all three have one main thing in common, and it’s not a unique sense of fashion. It’s the performance of it.

The ‘swag gap’ refers to when, in a couple, one person has an identifiably better sense of style than the other. Similarly, the online fashion scene can’t seem to let go of their arbitrary ideas of ‘niche’ and ‘chic’ fashion. Whether it’s a Chief Keef polo or an Acne Studios Stockholm 1996 shirt, Margiela tabis or ballerina flats. Fashion influencers and self-proclaimed fashion lovers from this corner of the internet are consistently on the hunt for an item or brand so removed from the mainstream trends, often specifically seeking out archival or luxury designer pieces. What all three archetypes have in common is that they're more concerned with perception rather than any form of reality. Like wellness signaling, the trend in which people are more concerned with signalling their healthy lifestyle through their appearance than actually being healthy, this particular corner of the fashion community is status signalling. It's not about fashion. For them, it's about capital.

Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu introduced the concept of cultural capital in the 1970s and treated the matter as a solely class-based concept. Based on his understanding, cultural capital may be symbolic in form, but is valued so much in our hierarchical society that it rewards its possessors in ways that are far from symbolic. Capital is capital, whether symbolic or monetary. It comes with power, authority, social mobility, access, and ultimately profit. It comes with status.

The issue with certain online fashion communities is their performativity of cultural capital. The generation that grew up in an oversaturated and fragmented social media landscape is desperate for originality. And in their quest for nicheness, many attempt to half-heartedly accumulate as much cultural capital as possible in order to build their new identity. Cultural capital in this sense is less about the embodied state. No one’s really concerned about knowledge and competencies. It doesn't matter where the tabi originated from. All that matters is it's from Margiela. It’s all in the object and materialisation of knowledge, or maybe the performance of it. In other words, it’s about what cultural goods—clothes, books, accessories, art pieces, or bags—they own. 

Left: Laganini on Instagram, right: Mia Wells on Instagram

It’s not an attempt at earning status as much as it is about performing it. So if you’re, say, dating someone with perceivably worse style than you, your performance will be called into question. Are you two really a good fit?

But much like money, cultural capital isn’t distributed nor profited from equally. Some are lucky to have that knowledge passed down to them. Some have the means to buy their way into earning said knowledge through, for example, multidisciplinary education. Then there are others who don’t have the money nor the connections, and must work for it their entire lives. 

This disproportionate distribution calls into question who exactly gets to leverage and profit from cultural capital. And whose culture is considered ‘good enough’ to be capital?

East Asian culture, for example, has been endlessly used as inspiration in both high and low fashion. From Galliano’s China collection in 2003 for Dior to Adidas’ viral Tang jacket. East Asians cultures have been a source of inspiration in fashion for centuries, but on whom is it considered fashion? It seems as though qipao shirts only became ‘chic’ when on the white body. Meanwhile, many Asians across the west recall getting ridiculed and shamed for their cultural dress.

Queer communities too have always been a huge influence in the fashion world. Queer men and stud lesbians have long pushed the boundaries of male and masculine gender expression, but it is the straight man who has arguably benefitted from this most—at least socially. Maybe they've finally realised that women are, in fact, attracted to femininity. Maybe these straight men want to take on a persona of someone safe and culturally aware. Or maybe they just want to elevate their style. No matter the reason, they are turning to queer communities for inspiration, and they're giving nothing back. The women saying they don’t want a ‘swag gap relationship’ will often pursue straight men like these, who have good style, take care of themselves, and are (seemingly) culturally aware. But we recently saw a rise in women coming online saying they wouldn’t even entertain the idea of dating a bisexual man. The contradiction begs the question: on whom is femininity tasteful?

The Lo Lifes, a street gang and subculture born in Brooklyn during the 1980s and 1990s.

The same can be said about streetwear. Bourdeau studied cultural capital solely through a class-lens, but many studies have since come out and brought race into the equation. And rightfully so. Capital, whether culture or money, has never been an equal system. Take Ralph Lauren's polos as an example. It was the African-American community and Lo Lifes who popularised them in the ‘80s. And yet those of the destination collection, more known as Chief Keef polos, are often seen as “unlike Ralph Lauren" by the same people who claim to love fashion. Until it was seen on the runways at Fashion Week, streetwear wasn’t even considered ‘real fashion’. And now, countless trends can be traced back to streetwear movements, but rarely ever do Black people get the credit for it. There’s a small demographic that gets to embrace the streetwear style and be labeled as having swag, and it’s not the originators.

That’s when the overemphasis on swag, chicness, and nicheness starts to feel performative. People engaging with these concepts in any serious capacity often don’t dress in the ground-breaking ways they claim to be. Instead, they buy into whatever the internet tells them is niche, trendy, or intellectually fashionable. They’re greedily consuming a culture that isn’t theirs. And there's a lot of irony in the rise of these trends coinciding with the rise of conservatism and far-right sentiments amongst the same generation. We see fashion profiting off cultures they don’t intend on representing. We see people performing an identity they don’t really support.

How often do people really understand the history behind what they’re wearing? Is the social status they’re gaining proportional to the effort they put into building their style? Or are they just climbing up the social hierarchy by adopting subcultures popularised by marginalised communities, while those same communities rarely ever profit from that capital in the same way?