BREAKING NEWS
July 27, 2006
The Heyday of the Dead
What is that little black cloud drifting across the sun? Will it ruin our picnic, like ants or a motorcycle gang? Heaven protect us ... a skull? Not one, but a sea of them! Ah, but ere it comes near, it is clear: it will barely cast a pall.
If it was not clear a year or two ago, when the skull motif cropped up on battered Herman-Melville-meets-Edgar-Allan-Poe T-shirts made by Rogues Gallery, on costly cashmere sweaters by Lucien Pellat-Finet, on the perforated uppers of the wingtips made by the men’s wear line Barker Black, it is now. What only recently seemed clever and stylish — I’m wearing a skull! I’m baaaaad! — has shifted into overdrive, if not overkill.
Beyond the sea of skull wear — belts, T-shirts, ties — there are umbrellas, sneakers, swimsuits, packing tape, party lights, even a skull-branded line of hand tools. One company has made a skull toilet brush and caddy (with a molded-plastic femur bone for a handle). This summer Damien Hirst announced that he will make a life-size skull, cast in platinum and adorned with 8,000 diamonds.
It has become the Happy Face of the 2000’s. When the mid-1980’s proto-Goth group the Ministry sang “Every Day Is Halloween,” this was not quite what they had in mind.
Skulls are ringing the dinner bell louder than ever. Alexander McQueen’s fall men’s wear show did not play up skull imagery on the runway — surely the critics would be bored — but there are plenty back in the showroom, on sports coats, polo shirts and trousers. His $210 skull-print silk scarf is one of the best-selling items on the men’s designer floor at Barneys New York.
“We’ve sold 400 since May,” said Timothy Elliott, a Barneys spokesman. “We sell them as fast as they come in.”
Ah, well. Eat, drink and be trendy. Tomorrow we die.
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Skulls Are Happy Faces? Socionomics Explains Why
By: Melody, July 27, 2006 |
In a bear market, tastes crash from the “alive” phase of the peak to an emphasis on death at the bottom.
The Elliott Wave Financial Forecast, July 2006
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Given the proximity to the May peak in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the skull-look actually seems a little ahead of the bear market in social mood. According to The Wave Principle of Human Social Behavior, however, “shared fantasy images” can be an intermediate step between mood change and resulting action. So the trend probably speaks to a future and cultural emphasis on death that comes later in a bear market.
Another aspect, which is touched on in the balance of the New York Times piece at left, is that there are bullish elements to the “skullmania.” In fact, the skull imagery is so widespread that the Times wonders if it’s lost its traditional association with death. We think it has more to do with the position of social mood which is in a bear market, but one that has been buffeted by countertrend rally, a long one that dates from October 2002 to May 2006(?). We firsts talked about this clash in the November 2003 issue of The Elliott Wave Financial Forecast (for the full discussion see Additional References to the entry of November 8). These cross currents explain why, in many cases, the bearish skull imagery appears within a bullish context. In the case of the item pictured above, for instance, on a pink bikini. At the bottom the skulls will probably be around, but pink bikinis will be very passé.
In the words of the NY Times the skull trend is “— fun, flexible, easy, breezy!”:
The skull is all-purpose,” said Sasha Frere-Jones, a music critic at The New Yorker. “It simultaneously refers to horror movies, to the Misfits and, by extension, all punk rock, and to a generalized culture of blackness and spookiness and the larger, mall-Goth culture.” So, he said, “if you’re really at heart a Goth, but you have friends who are into metal and punk, you can rock the skulls and be friends with all of them.”
But the overriding message is bearish as the Times also notes that the skull is “one of history’s most formidable images, seen in thousands of years of art and symbol. Robert Rosenblum, a professor of fine arts at New York University, explained that the skull is central to the Mexican vanitas, a genre of still-life painting in which temporal pleasures are juxtaposed with a skull. ‘The vanitas includes the skull as a reminder that death is everywhere, as a cutting edge to too much contentment with the here and now.’” |
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