Inspired by the discussion of Gothic revival architecture in my post on the anti-Promethean backlash, this post is an excerpt from chapter four of The Substance of Style, published in 2003 and is currently on sale for just $2.99 on Kindle.
Aesthetic meaning won’t hold still. Indeed, much of the value of aesthetics lies in its pliability, in our ability to direct the joys of form to new meanings or to strip form of its connotations and enjoy aesthetics for its own sake, often leading to new associations. Just as once-neutral forms can take on new or recovered meanings, so elements that were once meaningful can evolve through use and popularity into primarily formal motifs, with little significance beyond the pleasure they bring. Pleasure tends to suck the symbolism out of aesthetic elements, but new connections are always emerging….
To the British Victorians who revived Gothic architecture, the return to medieval styles represented a rejection of bourgeois, industrial life. Some advocates emphasized the imagined religious and social harmony of medieval villages; others, the authenticity and expressiveness of hand craftsmanship. Regardless of emphasis or details, Gothic revival architecture embodied an intellectual critique that damned nineteenth-century economic, social, scientific, and technological trends. It was an outward and visible sign of an ideological commitment.
Within decades, however, the style had come to indicate little more than a general respect for history and scholarship, along with an appreciation for high-class architectural fashion. “By the simple device of building our new buildings in the Tudor Gothic style,” said Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton University, in 1902, “we seem to have added to Princeton the age of Oxford and Cambridge; we have added a thousand years to the history of Princeton by merely putting those lines in our buildings which point every man’s imagination to the historic traditions of learning in the English-speaking race.”
More flexible than previously dominant classical styles, Gothic revival architecture suited the era’s expanding colleges and was even used for scientific laboratories on both sides of the Atlantic. Although Princeton’s primary early-twentieth-century architect embraced the ideological symbolism of Gothic architecture, that association was belied by the university’s most prominent Collegiate Gothic building. Blair Hall not only greeted arriving trains, the epitome of industrial technology, but was named for the railroad entrepreneur who donated the funds to build it. Ambitious new universities like Duke and Chicago, similarly built with money from nineteenth-century industrialists, adopted neo-Gothic architecture to represent their status as places of serious learning. Their architectural choices in no way condemned their benefactors’ enterprises or the dynamism of turn-of-the-century America.
Nowadays, the sight of Gothic revival buildings suggests higher education, with no particular reference to medieval ideals. Only an allusion to scholarly or, in the case of churches, religious contemplation still attaches to this architecture. The form draws its meaning not from its original intent but from the activities that have come to surround it. If neo-Gothic architecture hadn’t suited the work of early-twentieth-century universities, and if those institutions hadn’t had the resources to erect lots of buildings during the height of its fashion, the style never would have come to represent elite scholarship in the public mind. It would have been nothing more than a passing nostalgic fad or an esoteric symbol of reactionary traditionalism. Experience, not predetermined ideology, gave the style its looser, more enduring, meaning.
Something similar is happening with the revival and spread of dreadlocks. First adopted as an outré religious symbol, the mark of the subversive, even scary Rastafarians (hence the “dread” that conservative Jamaicans attached to the style), dreadlocks became over time an emblem of reggae music, Afrocentrism, or nonsectarian (as opposed to Rastafarian) spirituality. Over the past decade, the increasing popularity of dreadlocks has eroded even this symbolism. Just as neo-Gothic buildings suggest only a general idea of “scholarship,” so dreadlocks increasingly connote only a general sense of creativity, individuality, and stylishness.
Casting and costume directors put dreadlocked actors in roles calling for cutting-edge intelligence (the clever lab tech, the early adopter) or romantic exoticism (the soap opera leading man). Like narrow-framed glasses and black clothing, dreadlocks are affected by writers, artists, and ad executives.
“Recently, I visited a large record company, and half the staff must have had them: graphic designers sitting behind computers, A&R people, account executives. Not so long ago, you couldn’t get a job if you had dreadlocks. Now you probably could run for mayor,” says an artist who originally adopted the style as a sign of “rebellion and respect.” The spread of dreadlocks, she laments, has removed much of the style’s meaning: “In American cities, so many different citizens from different cultures now carry dreads that some of the spiritual reasons behind them have been lost.”
That loss would be just fine with people who wear the style mostly for its looks and ease of care, not its symbolism. Writer Veronica Chambers is both amused and aggravated by the misunderstandings her locks engender: “Over the last eight years that I have worn dreadlocks, [the style] has conferred on me the following roles: rebel child, Rasta mama, Nubian princess, drug dealer, unemployed artist, rock star, world-famous comedienne and nature chick. None of which are really true. It has occurred to me on more than one occasion that my hair is a whole lot more interesting than I am.” Chambers is not “wild,” as some assume. She doesn’t smoke pot, and her tastes run to Calvin Klein, not dashikis. Yet she agrees with a friend who concluded, after Chambers surprised him in a straight bob wig, “Those dreads are really you.” However misleading their original symbolism, the locks have become integral to her identity, just as neo-Gothic architecture is a part of Princeton’s. Their value is personal and subjective but nonetheless genuine.
Chambers adopted her hairstyle because she was inspired by a photo of Alice Walker, “her locks flowing with all the majesty of a Southern American Cleopatra.” Walker, in turn, was inspired by Bob Marley and Peter Tosh, imagining “what a person dreamed about at night, with hair like that spread across the pillow. And, even more intriguing, what it would be like to make love to someone with hair on your head like that, and to be made love to by someone with hair on his or her head like that.” Whatever cultural significance dreadlocks may have had to Chambers and Walker, their initial reactions were not cognitive but visceral—beauty and sex. The meaning came after the pleasure, through a combination of cultural associations and personal experience.
The cultural significance was nevertheless important to the spread of dreadlocks, freeing people to wear dreads in the face of potential embarrassment. Consider the costs and benefits of adopting an unusual style. At first, someone who has no reason beyond taste to embrace a hitherto unpopular look won’t be likely to accept the risk of social ostracism (or the added expense). Only those with a strong ideological or religious commitment—those who want to make a statement—will incur the cost. These early adopters, however, spread the idea, attracting people who like the look and share some cultural affinity with those who’ve adopted it for ideological reasons. The style becomes a signal of solidarity, not only for those who embrace all the early adopters’ beliefs, but for those who admire their conviction, sympathize with some of their ideas, or want a sign of iconoclasm.
Less alienated from the general culture but still acting on conviction, this second wave of adopters can articulate a dissident, but more respectable, meaning for the style: an affirmation of black pride, for instance, rather than a belief that Haile Selassie is God. The new aesthetic brings praise from a small but growing group, diffusing the style further, even as it remains outside the mainstream. The look goes from culturally marginal—strange—to culturally nonconformist in a more positive sense. That’s one reason second-wave adopters are often artists whose social identities already have a romantic element of rebellion. This pattern holds true not only for personal appearance but for graphic design, architecture, and interiors.
Second adopters, in turn, reduce the risks of the look for those with less commitment to a particular meaning. (Later adopters may also drop some of a style’s more extreme or costly elements, creating neater dreadlocks or eliminating gargoyles.) Over time, as more and more people embrace the style, the cost of using it falls, while the pleasurable benefits remain. Remnants of the original symbolism may survive, creating confusion in some cases, adding value in others, but meaning becomes primarily personal and particular: Those dreads are you, not Those dreads are the authentic black experience.
In the age of look and feel, this aesthetic cycle appears to have accelerated, heightening the tension between meaning and pleasure and between social and personal meaning. As we see more aesthetic possibilities, and feel less pressure to conform to a single “correct” or consistent look, we turn formerly meaningful styles into sources of personal pleasure. At the same time, we seek to convey something about ourselves (or our products or places) not only through verbal declarations but through look and feel, creating, in the process, new connections between surface and substance, form and meaning. We want to show as well as tell, and the increasing variety of aesthetic options permits more complex or differentiated meanings, a more specific match between outward form and inward identity.