Hipster Camo: In The Woods Together
When fashion hides in plain sight, what is it we’re really trying to blend into?
Pop Quiz:
You see some young homie on the street rocking a RealTree camouflage hat, denim jacket, plain white tee, Carhart dungarees and leather work boots.
Are they:
In the heart of Rural America, going about their business?
Or..
In the heart of Brooklyn, doing the same?
It’s a real stumper these days, huh?
The presently on-trend ubiquity of woodland camouflage feels like the final expression of an irony that’s never been lost on your humble Curemeister.
(Who has always, to some extent, felt like a redneck in the city and a hipster back home in the South.)
So for years now, the fact that rocking Carhartt’s and draining PBR tallboys will earn a nod of approval in a fishing camp in the Blue Ridge Mountains and at the bar in Brooklyn has been a source of quiet amusement over here.
But it was at a concert in Fort Greene last year, when every attendee looked like some kind of downtown ranch hand, that we saw some kind of cultural circle close.
Seriously though.
What has drawn the cultural urban vanguard to the practical rusticity of the nation’s heartland?
Perhaps then, it’s worth unpacking whether this is some kind of meta-ironic cool-kid cosplay of Rural America…or is it the sincere expression of an unforeseen alignment between two beating hearts of American identity?
Let’s start with some theories we’ve heard on the airwaves lately.
One is that the popularity of Yellowstone jumpstarted this particular trend. Another posits that it’s the result of a growing paranoiac train in American culture and the concurrent desire to blend in amongst the chaos. We’ve heard it described as peak gorpcore, which, for the blissfully unaware, is a term for functional outdoor gear being re-purposed as cool streetwear. Some say it’s just another example of the moment’s nostalgic zeitgeist, a callback to the grunge camo of the 1990s, (so are so hot right now). A neo-transcendentalist view of the camo-trend might see it as an expression of affinity with a natural world under siege, with its photo-realistic patterns of forest and field.
These are all pretty reasonable explanations. And very possibly all play a role in the ascendance of RealTree Edge camo (though we’ve always been bigger fans of RealTree Max-4 Waterfowl pattern) on the streets.
But in our probably incorrect take, there’s something larger and weirder at play here. Because we’re in a cultural moment that rejects any kind of certainty or clear categorization.
We’re politically scrambled and emotionally adrift, living through a time when institutions feel shaky at best. Once stable norms are evaporating, the economy’s weird as hell and our future feels less certain than ever.
We’re living in the spin cycle, and no one’s quite sure what side of up we’re heading toward.
The moment, in short, feels very groundless.
In her essay on this very topic, Hiding In Plain Sight, the writer Isabel Slone affirms camo-chic as the preeminent response to the cultural moment. In her view, its popularity is an expression of the urban-dwellers desire to blend into an America they see as hostile. A preparation for unknown circumstances, replete with the ability to blend in anywhere.
And that is also probably partly true. America is in a hostile place. There is much and heavy darkness afoot in the nation. Dangerous things are happening quickly. People are worried about where to go and what to do when things go bad. And understandably so.
But in our take, there’s something else afoot here.
The current loving-on of camouflage is a kind of post-ironic form of desire for a different kind of world. A kind of nostalgia for a life unlived.
Not necessarily a life of tree-stands and the messy business of field-dressing but a grounded life. It is, in our view, to a desire not to disappear, but to live in a world that is simpler and clearer and realer.
It’s a kind of chainsaw cottage-core, if you will.
Camo, then becomes a symbol not for toxic individuality but its positive relative: personal agency and resilience in a world that seems bent on stripping our agency from us, on shoe-horning us into metricized boxes of production and consumption. It speaks to a longing for connection with the dirt and bushes and primitive stuff of human life--with all their intonations of violence and animal-adjacent messiness--in a world that feels ever less human.
It’s a recognition that all of us--no matter where we are or what we believe--are creeping through the thickety dark woods of our strange era.
Waiting on the clarity of a new dawn.
And wondering what strangeness it will bring.
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