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In this chapter I take a brief first look at Occupy Wall Street, a key “case study” that I will keep coming back to throughout the book. Occupy succeeded in introducing a popularly resonant populist narrative about economic inequality and a rigged political system. How it did so is instructive and foreshadows key concepts that I will keep building upon in later chapters. However, Occupy also offers us lessons about what not to do; I will examine how Occupy turned inward in ways that severely limited its ability to take the popular outrage it had stirred up and mobilize it into a political force.

“The years in which the hegemony of neoliberalism was unchallenged have fortunately come to a close.”

—Chantal Mouffe28

November 15, 2011, 1:36 a.m. EST

A massive police force is presently evicting Liberty Square, home of Occupy Wall Street for the past two months and birthplace of the 99% movement that has spread across the country.

The raid started just after 1:00am. Supporters and allies are mobilizing throughout the city, presently converging at Foley Square. Supporters are also planning public actions for the coming days, including occupation actions.

Two months ago a few hundred New Yorkers set up an encampment at the doorstep of Wall Street. Since then, Occupy Wall Street has become a national and even international symbol—with similarly styled occupations popping up in cities and towns across America and around the world. The Occupy movement was inspired by similar occupations and uprisings such as those during Arab Spring, and in Spain, Greece, Italy, France, and the UK.

A growing popular movement has significantly altered the national narrative about our economy, our democracy, and our future. Americans are talking about the consolidation of wealth and power in our society, and the stranglehold that the top 1% have over our political system. More and more Americans are seeing the crises of our economy and our democracy as systemic problems that require collective action to remedy. More and more Americans are identifying as part of the 99%, and saying “enough!”

This burgeoning movement is more than a protest, more than an occupation, and more than any tactic. The “us” in the movement is far broader than those who are able to participate in physical occupation. The movement is everyone who sends supplies, everyone who talks to their friends and families about the underlying issues, everyone who takes some form of action to get involved in this civic process.

This moment is nothing short of America rediscovering the strength we hold when we come together as citizens to take action to address crises that impact us all.

Such a movement cannot be evicted. Some politicians may physically remove us from public spaces—our spaces—and, physically, they may succeed. But we are engaged in a battle over ideas. Our idea is that our political structures should serve us, the people—all of us, not just those who have amassed great wealth and power. We believe that is a highly popular idea, and that is why so many people have come so quickly to identify with Occupy Wall Street and the 99% movement. You cannot evict an idea whose time has come.

Most of us had been anticipating an imminent police raid of Zuccotti Park (a.k.a. Liberty Square), so I wrote the first draft of the above press statement about ten days before the eviction. Initially, the draft was received less than enthusiastically by some of my colleagues in the OWS Public Relations working group, so I decided to abandon it and repurpose some of the language for another article.29 However, as the eviction unfolded in the middle of that November night, members of the PR team asked me to adapt the draft as quickly as possible and post it to OccupyWallSt.org and blast it to the press.30 I raced over to Patrick Bruener’s apartment, we gave it a final look-over, and we hit “send.”31

Beyond the radical fringe

Two months earlier, I was living in Providence, Rhode Island, and I was quite skeptical about Occupy Wall Street. When I first read Adbusters magazine’s call for a Tahrir Square–style uprising in New York City’s financial district, the lack of appreciation for context annoyed me.32 Wall Street is not Tahrir Square. And though I was inspired by the Arab Spring, I didn’t think you could neatly transplant its tactics. Moreover, as Occupy Wall Street kicked off, it looked to me like the brave radicals initiating it were making the classic mistake of putting their counter-cultural foot forward first, thereby dooming the action to be locked onto a predictably lonely path where so many Americans who agreed with their populist sentiments would be inoculated against them as the messengers. It seemed to me to fit a pattern I had long been critical of, where self-selecting “activists” connect with each other at the expense of connecting with the broader society. A week into Occupy Wall Street, I even wrote a post for my blog with this critique titled, Occupy Wall Street: Small Convergence of a Radical Fringe.33

That was the experienced grassroots organizer in me. That’s the thing about experience. When you hear about an idea, you can instantly foresee a million things that could go wrong. And when your concerns repeatedly play out, it is easy to grow a little cynical and even a little bitter. It is easy to forget that revolutionary moments require an ingredient that you may now be running low on: a drive that once consumed you, but now pulses through the veins and brains of people younger than yourself, whom you are tempted to condescendingly dismiss as politically naïve. Can’t they see that to mobilize masses of people, you need more than a militant call to action and a Twitter account? Sure, just about everyone was furious with Wall Street, but turning latent discontent into coordinated collective action requires strategies to organize people and build alliances, and an appreciation for context.

Sometimes what you really want is to be proven wrong. That is how I started to feel when the occupation of Zuccotti Park persisted and the story started to significantly break into the mainstream media cycle; when labor unions and longstanding community organizations started to endorse and to plan actions under the new frameworks of “occupy” and “we are the 99%”; when GOP strategist Frank Luntz said he was “frightened to death”34 of the effort and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor decried the “growing mob”35 of Wall Street protesters, while House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi expressed her support,36 and the New York Times also endorsed the protest.37

Overnight, it seemed, a new political force had emerged; one that had the potential to frame the national debate and finally create popular pressure—a counterforce to the formidable power of capital. Despite my doubts, the thing had started to go big.

Grassroots movements for change are more often than not rife with all kinds of clumsy missteps. Thankfully the concerns that I was stuck on were not enough to stop the rapid growth of this audacious new movement. I realized that I myself had to get unstuck. If I were to wait for the perfect movement—one that I had no critiques of—I would wait forever. History would pass me by.

I heard that my friends Beka Economopoulos, Brooke Lehman, and Han Shan were involved, and I called them up. Then I freed up ten days from my schedule and took the train from Providence to New York City.

Ten days turned into the better part of a year.

Occupation as tactic and as symbol

By the time I arrived, Occupy Wall Street had already broken into the mainstream media and was profoundly changing the national narrative about wealth, power, and democracy in the United States. Occupy’s initial success in recalibrating the mainstream discourse about politics and the economy is remarkable. It was as if a 30-year spell had suddenly been lifted, as a new “common sense” was unveiled about what is at stake and who is to blame. It behooves us to retrospectively examine why this particular tactic of occupation struck such a nerve with so many Americans and became such a powerful catalyzing symbol. To do so, we have to make a distinction between Occupy’s broad audience and its core actors, and between the meanings that resonated popularly and the meanings that the physical occupation held for the dedicated people who were on the ground occupying. Zuccotti Park was home to a thriving civic space, with ongoing dialogues and debates, a public library, a kitchen, live music, General Assemblies, more meetings than you can imagine, and all varieties of high-energy, creative activities. In this sense, occupation was more than just a tactic. Many participants were consciously prefiguring the kind of society they wanted to live in.38

But it was also a tactic. A tactic is basically an action taken with the intention of achieving a particular goal, or at least moving toward it. In a long-term struggle, a tactic is better understood as one move among many in an epic game of chess (with the caveat that the powerful and the challengers are in no sense evenly matched). A successful tactic is one that sets us up to eventually achieve gains that we are not presently positioned to win. As Brazilian educator Paulo Freire asked, “What can we do now in order to be able to do tomorrow what we are unable to do today?”39 Thus, a tactic is a kind of stepping stone.

By this definition, the primary tactic of Occupy Wall Street (physical occupation of public space) could be considered enormously successful. We subverted the decades-old hegemonic conservative narrative about our economy and our democracy with a different moral narrative about social justice and real democratic participation. As a result, we are arguably better positioned than before to make bold demands, as we can now credibly claim that our values are popular—even that they are common sense—and connected to a substantial social base. With a new broadly resonant vocabulary, we are now better positioned to organize popular social bases to take more powerful political action. Such a shift in the constellation of popular meanings is among the central operations required in a long-term hegemonic struggle.

I want to suggest that the primary reason the tactic of occupation resonated so far and wide is because it served as a symbol about standing up to powerful elites on their own doorstep. To most sympathizers, the “occupy” in “Occupy Wall Street” essentially stood in for the F word. Millions of Americans had been waiting for someone or something to stand up to Wall Street, the big banks, the mega-corporations, and the political elite. Then one day, a relatively small crew of audacious and persistent New Yorkers became the catalyzing symbol of defiance we had been waiting for.

Thus, Occupy Wall Street served as something of a floating signifier, amorphous enough for many different kinds of people to connect with and to see their values and hopes within the symbol.40 Such ambiguous symbols are characteristic of popular challenger alignments. Many objects can serve as the catalyzing symbol, including actions (e.g., the occupation of Tahrir Square or of the Wisconsin State Capitol), individual politicians (quintessentially Juan Perón in Argentina), or even constructed brands (e.g., the “Tea Party”). As these examples suggest, this phenomenon can be seen in all kinds of political alignments, across the ideological spectrum. In all cases though, a good degree of ambiguity is necessary if the symbol is to catalyze a broad alignment. If the symbol’s meaning becomes too particular—too associated with any one current or group within the alignment—it risks losing its powerfully broad appeal.

It is important to note that although the signifier is floating (i.e., not peg-able), it is not empty of content. First of all, it has to feel meaningful enough to resonate. Furthermore, different symbols tend to pull in different directions (depending partly on the strength of the organization and “ground game” of those who are pushing or pulling them). Candidate Barack Obama as floating signifier, for example, pulled a lot of grassroots energy into what has in many ways turned out to be an establishment-reinforcing direction. Occupy Wall Street as floating signifier, on the other hand, pulled—at least initially—both popular and some establishment forces in the direction of the fired-up, social justice–­oriented grassroots movement, intent on systemic change.41

When a challenger social movement hits upon such a catalyzing symbol, it’s like striking gold. One might even argue that broad political alignments are constituted in the act of finding their floating signifier. Hitherto disparate groups suddenly congeal into a powerful aligned force. Momentum is on their side and things that seemed impossible only yesterday become visible on the horizon.

It is important to recognize a few things, then, about our relationship to the tactic of physical occupation during Occupy Wall Street’s brief run:

1 It accomplished more than any of us really imagined it would have.

2 A significant part of the tactic’s political value was in serving as a popular defiant symbol that shifted prevailing meanings in the culture.

3 It was incredibly resource-intensive to maintain.

4 The tactic was not going to serve us forever. Indeed, its utility was waning prior to our eviction.

5 Moving forward in the years ahead, we will have to come up with other popular expressions of the values and hopes that OWS brought to the surface.

Here it becomes important to distinguish between our tactics, our message, and our movement. Of these three, our tactics should be the thing we are least attached to. In oppositional struggle, it is critical to maintain the initiative; to keep one’s opponents in a reactive state. This is not accomplished by growing overly attached to any particular tactic—no matter how well it worked the first time—and thereby doing exactly what our opponents expect us to do. Of course, it is a lot easier to conceptualize the need to be innovative and to keep our opponents on their toes than to actually come up with the right thing at the ripe moment to make it so. Moreover, it is wrongheaded to get caught up in the elusive search for the perfect silver bullet tactic. Movements are, more than anything else, about people. To build a movement is to listen to people, to read the moment well, and to navigate a course that over time inspires whole swaths of society to identify with the aims of the movement, to buy in, and to take collective action.

The “Occupy” in Occupy Wall Street was the tactic that launched a movement for social justice and real democracy onto center stage in the United States, even if ephemerally. It served as the initial catalyzing symbol. Hopefully ten or twenty years from now, when we look back at all we have accomplished together, we will credit this mobilization as a critical moment that helped to spark and then build a longer-term movement. However, when we fail to find other successful tactics—and other popular expressions of the movement’s values—we are pronounced dead as soon as the initial tactic fades. Of course, most successful movements are first pronounced dead many times over. Still, this challenge of popular mobilization remains looming before us. Fortunately, Occupy Wall Street—and the tactic of occupation—was neither the primary message nor the movement itself.

And, fortunately, we do not have to reinvent the movement’s message from scratch, come the next rounds. What emerged in tandem with the deployment of the captivating tactic of occupation was the compelling message that “We are the 99%!” We might well consider this among our core messages in a new movement era. The framework of the 99% accomplishes a number of important feats that it is important to explicitly note:

 The 99% frames the consolidation of wealth and political power in our society—the central grievance of the Occupy movement and a central crisis of our times.

 The 99% frames a class struggle in a way that puts “the one percent” on the defensive (whereas the common accusation of “class warfare” had somehow tended to put a lot of people in the middle on the defensive).

 The 99% casts an extraordinarily broad net for who is invited to join the movement. Most everyone is encouraged to see their aspirations tied to a much bigger public. Thus it frames a nearly limitless growth trajectory for the movement.

The meme of the 99% is a real winner. Its message and framework may prove better at helping us “weather the winter” than any single tactic could. It points the way towards a necessary expansion. It encourages us to not just act on behalf of, but alongside, “the 99%”; to look beyond the forces already in motion, to activate potential energy, to articulate a moral political narrative, and to claim and contest our culture and our future.

Of course, many critics from the left and from the academy have taken issue with the meme of the 99%, arguing that it poses a false unity that obfuscates important heterogeneity and power concentrations within an absurdly broad category. Analytically, they are of course correct, but these critics neglect to consider this framing as a power move—what Pierre Bourdieu might call a “worldmaking” operation. Here again is a classic example of the academic error of “uncritically attribut[ing] political efficacy to textual critique.”42 While we often think of elites and the already powerful as the forces that construct and wield “universality” as a tool in service of their (particular) power and privilege, I will argue throughout this book that it is just as necessary for underdog challengers to articulate differently framed “universalities,” even if such operations are rife with additional moral and strategic dilemmas. As such, I embrace “the 99%” for strategic reasons and assert that its ambiguity is necessary for the construction of an alternative hegemonic alignment. That the scope of such universalizing rhetorical moves can be expanded by subsequent movements (notably Black Lives Matter) does not negate the political value of the former move.

Five years after the gathering at Zuccotti Park was disbanded, it is abundantly clear that a still-emerging progressive political alignment has indeed taken the core of its populist language from Occupy Wall Street. The unexpected popularity of self-identified democratic socialist Bernie Sanders—unexpected by the punditry, but also by many in the left—in his campaign for the presidency is at this point probably the most notable next manifestation of the nascent alignment.

Holding up a mirror

“As we see our face, figure, and dress in the glass…so in imagination we perceive in another’s mind some thought of our appearance, manners, aims, deeds, character, friends, and so on, and are variously affected by it. A self-idea of this sort seems to have three principal elements: the imagination of our appearance to the other person; the imagination of his judgment of that appearance, and some sort of self-feeling, such as pride or mortification…The thing that moves us to pride or shame is not the mere mechanical reflection of ourselves, but an imputed sentiment, the imagined effect of this reflection upon another’s mind.”

—Charles Cooley, The Looking Glass Self43

Let us imagine a particular group imagining itself through the reflection of the perceptions of other groups or of the larger society—through the others’ impressions, associated meanings, and stereotypes about the particular group. We can also imagine the reverse: the larger society glimpsing something of itself in the reflection of a particular group (that is contained within itself). In this way, we can conceive of a powerful challenger movement as “holding up a mirror” in which society recognizes its own reflection. Society sees parts of itself that had escaped its conscious gaze, and, thereby, society re-imagines itself.

Sociologist George Mead discussed how particular “individuals stand out as symbolic. They represent, in their personal relationships, a new order, and then become representative of the community as it might exist if it were fully developed along the lines that they had started.”44 If we substitute Mead’s “individual” with an individuated collective actor, and substitute “the community” with society, we can conceptualize how Occupy Wall Street became symbolically representative of society “as it might exist if it were fully developed along the lines” that Occupy started. Thus, Occupy Wall Street held up a mirror and we recognized ourselves in the reflection—not just we the self-selecting individuals who physically took the park and the streets in New York’s financial district; “America” itself saw itself in this mirror, saw its own condition: saw the level of economic inequality and political disenfranchisement it had come to tolerate. We might compare it to waking up ten years after a traumatizing disaster, catching a glimpse of oneself in the mirror, and finally seeing oneself clearly again; reconnecting with the hint of one’s precious long-lost soul in a glimmer in one’s own eyes, after having identified for so long with the shell one had become; like a feeling of returned wholeness after years of fragmentation and anomie.45 In that reflection were Wall Street and capitalism and the power they had attained over our material and moral universe. In that reflection were the failures of our political representatives to represent public interests and even, in their dominant discourse, to represent a recognizable picture of most people’s reality. In that reflection was a lack of popular collective power. And in that reflection was an intuitive ringing truth; that, yes, we are the 99%, a re-imagined public ready to unify and claim our share.

In a sense then, Occupy Wall Street provided the mirror for a new unification to recognize itself as a “community” with shared interests, as a revived public. At the center of that reflection of a broader community, there was the core, which we might call Occupy Proper: those who were most active, explicitly as part of OWS, and who therefore felt intense ownership and identification with the named group. Occupy Proper operated as a symbol and the signifier of the very existence of the larger unification, the newly re-imagined community. The imagined community, however, was far larger than Occupy Proper.46 Its projection included, in a sense, all of America—even the “one percent,” insofar as Occupy’s signature slogan, “We are the 99%!” was a new class-conscious framing of the whole national public, including the class antagonism within it.

However, Occupy Proper also saw itself distinctly individuated in the mirror. And it sometimes mistook itself and its bounds for the whole community of concern, rather than seeing itself as a symbol and special agent in the service of a much larger social unification. This smaller individuated core, in this narrower reading of the mirror, was comprised of those who physically occupied and participated in the occupations’ recognized upkeep and projects. If the boundaries of such a core were to become too clearly delineated, it would lose its ability to activate and influence the direction of a larger movement. To go in this self-enclosing direction, its growth trajectory would have to rely only on bringing more people into the core itself, through inspiration, self-selection, and replication (i.e., occupying more public parks). More and more individuals would join Occupy—and assimilate into its distinctive subculture—until it somehow reached a critical mass. Many occupiers implicitly believed this to be the path to scaled growth. America could join Occupy Proper, but only entirely on the latter’s own terms.

The problem with this smaller reading of the mirror is that as soon as the symbol circumscribes itself as a neatly bounded object unto itself, it ceases to be the signifier of a larger unification. It loses its magical properties and its symbolic power. It shrinks and is distorted into an other. As an other, it loses its power to name and catalyze the larger unification. The social fragments that were in the process of becoming an ascendant political unification instead become inoculated against the initial catalyzing agent, Occupy Proper (i.e., those dirty hippies in the park who won’t stop drumming). The mirror that the nascent unification caught a glimpse of itself in becomes a picture of a stranger.

The moment the newly framed unification caught a glimpse of itself in the mirror was the same moment that constituted Occupy Wall Street’s initial success. At this moment, the core of the embryonic movement faced its first test of maturity. For a fleeting moment—perhaps two months—it seemed as if sun, moon, and stars orbited around the movement and its intervention. Incredible attention focused on the individuals who occupied—i.e., Occupy Proper. Paradoxically, to succeed politically, we had to use the attention directed at us to shift attention to a broader public, i.e., to our new and prescient articulation of unification: a public-as-protagonist in an unfolding epoch. We had to avoid staring too much at our own narrow reflection in the mirror—the trap of narcissism—and becoming unwitting accomplices to our opponents’ playbook one-two punch: first, to brand us as special (i.e., as a particular; an other) and then as especially malignant, thereby hindering our ability to catalyze a larger force, by inoculating enough of the public against us.

The movement’s active core had to remain in the story, but as a popular symbol of the values and aspirations of many different sorts of people. Like a guest at a party who suddenly finds herself at the center of everyone’s attention and praise, a nascent movement has to resist talking on and on about herself or allowing the conversation to stay focused on her personally. Her presence may be captivating and novel at first, but soon the other guests will grow bored. Instead, she uses her soapbox to strategically draw attention to other situations, stories, and symbols; situations, stories, and symbols that draw additional scrutiny to her opponents and to the crises she has eloquently named. She speaks not about herself but directly to the identification her ­audience feels with her cause. She invites that grain of awakening identification to grow. She invites her audience to become the historical actor, the protagonist. She seeks to invent new flashpoints, new moments, featuring new (aligned) actors stepping into history. She lowers the bar for entry and builds many on-ramps. If she is very good, her audience will have taken its first step forward without even realizing, in order to lean in to hear her.

Otherization

Immediately following Occupy Wall Street’s inauguration, its opponents mounted a public relations offensive to negatively brand the burgeoning movement. They attempted to individuate, caricaturize, and otherize the visible actors—the occupiers—in order to inoculate more Americans against identifying with a larger unification—the 99%—and keep them from joining or aligning with the movement. We had to counter this attempt by projecting ourselves as symbolic of a larger unification. Occupy Wall Street served as a powerful floating signifier of a newly imagined unification, and so its opponents predictably sought to nail down the signifier; to fill its positive ambiguous contents with negative stereotypes about an otherized Occupy Proper (i.e., stinky counter-cultural types who drummed all night and defecated on neighbors’ doorsteps).

When Mayor Bloomberg attempted to “clean Zuccotti Park” on October 14, 2011, he was making the first move in what became a ceaseless character assassination campaign. Bloomberg’s talk of “cleaning” was an attempt to frame occupiers as dirty and to use sanitation as a ruse to evict us from Zuccotti Park for seemingly non-political reasons. However, in a jujitsu move, we used the mayor’s ploy to catalyze the broadest visible political support the movement had seen to date. Recognizing Bloomberg’s cleaning attempt for the threat of eviction it was, local and national allied organizations called upon their members to flood the park. By six o’clock on the morning of the attempted cleaning/eviction, the crowd had swelled to several thousand. By 6:30am the deputy mayor had announced that the “cleanup” was off. The whole episode served as free publicity for a rally at Times Square that had already been planned for the next day (as part of a Global Day of Action). There, tens of thousands of New Yorkers joined together for one of Occupy Wall Street’s largest public actions.

Bloomberg and other opponents sought to portray the movement as a particular kind of person doing a particular thing (e.g., “dirty hippies”), rather than a popular response to a common crisis. To counter this strategy, movement organizers sought to bring more kinds of people, visibly engaged in more kinds of things, into the movement. We sought to make and portray the nascent movement as more than a protest, more than an occupation, more than any particular tactic, and more than any one particular type of person. Within its first few months, the movement did indeed become far broader than those who were able to participate in physical occupation. Occupy Wall Street included people like Elora and Monte in rural West Virginia who sent hand-knit hats to occupiers at Zuccotti. It was 69-year-old retired Iowa public school teacher Judy Lonning who attended weekly Saturday marches in Des Moines. It was Nellie Bailey, who helped to organize the Occupy Harlem Mobilization. It was Michael Ellick and other religious leaders who brought Occupy Faith to their congregations. It was Selena Coppa and Joe Carter, who marched in formation to the New York Stock Exchange with 40 fellow “Veterans of the 99%.” The boundaries of Occupy Wall Street were intentionally expanded and blurred. Occupy was everyone who took some kind of action to confront the democratic and economic crises initially named by a few hundred defiant occupiers in New York City’s financial district.

Thus, the needed expansion that Occupy was criticized for lacking was not entirely absent—not even close. But it is certainly the case that not enough of Occupy’s core was oriented toward the task of scaling up these fits and starts.

Occupy fashion

Those of us who worked intentionally to make Occupy Wall Street represent a broader unification had to navigate more than just our opponents’ efforts to otherize the movement; we also had to navigate the movement’s own internal tendencies toward self-­enclosure. I have referred to Occupy Proper, which until now has been my own private moniker for the tendency amongst a core of participants to own, protect, and clearly delineate Occupy’s boundaries. This tendency wrapped itself in ideological rationales, especially the imperative to keep “liberal reformists” from co-­opting the radical movement. My intent here is not to dismiss wariness of the possibility of such cooption outright, but instead to assert that, regardless of the merit of such rationales, another force drove this wariness as well: the force of individuation itself.

To apprehend how this force or pattern played out in Occupy Wall Street, let us momentarily suspend judgment about Occupy’s ideological content and look at the movement through a lens of fashion. Many of the movement’s core participants signaled belonging in the new group by simultaneously signaling difference, defection, disobedience, or rebellion from aspects of the status quo. It may be useful to consider such signaling behaviors as analogous, at least, to how fashion functions. Fashion’s usefulness as a lens is evidenced by the fact that such signaling often manifested most visibly in the literal form of fashion—i.e., clothing, styles, and other external adornment—which any casual visitor to Zuccotti Park could corroborate.

It is hardly novel for political expression and fashion to blend together. Georg Simmel spoke of an “increased power of fashion” that “has overstepped the bounds of its original domain, which comprised only personal externals, and has acquired an increasing influence over taste, over theoretical convictions, and even over the moral foundations of life.”47 One might object that Occupy Wall Street was attempting to do the opposite of what fashion does; that fashion gravitates toward that which is considered elegant or refined, in constant imitation of the upper strata of society, while Occupy was oriented in the opposite direction.48 Occupy’s oppositional orientation may have, indeed, changed the content and kinds of expressions of fashion, but it does not negate that the same essential form or pattern of fashion was at work. Simmel’s description of “club-haters organiz[ing] themselves into a club” is apt:

…it becomes evident that the same combination which extreme obedience to fashion acquires can be won also by opposition to it… If obedience to fashion consists in imitation of such an example, conscious neglect of fashion represents similar imitation, but under an inverse sign… Indeed, it occasionally happens that it becomes fashionable in whole bodies of a large class to depart altogether from the standards set by fashion. This constitutes a most curious social-psychological complication, in which the tendency towards individual conspicuousness primarily rests content with a mere inversion of the social imitation and secondly draws in strength from approximation to a similarly characterized narrower circle.49