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September 26, 2007
"prole creep"
Just hearing that someone came up with a concept called “prole creep” has got my mind racing.
Without having read anything about it, I can think of several examples.
Tattoos, for one. Didn’t those originate with sailors getting them in Polynesia, and then bringing the concept back to Europe and America?
Necklaces for men?
George H. W. Bush producing George W. Bush?
UPDATE: Jewelry on children. (Especially pierced ears on babies.)
UPDATE: The wearing of baseball caps/trucker hats, of course.
UPDATE: Publicly revealing personal details about one's life. Via "blogs", for example.
UPDATE: Weightlifting.
UPDATE: Wearing sweatpants/tracksuits while not exercising.
Posted by eric at September 26, 2007 09:26 AM
Comments
Prole creep goes even deeper with the Bushes. I remember listening distractedly to an NPR political program back in 87 and thinking, why are they interviewing Jack Nicholson about the presidential race? And then realizing that the interviewee was actually mild-mannered gentleman spook GHWB, Prescott Bush's preppy son, and that he had apparently taken very seriously some flack's advice to butch it up à la Reagan.
As a general phenomenon, prole creep has to be mass media related.
Posted by: robert at September 26, 2007 10:11 AM
Is this the reverse of the concept by which things get passed down the class scale? We always called it "the classes, the asses, the masses". Things like gays being the first to manscape, then the frat boys, then every nascar guy at wal-mart.
Posted by: Rick at September 26, 2007 10:37 AM
I guess "If there is hope, it lies in the proles" needs to be revisited and revised.
Posted by: Moncrief! at September 26, 2007 12:32 PM
But from which direction did things like ironically tilted trucker caps come? $6 pints of Pabst blue ribbon? Sleeveless Megadeth tees on Castro?
(Yes, fashion annoyed me in 2003.)
Posted by: Huntington at September 26, 2007 12:41 PM
The fetish-like interest in truckers in the 1970s (hats, "Convoy" song, CB radios, the show with the orangatang). My father was a truck driver. Not glamorous or sexy at all.
Posted by: homer at September 26, 2007 01:00 PM
Fun fact: This page is now the second entry when one googles "prole creep."
Posted by: Moncrief! at September 26, 2007 01:32 PM
Didn't "prole creep" just used to be called "slumming"? Or does "prole creep" connote a shift in perception of "slumming" behavior whereby the fashion/practice in question is actually elevated in status?
I thought pierced ears on babies was purely "Latina Creep".
I'd argue that the definitive and original "prole creep" was allowing the descendants of non-WASPs to move into the suburbs (or the "good neighborhoods"), get college educations, and enter "professions."
Posted by: Joe at September 26, 2007 02:20 PM
Joe:
Allowing the descendants of non-WASPs to move into the suburbs is not prole creep. It's more the opposite.
Prole creep evidently refers to when cultural characteristics of lower or "working" class people get adopted by the middle classes (and to a lesser extent, upper classes, who I think have always been more willing to adopt lower class traits, being in a more secure position).
Tattoos are the best example, I think, along with how everyone in southern England now has a quasi-Cockney accent.
Posted by: Eric at September 26, 2007 02:34 PM
More possible examples:
- Women's underwear as outerwear
- The "wifebeater"
- For that matter, most modern "casual" apparel
- All practices associated with urban "bohemia" (cf. your posts on Status Anxiety)
- Premarital sex
- The pickup truck
- Most traits associated with the modern "butch" gay man (except for the cupboard full of Kiehl's product)
I think I was trying to say that maybe "non-WASP creep" may have helped precipitate a high degree of "prole creep" in the last 50 years.
Posted by: Joe at September 26, 2007 03:00 PM
I have to disagree with premarital sex, Joe. I think that spans all classes through all of history.
Posted by: Huntington at September 26, 2007 03:16 PM
i read about estuary accents on wikipedia- that is some crazy shit. although it's much more fun to read about scouse or blacklands dialects and then try to approximate the phonemes using the example words.
Posted by: whitney at September 26, 2007 03:32 PM
Are you disputing that it's not more prevalent now among all classes than it was among Gilded Age young ladies or the contemporaries of Hildegard von Bingen?
Posted by: Joe at September 26, 2007 03:34 PM
More prevalent now, perhaps, but there was a lot of it going on then both among the factory girls and the debutantes, whereas Lily Bart could never have worn blue jeans.
Posted by: Huntington at September 26, 2007 04:19 PM
In Tucson in the 1870s, approximately one quarter of births were considered illegitimate (the Catholic baptism records do not identify the father). Two of my eight great great grandparents in the 1870s-1880s in Michigan had to get married after the woman got pregnant. I think there was a lot more premarital sex going on in the past than is generally recognized.
Posted by: homer at September 26, 2007 11:33 PM
Public male shirtlessness. Sometimes, the only markers between proles and inverts are muscle mass and presence/absence of neck tattoos.
Posted by: Joe Clark at September 27, 2007 01:02 AM
The term originated as "prole drift" and its actually referring to the other direction--the style of the upper class drifting down, so that it becomes lower class. Like white limousines, Gucci, the Hamptons, and cruises. If it's the other way around, it's simply irony. Which is really just the mocking of the lower class.
Posted by: ted at September 27, 2007 02:13 AM
Ted:
Interesting:
Yet if the "prole creep" mentioned in the other wikipedia article is just someone's erroneous addition, it still seems to be a real phenomenon.
And I don't think it's mocking. People don't get tattoos to mock working class people.
Although I'm not so sure about the PBR thing. Maybe things things start as ironic mocking.
Posted by: Eric at September 27, 2007 08:25 AM
What about:
Denims (from Levi Strauss to $330/pair indie design names)
Skateboarder fasion
We seem to miss discussing music-related prole creep....
Posted by: jason at September 27, 2007 10:10 AM
Sorry for threadjacking here on a putative example of prole creep (which I originally meant in a tongue-in-cheek way), but....
Huntington, I defy you to produce evidence, literary or historical, that shows there was "a lot" of premarital sex going on among the equivalent of "debutantes" (i.e., the highest economic/social classes) in, say, Europe/America from 1500-1914? Are you saying it would have been more likely for Lily Bart to have sex than to wear pants?
I agree with Homer that there was "a lot more [of it] than generally recognized" (and I'm not saying there wasn't any), but I would still argue that historically (at least for women in a Eurocentric context) premarital sex was typically way, way more "prole" than "posh."
H, maybe we should pick up a copy of this...
Posted by: Joe at September 27, 2007 12:08 PM
tanning.
fast food.
florida.
tv
Posted by: aka frank at September 27, 2007 12:35 PM
Where does it creep to? Oblivion.
The example of wearing baseball cap backward seems to have ceased in the recent decade.
Posted by: jason at September 27, 2007 04:00 PM
I'm pretty sure Lily Allen fits in here somewhere.
I'm also pretty sure that the frequency of premarital sex among the upper classes 100 years ago (for example) cannot be accurately "proven." If premarital sex was as much of a taboo activity as pedophilia is now (let's assume that's a roughly decent comparison for the sake of argument), then those participating in it, nearly all of them at least, didn't advertise or admit to that fact.
Posted by: Moncrief! at September 27, 2007 04:57 PM
Bling bling
Soccer stars
Soccer wives of the Posh Beckham variety
Chefs as celebrities
Reality series
Flip flops
Posted by: max at September 27, 2007 05:44 PM
Drift and/or creep, it certainly is real. Totes!
Oh, I don't think tattoos are always mocking, not consciously anyway. But it many cases, I think it's simply class drag, in the sense that some people get tattoos so that they look like sailors, mechanics, or Hell's Angels. Or they wear Carhardt to look like construction workers. Like the kids wore jeans in the 1950s. Drag is not always mocking, not in the Ha-ha-ha-look-at-you way, but there are all sorts of complex and not-always-nice power things going on when someone dresses "down" to feel sexy or authentic or dirty. And whatnot. I'm sure there's some dissertation on it floating around.
Posted by: ted at September 27, 2007 10:35 PM
Blue jeans are the perfect prole creep example.
Posted by: Donald at September 28, 2007 10:13 AM
Marie Antoinette playing shepherdess at Petite Trianon.
Commodus in staged gladitorial combats.
Caligula dressed up as a common soldier (hence his name "Little Boots")
"Slumming" in Harlem in the 1930s
Nothing new here.
Posted by: hell's kitchen guy at September 28, 2007 10:31 AM
You are now famous in a way I think might sicken you: http://gawker.com/news/the-more-you-know/-304703.php
Posted by: Justin at September 28, 2007 10:39 AM
Uhh, the epitome of 'prole creep:' the modern day Liberal (big L, not little el). Have you ever seen any group so hopelessly lost on the path to what they *think* pretentiousness is? Seriously, read some real literature, buy some clothes from a respectable brand, and learn to appreciate good food and wine. The stuff you're coming up with now is NOT as good as you think it is! It's an American version of the Chav!
At least NASCAR Dads know they're rednecks.
Posted by: Mike Jonze at September 28, 2007 10:47 AM
i was a prole drifter. so bored with my wasp existence, in highschool i donned fake nails, tanned, listened to 'black music', got a tattoo and hung out with townies from a blue collar town nearby. later i went latin, moved to miami, listened to reggaeton, and dated all wrong. now i accept who i am, but i am still bored.
rich kids envy and adopt the cultures of poor kids becuase, for the most part, they are more original/interesting. plus it helps us feel less guilty for all that we have.
Posted by: guilty at September 28, 2007 03:34 PM
"guilty," that refusal to use capital letters in writing thing is so fucking over I can't even tell you. It's really, really over.
Posted by: Michel at September 28, 2007 08:24 PM
I lift weights rather un-ironically I like to think.
Posted by: David at September 30, 2007 06:28 PM
Michel:
Hmm, from a purely visual/aesthetic point of view, I've always found lower case/small letters to be so much more elegant. There's just something a tad vulgar about UPPERCASE (SEE WHAT I MEAN?). Using lower case, to me, is the graphic equivalent of speaking in a hushed tone, which can be very sexy.
Posted by: max at October 2, 2007 02:48 AM
i completely agree with max. i'm getting hard just typing like this.
Posted by: Jack at October 10, 2007 08:52 AM