Haha, Western culture is exhausted.
As someone who lives in the one of the world's cultural peripheries I approach this with the slack-jawed expression of the country bumpkin hearing about the last fad from the capital; still, this whole thing about western culture eating itself at increasingly rapid rates with increasingly diminishing returns is fascinating to watch. On the purely economical side, a friend of mine remarked that it could as well be that young americans and money aren't in talking terms these days and may have found a way to reconcile budgetary constraints with self-expression (I don't know about that). And it's not that I don't agree in part with some of the reasoning behind this thing (like, I also am a bit annoyed by the idea that when I enter a room my clothes will have a fuck*ng class war for supremacy with the other clothes in the room), but I don't think that the concrete manifestation of that should look so fuck*ng grubby, I can't do it. The guy saying the other day he went out with a fanny pack is just *begging* for a box in the ear.