Astral Codex Ten

barberpole model of fashion

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barberpole model of fashion

Article

barberpole model of fashion is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between May 12, 2021 and September 25, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “and the barberpole model of fashion”; “I ended up near the top of the barberpole model of fashion”; “It’s the Barberpole Model Of Fashion all over again”. It most often appears alongside 1950s, 1950s American consensus, 1990s.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 3
  • Issue count: 3
  • First seen: May 12, 2021
  • Last seen: September 25, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Theses On The Current Moment
May 12, 2021 · Original source
I still don't have a great sense for how 1950s-era conformity and repression failed, but my best guess is something like a respectability cascade and the barberpole model of fashion. The most interesting intellectuals of the era became disillusioned with the consensus, a few halting and dangerous attempts to speak up produced common knowledge of this, and the new set of ideas spread outward. First a few mad geniuses, then the coolest artists and writers, then the brightest academics, then journalists, then well-educated people in general, then the population in general, and the last step was reaching the government (still not really complete; marijuana remains illegal at the federal level).
Inline links: respectability cascade, barberpole model of fashion
Why Do I Suck?
February 02, 2022 · Original source
First: in basically every other way, I am an extremely unfashionable person. But in this case, somehow I ended up near the top of the barberpole model of fashion. I felt like all my friends were social justice warriors, back when other people described barely knowing one or two. So I got annoyed with them early and rebelled against them early.
Inline links: barberpole model of fashion
Sources Say Bay Area House Party
September 25, 2025 · Original source
“Yeah,” says Vinaya. “I think I might be the only one. The thing is - it feels like profanity ought to mean something. There ought to be words where if you say them, people will audibly gasp. Mothers will pull back their children and say ‘No, no, don’t interact with that person, they use profanity!’ But you can’t do that anymore. People like to imagine they become some sort of dangerous motorcycle gangster when they say ‘fuck’. But the least cool person you know says ‘fuck’ all the time. They have a Twitter account that consists entirely of statements like ‘The orange fuckface is up to his usual fuckcrustable chumpfuckery’. The sort of people who the thinkpiece writers imagine using ‘heckin’ actually have a brand of mustard in their fridge called something like ‘Dan’s Fucking Awesome Spicy Mustard’ and never miss an opportunity to point it out to visitors. Something’s got to give. So I asked myself - what word will genuinely make strangers gasp? What makes your friends take you aside privately and tell you that you really shouldn’t be saying words like that? What do the self-appointed guardians of good taste treat as totally beyond the pale, as so radically Other that it automatically makes you one of the outcasts of society? And the only answer that made sense was ‘heckin’. Which is obvious in retrospect. It’s the Barberpole Model Of Fashion all over again. In 1960, the most rebellious and dangerous thing imaginable was a socialist who wore bandanas and supported equal rights for black people. Gradually more and more people who wanted to look cool and dangerous took this identity, until it became the cringiest and most try-hard thing imaginable, and now the really rebellious and dangerous youth are differentiating themselves by dressing in fancy pressed shirts and being racist. It’s a generational cycle. In the same way, once every last milligram of edginess has been squeezed out of the word fuck, the age of heckin will begin anew.”