Jeremiah Tolbert

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Does the New York Times arti­cle on Steampunk mean the genre/​fashion craze has made the high water mark and will begin to recede from here? What is the shelf-​​life of an aes­thetic move­ment, and for that mat­ter, what is the soci­o­log­i­cal force behind this par­tic­u­lar movement?

It’s a Stylistic Rebellion

Particularly as an aes­thetic move­ment, steam­punk is pop­u­lar pri­mar­ily with an under 30 set. This is a gen­er­a­tion that has rarely owned hand-​​crafted objects. Our con­sumer goods have been mass man­u­fac­tured, extruded plas­tic blocks. Aesthetic appeal was rarely a con­sid­er­a­tion, and even if it was, each prod­uct was exactly iden­ti­cal to the other. You could try and stand out through your par­tic­u­lar fash­ion sense and con­sumer good choices, but more often than not, you ended up look­ing like a thou­sand others.

Steampunk is a mid­dle fin­ger to the iPod, but it’s also a blown kiss. This move­ment says, “yes” to tech­nol­ogy and sci­ence, but also “does it have to look so anti­sep­tic?” The design aes­thetic of Apple appeals to many, as evi­denced by their stock prices, but it’s some­what repul­sive to oth­ers. And for a gen­er­a­tion who has rarely owned hand-​​crafted objects, the attrac­tion of tak­ing some­thing and mod­i­fy­ing it, craft­ing it, until it is yours and unique–is very strong. The Victorian period was not the last time things were made by hand, but it’s an aes­thetic dis­tantly enough removed from the mod­ern that it feels dif­fer­ent, more so than the 40s, 50s, 60s, etc. Steampunk is brown and brass, in con­trast to the whites and blacks of mod­ern design. It’s metal and wood, not plas­tic. It’s lace, not lycra.

It is also a call­back to a period when objects looked exactly as if they were capa­ble of what they could do. A square block of plas­tic does not con­vey its abil­ity to com­mu­ni­cate over vast dis­tances. There’s noth­ing inher­ently com­mu­nica­tive about it’s shape. A steam­punk ray gun, on the other hand, can­not be con­fused for much of any­thing else. Technology then was cruder, but you could tell what some­thing did by look­ing at it. You could see the inner work­ings, and those inner work­ings were much eas­ier to under­stand. I think most peo­ple feel they could learn to put watch pieces together. Not very many believe they could learn to man­u­fac­ture cir­cuit boards.

Has it peaked?

Unless you’re invested semi-​​professionally in the pop­u­lar­ity of the genre as I am, then this ques­tion doesn’t prob­a­bly mat­ter to you. Having spent most of my spring prepar­ing a series of images and sto­ry­lines that draw heav­ily from this aes­thetic, I am a lit­tle con­cerned that the pop­u­lar­ity of steam­punk is about to peak, if it hasn’t already. If the activ­ity on the steam­fash­ion group on Livejournal is any indi­ca­tion, pop­u­lar­ity has already begun to wane. I recently rejoined this group, and I have found that posts to it are increas­ingly infre­quent. Now it may just be that every­one is too busy mak­ing things, but I sus­pect some have already moved on to other fix­a­tions. After all, you could make a strong case that the fashion-​​aspect of steam­punk evolved out of Goth cul­ture, and so it’s not unrea­son­able to believe that it will con­tinue to evolve and frac­ture off into other sub-​​cultures. We already have terms like clock­punk and dieselpunk, even if these terms don’t have the same trac­tion in the zeit­geist that steam­punk has right now.

The nice thing about a genre and an aes­thetic that is based heav­ily on a his­tor­i­cal period is, it prob­a­bly never really goes out of fash­ion. There will always be some small sub­set of fans inter­ested in the time period. Let’s face it: steam­punk is freak­ing cool, and it’s going to take some­thing pretty dras­tic to change that. Even if that does change, it’s not like being uncool has ever stopped fans from lik­ing something.