Rebellion

How do I rebel if the corporate world owns everything I think is cool?

Honestly, I don’t want to rebel, first of all because even though the “corporate world” does own everything I like to wear etc…, they wouldn’t qualify it as cool. I wear things that most teens would never qualify as cool; I wear clothes that are “proper” as in nice shirts and long pants or jeans (that do NOT go down beneath my ass). The only times that I wear shorts, it’s with normal t-shirts without any importance in the labels. But for all I know, I could be one of those kids that follow fashion and the cool brands and all. I wouldn’t know, since I haven’t been in a non-uniform school in years, so I’m totally ignorant as to what is cool these days. There’s also the fact that fashion is much more open these days. A few years ago, the Mook look and the Midriff style were the basis of who was cool. Now, you’re cool as long as you find a style that suits you.

To rebel, there might be a way: use or create a style so terrible or so insulting that only a specific group of people will dare use it, then keep morphing it so no one will get bored of it. I believe the best way to make a new cool is to create your own little style, and keep it going with irregular changes. But the most important part would be to create it in a way that only the daredevils of society, or the mooks, would dare to implement it. A relatively good example would be “Insane Clown Posse”, which was so awful and insulting to different types of people that only a few thousand people would follow it out of a million. Of course, they were later swallowed up by the corporations and edited to be more pleasing.

Another way to (maybe) rebel would be to go the opposite way than the rest of the corporate world: the corporate world keeps changing to adapt to teenagers likings, but what if you took past styles and used them. Maybe changed them a little to suit you better, but nonetheless using styles that are “so last year”. This might throw off the corporations, and by the time they figured out what was happening, there would be a whole other bunch of styles that they thought no one would ever use again going on in the world.
The last way I can think of to rebel against all the styles and looks advertised by MTV and such is to have your own style, and I don’t mean your own as in you and your whole school or whatever, make one for yourself and stick with it. Whether it changes or not, whether the corporate world notices or not, create your own style either for you alone or for your group of friends. Make it good enough that you’re comfortable with it, but not so great as to inspire everyone to try it out. Create it like you were creating your own little town: look at all the other ones out there, take the parts of each that you like or that work, and mash it up to your liking. That’s probably the only real way to rebel against all those advertisements and such: create something awesome, but keep it contained to yourself and a very small group of people.

If everyone did that, and just worked independently or in minuscule groups, how could fashion keep up? With all those millions of teens out there, if every group of five of them had a different style, how could the companies keep up, how could they create something that fit all those styles together? There’s no way it could do that, and even if it managed to make something that was cool to 6000 different styles, they would never make enough profit from it to keep working, or from going bankrupt. So out of the three ways out of the corporate media loop, the last one is probably the most efficient and the least likely to get you beat up because of how insulting you are. You have to show your independence from the rest of the world. And if every teen does that, the media empire that has built up over all these years will crumble, unable to keep up.