Yes, it’s true, expect Stalin’s portrait to become part and parcel of chic decorating in high end urban condo units near you, much like Che adorns millions of capitalist T-shirts. Stalin’s prominent moustache not for you? There’s always the clean-shaven Mao. Me? I’m waiting for mass exterminator Pol Pot to come into vogue. He’d go great with my modern sparse abode.
Below are my favorite commie chic hip totalitarian posters. 1 depicts N Koreans marching; 2 is Andy Warhol’s Mao. 3 is Leni boy (and that would look so good enlarged onto a shower curtain, wouldn’t it?). Though most people consider posters like these worrisome, I believe they have no more political significance than a poster of Sponge Bob. In other words, they are no more than a manifestation of edgy syndrome, from people who want to set themselves apart what they would probably consider mere mundane society.
Fashionistas’ use chic as a harmless social weapon to keep their own co middle class neighbors off guard: no one of the upwardly mobile class (or would-be upwardly mobile class or the merely just wishing to be upwardly mobile) wants to become a static bourgeois troll. The problem with being chic is that you constantly have to redefine it. Someday, for example, it may be chic to adorn your living room wall with George Bush or Donald Rumsfeld (in Warhol style perhaps?) or Sadam Hussein or, alas, Hitler and/or Pol Pot. The edge must be continuously sharpened. Eventually it comes full circle.
