Decadence and Popular Culture

This chapter examines decadence in terms of the contemporary popular obsession with the practice of self-fashioning through dandyism, drag, or costume as a way of negotiating or overcoming social boundaries, often in a playfully transgressive manner. Glam rock stars of the 1970s represent a modern form of dandyism and camp self-expression, while the aesthetics of opulence and excess take on a more profound significance when considered in terms of social inequality in the drag ball culture of 1980s New York where the aspiration to be ‘real’ is enacted through costumes and cosmetics. Decadence in today’s celebrity culture is exemplified by Lady Gaga’s gender-bending pop performance art, and we can also observe a queer countercultural resistance to the mainstream using the same decadent paradoxes of beauty and decay, artifice and reality. The ‘cult of the self’ may seem superficial, but the process of self-fashioning through clothing and makeup is in fact a process of self-acceptance.