New to New York, you show up for your first post-college interview with your ideals still intact. You’re prepared with briefcase in hand and a sleek part in your hair—the job with a starting salary of $50K will be yours. But something’s not quite right. The guys in the corner offices aren’t wearing the Barney’s version of your Filene’s Basement suit. Your wool slacks look all wrong next to their designer ripped jeans and your dress shoes are too loud on the hardwood floors compared to their throwback sneakers. You run your hand through your gelled hair and try to make it look as casually disheveled as theirs. Then you take a deep breath and hope no one will judge you based on your appearance.
What you don’t realize is that even though these successful New Yorkers are dressed in what resembles traditional “screw the man” attire, they are the man. You’ve just come face-to-face with the Fauxbo. Trying to figure out the origin of this modern day anomaly is as futile as pondering the chicken or the egg dilemma. Does the Fauxbo move into gentrified neighborhoods, or are neighborhoods gentrified by the Fauxbo’s presence? Either way, they live in areas once reserved for the type of bohemians who refused to sign a lease or hold a steady job—except Fauxbos sign a $2,000 a month lease and make an annual salary of $80,000 or more
“The most expensive area in the city right now is the West Village,” explains Jared Wiener, Director of Brokerage Services for Triumph Property Group Ltd. in Manhattan, who says a studio there goes for at least $3,700 a month. The old countercultural centers that used to be poor and neglected are now the ideal nesting grounds for Fauxbos. Just as the man in the gray flannel suit moved into suburbia and multiplied, Fauxbos in their ripped blue jeans have proliferated in New York City as far back as the 1960s, until their kind far surpassed the genuine bohemians in number—and still they continue to grow.
In Greenwich Village 1963: Avant-Garde Performance and the Effervescent Body, Sally Banes writes of Andy Warhol, “The Factory was both site and symbol of the alternative culture’s disdain for the bourgeois ethic, from work to sex to control of consciousness—a sanctified space where leisure and pleasure reigned.” But really, Warhol’s reputation belied just how much he shared with the establishment—he was a successful businessman just like most of the bourgeoisie.
Warhol redefined a medium once characterized by individuality—the essence of bohemianism—by turning the creation of art into a hyper-commercial process. And if the real Factory was the birth of the Fauxbo, then the recent film Factory Girl brings us to maturity with a Fauxbo (Sienna Miller) playing a Fauxbo (Edie Sedgwick) in a Fauxbo’s playhouse.
It was Warhol’s Factory that was obsessed with form over content. Likewise, the Fauxbo has stripped bohemian emblems of any kind of anti-establishment meaning, so that they become the new status symbols. Consider Whole Foods, for example, the perfect amalgamation of corporation and bohemia. Back in the ’60s and ’70s, many involved in the counterculture opted out of the corporate world to return to nature; some quite literally moved to the country and grew tomatoes, while others opened small health food stores to sell tomatoes to those who weren’t lucky enough to grow their own. Today, the Fauxbo eagerly plops down his money to eat organic, but his hands never touch the soil.
On March 29, the Bowery Whole Foods will open on the Lower East Side, an area that has been transformed over the years from ethnic ghetto to bohemian enclave and now to Fauxbo paradise.
Today, Fauxbo-land reaches as far as SoBro (South Bronx), SoHa (South Harlem), ProHo (Prospect Heights), SoHell and Clinton (Hell’s Kitchen)—“up and coming” neighborhoods that have been oh-so-cleverly renamed in a marketing ploy meant to shirk their bad reputations and attract Fauxbos by aligning themselves with already hip areas. Weiner says the new renters here are educated and affluent; they are the children of Baby Boomers. But while their parents identified with bohemia in their youth but grew up to take jobs as lawyers and doctors, Fauxbos refuse to sacrifice one for the other, choosing instead to combine elements of both—acquiring high-paying jobs so that they can maintain an appearance that, at first glance, implies a refusal to join the rat race.
In these neighborhoods, Fauxbos can indulge in the stylistic aspects of bohemia—they can sport their messy hairdos (although now they pay $350 to get the cut just right) and wear their worn-in jeans (but they buy them that way at $288 a pair) wiling away the hours in a coffee shop. But the substantive aspects have vanished—Starbucks is quiet without the passionate debate found in coffeehouses of yore. Instead, a Fauxbo will sit with his iPod playing Bob Dylan, Bright Eyes or—hell—even Green Day. Because the point isn’t whether the music on the speakers—Damien Rice, Aimee Mann or The Decemberists (whose CDs are also sold there)—is too mainstream, it’s that the Fauxbo himself hasn’t chosen it, and the Fauxbo is nothing if not a rebel without a cause.
For Fauxbos, quality of life is just good enough that they see no reason to question it. They’re a happy, complacent people, mollified by the very money that genuine bohemians purported to disdain. The Fauxbo’s ability to present himself as part of a thriving counterculture when, in fact, his money is driving the true counterculture away, threatens to drain the city of its diversity. Today, lawyers and T-shirt designers have much more in common than they might think. So next time you see a Fauxbo casually walking down West Houston in his bohemian costume, don’t be fooled. Beneath that I-Couldn’t-Care-Less-What-You-Think exterior, beats the heart of a conformist. And far from changing the fate of the world, Fauxbos ensure it continues to go ’round.
