Is Streetwear a Machine That Turns Insecurity Into Money?

In his 2018 skit on Supreme, Hasan Minaj, the patron comic of hype culture, said, “Without objects that make me stand out, what am I? Then I just have to be myself, and that’s terrifying, because I am insecure and I need things to make me feel better about myself.” In a couple of sentences, he deftly drilled to the core of the fuccboi psyche: a deep-seated insecurity about one’s own worth and an equally deep-seated desire to prove that worth to others.

Both the clinical and the cultural term for this state is Narcissism.

Narcissism is often confused with egotism or mere selfishness, but while it may contain elements of both, it’s driven not by an outsized sense of self-respect but by self-loathing, which leads to inexorable desire and strife for approval from others. “It’s a very insecure personality, and all the stuff on the outside – the grandiosity, the arrogance, the entitlement – is a suit of armor to buttress a weak interior core, because on the subconscious level narcissists think that others will see that they are not all that,” Dr. Ramani Durvasula, a best-selling author and an expert on narcissism, told me.

Read More