The Pose

The flannel shirts, the vintage band tees, the carefully curated record collections—everyone at NYU seemed to have gotten the same memo about what cool looked like that year. The funny part was how self-aware everyone was about it, how intentional every choice was, how much thought went into looking like you didn’t care. A reality show documenting it just made the whole thing more explicit, but the feedback loop was already there, everyone already performing for invisible cameras. It wasn’t fake exactly, but it wasn’t not-fake either. That’s probably what made the whole thing interesting.