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"  Standing on line at the American Apparel store on New York&amp;#039;s Upper East Side, I couldn&amp;#039;t help but notice the watch on the wrist of the pretty woman in front of me\u2014it was a Rolex President, in yellow gold, with diamonds filling the bezel. Next to it was a thick, cabley gold cuff bracelet\u2014almost definitely David Yurman. The total effect was a thick shield of noble metal. But her clothes weren&amp;#039;t nearly so elaborate\u2014 she wore a white T-shirt (American Apparel), tailored dark jeans, and slim sandals. The mix of low and high in her wardrobe was studied and flawlessly executed. I guessed that in this woman&amp;#039;s closet I could find Balenciaga and Louboutin\u2014and also a Muji tote and Havaiana flip-flops in every hue. In the past several decades, we&amp;#039;ve lived through middlebrow, branded-brow, no-brow (one definition: &amp;quot;intellectual discourse influenced by both high culture and low culture as initiated by Critical Theory in the United States and Cultural Studies in the United Kingdom&amp;quot;). Now, in music, fashion, art, food, even politics, showing that you can move fluidly between low and high\u2014 demonstrating your ability to curate the objects and culture in your life\u2014is the latest iteration. You watch John Adams and American Idol. You eat lunch at Chipotle and dinner at the French Laundry. You lap up the tabloids&amp;#039; coverage of Britney&amp;#039;s breakdown but are now rooting for her psychoanalytic recovery. If you&amp;#039;re a presidential candidate, you well know how hard it is to gracefully negotiate the continuum. Barack Obama makes the remark about those who &amp;quot;cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren&amp;#039;t like them,&amp;quot; and he&amp;#039;s labeled an elitist (too high) by his rivals Hillary Clinton and John McCain, even though his biography\u2014son of an African student and a girl from Kansas\u2014 implies something more complicated. Hillary Clinton, formerly of Wellesley, Yale Law, and countless Renaissance Weekends, throws back a shot of Crown Royal in Indiana to earn the critical working-class seal of approval. John McCain, distinguished veteran and public servant, actually responds to the declaration of Heidi Montag, star of The Hills, that &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m voting for John McCain. I&amp;#039;m a Republican, and McCain has a lot of experience,&amp;quot; with: &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m honored to have Heidi&amp;#039;s support, and I want to assure her that I never miss an episode of The Hills, especially since the new season started.&amp;quot; For better or for worse, how did we come to this? A brief cultural history of the high-low mix: According to Robert Thompson, professor of popular culture and director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University&amp;#039;s S. I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, &amp;quot;before the baby-boom generation, people watched I Love Lucy but would only admit to watching Masterpiece Theatre. But the baby boomers&amp;#039; ideals were different; they didn&amp;#039;t pretend to subscribe to only high-culture things. They grew up in an explosion of popular culture in the post\u2013World War II era, from Davy Crockett to Gilligan&amp;#039;s Island,&amp;quot; and then imparted that experience of popular culture to their kids. What has made us embrace these separate tropes and value their combination? &amp;quot;As a society, we have developed the tool of irony to deal with lowbrow culture\u2014enjoy it, but put it in its proper place,&amp;quot; Thompson says. &amp;quot;We do it without guilt. The common statement that a certain TV show is a `guilty pleasure&amp;#039; is a form of irony and a way of saying we&amp;#039;re proud of embracing it\u2014that we know where it stands, priority-wise, and we&amp;#039;re happy to have it as entertainment, or, in the case of consumer culture, to buy it.&amp;quot; Thompson&amp;#039;s conclusion is that when it comes to low and high, one does not replace the other; they simply go together. &amp;quot;The true distinction between low and high has been totally annihilated,&amp;quot; he says. That&amp;#039;s evident in the audience for American Idol, about which Thompson adds, &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s an incredible phenomenon, in that grandmothers, office workers, and teenagers all talk about it the next day. The trend will only continue as the holdouts who do not embrace the mixture of high and low\u2014the generation before the boomers\u2014fade out.&amp;quot; As illustration, Thompson notes that &amp;quot;when I came to the university in 1981 to teach on popular culture, a lot of my colleagues thought I was absolutely crazy, and that what I was doing wasn&amp;#039;t in the least bit academic. But look at today: The segment has grown hugely at my university, and in many others, too. There are still some holdouts in academia, but they are old-school, literally, and in the minority.&amp;quot; Tell that to Larry Summers, who as president of Harvard took a lot of heat in late 2001 and 2002 for insisting that Cornel West, the university&amp;#039;s first Alphonse Fletcher University Professor\u2014highbrow even by Harvard standards\u2014divert his attention from a hip-hop record he was making back to teaching and scholarship. But an ability such as West&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;to shift between high and low has become a laudable characteristic and is no longer taboo,&amp;quot; Thompson says. Indeed, West won that public relations battle; seven years later, he is now Class of 1943 University Professor at Princeton, and Summers is...no longer president of Harvard. West, on his website, calls himself a &amp;quot;public intellectual,&amp;quot; a nomenclature that itself embraces high and low. As with politics and academia, As with politics and academia, so goes fashion, \u00E0 la my encounter at American Apparel. And Isaac Mizrahi is in the peculiar position of being both chronicler and propagator of the phenomenon in his world. Here, the cultural history starts a little later\u2014 specifically, the late &amp;#039;70s and early &amp;#039;80s, according to Mizrahi, the designer who, in 2002, introduced a collection for Target that showed how cool and commercially successful it was (his sales for the chain approached $300 million a year) for high design to merge with mass-appeal stores. Even though Mizrahi is severing his ties with Target\u2014to take a job revamping Liz Claiborne\u2014the phenomenon continues. When Phillip Lim designed white shirts and dresses for the Gap, they sold out the same day in some Manhattan stores. Stella McCartney and Lagerfeld&amp;#039;s collections for H&amp;amp;amp;M drew lines around the block; Comme des Gar\u00E7ons at H&amp;amp;amp;M, due out in November, will surely do the same. It&amp;#039;s almost as if the anointing of a designer is no longer so dependent on the actress wearing his gown to the Oscars, or even on the runway show, but on his being approached to do one of these high-low retail deals. Of course, there&amp;#039;s a nice democracy inherent in the partnerships. &amp;quot;I jumped at the chance to be a part of making fashion for all women, not just a select few,&amp;quot; Mizrahi says, and he had no problem finding inspiration for doing that, tracing his enthusiasm back to his high school days. &amp;quot;Manhattan wasn&amp;#039;t yet completely gentrified at that point,&amp;quot; he adds. &amp;quot;It was multicultural and multiexperiential.&amp;quot; Mizrahi went clubbing at Studio 54, where, he says, &amp;quot;I was in the company of Tina Chow and Loulou de la Falaise. These women were cultured and smart, as well as incredibly stylish\u2014masters at mixing high and low in their wardrobes. In the early &amp;#039;80s, people weren&amp;#039;t obsessed with wearing high-end labels; it was about creativity. Tina Chow would be wearing a Pearl River T-shirt and man-tailored pants with an exquisite Chanel flat. Even Diana Vreeland wouldn&amp;#039;t blink at putting on a men&amp;#039;s Brooks Brothers shirt.&amp;quot; Mizrahi&amp;#039;s admiration of such mashing up became evident when he debuted his Target collection. For its launch, he had a show called &amp;quot;High Low,&amp;quot; in which he introduced his Target items alongside his pieces at Bergdorf Goodman: &amp;quot;Eighteen-dollar flats paired against $8,000 lace pants\u2014and they went perfectly.&amp;quot; The latest wrinkle is when artists lend their names to high-end merchandise; a recent famous case is Japanese artist Takashi Murakami&amp;#039;s collaborations with Louis Vuitton. &amp;quot;Thirty years ago, the art world would have declared Murakami a sellout without much chance of critical success, whereas now that has shifted,&amp;quot; says Lowell Pettit, a NYC-based art adviser for private clients. As evidence of this shift, he points to last spring&amp;#039;s Brooklyn Museum of Art show of Murakami&amp;#039;s work, which featured a Vuitton boutique selling Murakami-designed bags from the French label, some of them costing more than $2,000. Pettit calls the boutique &amp;quot;lowbrow shopping filtered through high-end luxury branding and vamping&amp;quot; and makes a loose comparison of Murakami to &amp;quot;Jay-Z doing Budweiser commercials\u2014he can go from being a major music mogul and hugely respected to promoting the most mainstream, commercial brand out there.&amp;quot; Similarly, Eminem was asked to perform at Nelson Mandela&amp;#039;s ninetieth birthday bash in London in June. And exemplifying Thompson&amp;#039;s comment that &amp;quot;some celebrities shift from lowbrow to highbrow at will,&amp;quot; OutKast&amp;#039;s Andr\u00E9 Benjamin is indulging his admiration for bespoke British tailoring by launching the Benjamin Bixby fashion line this fall. Mizrahi maintains that going into the future, &amp;quot;there will be little to no value placed anymore on how much you pay for something. The value will be in how you feel about it. For instance, I love Murakami&amp;#039;s work, but I love my Hello Kitty toaster just as much.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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