By Tan Shzr Ee, culturevulture

Forget your branded belts, posh accents and all that smooth talk about designer music playlists on your iPhone. These days, it seems, the cool thing is to be uncool.

Welcome to the idea of reverse-poseuring.

Think media and aircraft industry mogul Richard Branson, a man rich enough not to have to wear ties to work.

Then there is middle-class celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, who affects a mock East London accent to show people he is a regular guy.

Closer to home, there are those English-educated ACS boys who get a kick out of singing Hokkien songs oh so authentically.

It used to be that when people affected a wannabe dress sense, a fake accent or a false attitude, they poseured upwards on the social ladder. Poseuring was an act of aspiration towards a higher social or intellectual class, achieved in fast-forwarded time through the application of a superficial layer of identity.

But if you observe examples in recent history closely enough, they might well show that poseuring in reverse is equally common.

The phenomenon of geek chic is a good example. Spectacles, white socks in Converse sneakers, computer games and mullet haircuts used to be signifiers of bad taste, but they have become fashionable.

The trick, though, is to not be a real geek but to almost look like one while affecting the genre's essential attributes.

This is where poseuring is different from being: You can smell a layer of falseness, or at least a sense of a geek in 'performance' as opposed to a geek in existence.

Now, it goes to say that bona fide geeks out there could be as insulted as they are flattered by such an affectation, in the same way that a number of my genuine Hokkien-speaking friends find their ACS faux-speakers incredibly patronising.

Sometimes however, it is not that easy to identify the layer of falseness in reverse poseuring, simply because many of these are not so much pretending to be someone else than really being themselves, or at most performing an exaggerated version of themselves.

I am thinking about how a highly educated, extremely smart and funky old friend, C, gave up a good job to be a full-time mother and revels so gloriously in the mundanity of housewifedom.

You cannot quite call her a poseur because being a housewife and an NTUC FairPrice coupon expert is really what she has become, quite apart from the matter of her other skills.

So why do people reverse-pose? A large part of it lies in defying social expectations.

Some reverse-poseurs emphasise their character or family background flaws to gain empathy with a targeted crowd.

Reverse-poseuring thus maxes up street cred. In the case of election campaigners, the admission of a flawed and 'human' character trait will also lessen the distance between them and the targeted hoi polloi.

Often however, reverse-poseuring works on the opposite dynamic: It is about creating an exclusive cult, often through the rebellious act of fighting social expectations.

Geek chic, for example, would not be so successful today if it had been adopted early on by the masses instead of by the marginalised. But once it becomes a mainstream culture, geeks will only just be geeks.

Here perhaps, it is not so much about how geeks are only geeks, but about how we all have a bit of geek in us.

Similarly, small parts in each of us are all poseurs who aspire both upwards as well as downwards on the social ladder, depending on situation.

And where reverse-poseuring can be pinned down to be the 'active' personality here, it all boils down to which side of our multi-faceted personalities we want to emphasise when we finally decide on what is cool, or uncool.

This article was first published in The Straits Times on Sept 11, 2008.

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