Moreover, fashionability, or cool, or style, acts a passphrase, a shift key, a phase shift, a valuable proxy for speaker identity which then allows the speaker to communicate complexly, reflexively, with reference to self and modified by self. It is reliable because of the intense difficulty of faking fashion, which requires so much insider knowledge that any successful impostor is arguably no longer a fake. There’s a reason it’s tough to get into Berghain. Consider, by way of another example, the way true upperclass belonging, or highbrow aesthetic taste, is so impossible to convincingly fake for those outside the caste. So much of fashion is unquantified, subconscious, and ambiently soft that we are not even explicitly aware of the class and taste signals we send, or what alternative signals we might send to signal an alternative identity, and yet we send them constantly, through word choice, attitude, posture, interest, palette, reference, familiarity.⁶