Since we lived in Italy when I was a kid we didn’t have a TV (my folks didn’t understand Italian so they thought a TV was pointless) I read incessantly. This managed to give me the vocabulary of a college grad by age 12, I used this to be a pretentious as humanly possible up until about age 19… when I realized it was not helping me get laid at all.
I wore a beat-up cowboy hat in college for a few months. I’m not from a region where that would make any sense at all.
I carried a pocket watch for awhile, but maybe that’s not too bad.
Back when I owned/wore ties, many were pretentious. I had a beautiful tie featuring a scanning electron microscope picture of gonorrhea, another with a representation of 5-[2-ethoxy-5-(4-methylpiperazin-1-ylsulfonyl)phenyl]-1- methyl-3-propyl-1,6-dihydro-7H-pyrazolo[4,3-d]pyrimidin-7-one (aka Viagra).
To the best of my knowledge & experience, pretentious people smoke them because they’ve seen other pretentious people smoking them so figure that clove cigarettes are part of the uniform. Plus, even back when a lot more people smoked, few people smoked cloves so you were “special” for that alone. Few people walked around with a mouthful of wasps as well but it’s all in the marketing.
Hauntingly beautiful deep people who would say “I see that you’re reading The Diaries of Franz Kafka…”
I was an art major in the early 90’s. I know how this pretentious fantasy works.
Back in junior high school, when John Denver was big, I trained myself to say, “Far out” at every available opportunity. Even I think it got old fast.
Back in high school/college, I trained myself to cross my 7’s and Z’s as “European”. Eventually I got a job where I was writing numbers constantly and couldn’t be bothered to do so any longer. I never needed to do it to prevent confusion, I only did it because I thought it was special and unique.
Full disclosure: I still make closed-top 4’s.
Hehehe, I figured out pretty quickly that I had bought and cherished far too many Styx and Yngwie Malmsteen records to compete in any discussion with you guys in the late 80’s. 
But, I did go to art school. I have been trained (somewhat) in criticism. “Renoir Sucks” is a perfectly valid statement, as long as you back it up with a “because” :).
Hey, you dared to try them! Sometimes endeavor is its own reward.
Hmmm… I used to dye my hair black. I still behaved like I did before and after (a barely literate fool), but that was an affectation.
However, It was funny to have people in college come up to me and ask me how I bleached “just the roots”.
Dude, bless you. Seriously. But imagine some quasi Friends social group hanging out and being 20-somethings and you trying to make some deep/obnoxious commentary. I was being jerk-ish, regardless of the validity of my assertion. (I finally saw some of his works at the Barnes collection - he was capable of some great work amidst the bourgeois portraits).
As for the leather pants, yeah, I tried those, bow ties, fancy cuff links, hats, etc. - different ways to have something “distinctive.” That’s one reason I look at the beards being sported today and kinda giggle. I can only imagine how I would’ve mangled that particular trend.
Wait. I cross 7s because that’s how my third grade teacher taught me. Is that coming across as pretentious?
I just thought of another timely one. In high school, on the anniversary of John Lennon’s death (which is today), I would dress all in black and pretend to be completely forlorn (this was in the 90s, so I had had some time to come to terms with his death which happened when I was 4.)
I get douche chills thinking about this now.
Hehehe, I would have shown brilliantly if that was the trend when I was young (full beard in under two weeks!). But, I like being kissed, so a goatee it was and is.
My persisting leather pretension is a biker jacket, even though I fell off my last motorcycle around 30 years ago. I still (just about exclusively) wear one, I have no idea what it says about me at this point. Screw it, they’re comfy.
Various books I carried round school: Chinese philosophy, Che Guevara biography, Ulysses. At university I carried a plastic rose.
To be honest, I’ve never taken note of it in anyone else’s number writing. Which makes my attempt to be special with it doubly foolish. So I say “no” for you and “yes” for me.
Hehehe, you’re both cool, because I can’t be bothered to do it, and it looks neat.
I don’t have any pretentious habits, and I never did.
Regards,
Shodan
oops
Many aspiring young intellectuals go through a phase where they read Marx. Most stop after reading The Communist Manifesto. When I was 16, I decided that the Manifesto was for lightweights so I decided to read Das Kapital instead. Conspicuously, while in school, for several goddamn months.
Very much that. yeah. I think the idea was that some pre-Raphaelite chick would stop, lay her hands upon my shoulders, gaze deeply into my eyes and murmur “You are so deep. Deep and troubled. Let’s have immediate sex”.
Oh yeah, I used to wear two leather biker jackets, one of top of the other, because a William Gibson character did it.
I’ve done plenty of pretentious things. But while I frequently wore sports coats (sometimes even a suit) to class in high school and college, I didn’t and don’t perceive it as as such. I just liked the way a coat & tie felt and looked on me. Why else would I dress but to please myself? (And get chicks.)
To answer the thread question, I used to read books like Pagels’ The Origin of Satan in public just to annoy fundies and provoke them into making stupid assumptions.