I felt compelled to write a quick little diatribe about fashion and clothing after listening to Ed Zitron’s short conversation with menswear blogger Derek Guy, who many of you probably know from being annoyed with him on Twitter. Derek is great, he has a tailor’s eye for quality but also, like, understands how to dress larger bodies (something the big fellas hardly ever get to hear about!) and can tell you about a tiny little haberdashery in Vermont that makes really good indigo chore coats.
15 minutes is also the appropriate length for a podcast so this is well worth a listen in its entirety, but I wanted to write about something that Derek mentions right in the middle of the episode. “Clothing has been historically coded as frivolous and feminine,” he says. That sentiment is something I’ve been turning over in my head for the last few years, not because we tend to genderize fashion ( we do and it’s bad) but because I just got around to reading Baudrillard and think he would have something to say about getting a fit off.
Men who care about how they look or how their clothes drape or if something is tailored correctly have been pretty easy game for a long time. And that’s not to be all “men have it so hard!” or something, it’s more targeted at our general cultural constructs around large topics. What we choose to wear each day is important whether or not you have an opinion about darting or pleats. There’s two things at play here: by constricting those choices in gender norms you’re cutting off rivers and tributaries of expression. Women wear this; men wear this. The question of “why” never really crosses anyone’s minds.
The second part of the thought follows from there. Even the inkling to ask why we dress the way we do or whether that means something larger is grounds for dismissal. Politicians and (American) professionals typically dress like shit because to care about your clothes is to signal you aren’t a totally serious person and care more about how you look than the work you do. (There is a huge economic and complex class/socioeconomic component here that I’m not going to go for space reasons.)
The big ol’ binary here is that if we decide that caring about how you look is feminine, then not caring about how you look must exist in diametric relief. Looking like shit is the masculine dream, apparently. What that broad take misses is that our aesthetic decisions are made up of tiny lil’ signals. The choice of whether or not to care about you put on in the morning is not simply “I look good” or “I look like garbage.” Wearing a Bud Light t-shirt and cargo short tells people something whether you like it or not, it aligns you or disaligns you with specific people or groups just like wearing a leather harness or the exact same thing every day does. The positive and negative spaces are both filled by our decisions on what to wear. You are a constantly flashing beacon no matter what you decide to put on.
All clothing is costume. I remember that being the context of something my old high school classmate Gabriella Karefa-Johnson once said. (She’s now one of the most influential stylists in the industry and, also, a great person.) Not caring about clothes or fashion or style is in itself a decision to care about those things in an inverted way. You’re wearing a costume no matter what, it’s just up to you whether you know it or not.
Some music
It always feels like a little joyful burst every time you hear an obscure sample in the wild. I was spinning an Ahmad Jamal record I had picked up; the entire B-side is a single live take of his song “Extensions” from the Montreux Jazz Festival":
I immediately recognized a piano measure and knew it was a Madlib special. The guy will bury an earworm in you and double your satisfaction for finally finding the flip: