I don't always write about dandies or menswear, although I seem to have better luck getting published when I do. One might suspect that magazines and websites are hesitant to publish opinion pieces by people who don't specialize in specific fields, but a brief survey of many websites will show that expertise is rarely the standard, avowing allegiance to a particular group - biological or ideological - is often mistaken for something like a credential, and rational argument is valued less than the ability to use phrases like "I can't even," "so many feels," and "because ____." So I've decided to use this blog to publish those essays I can't help but write whether anyone publishes them or not. I write them partly to stay in practice as a writer, and partly to focus and organize my own thoughts about particular issues. If anybody reads them I hope they get some pleasure out of doing so and recognize that argument, disagreement, and dissent can be very good things.
Of Dress Codes and Speech Codes
Recently, people have been writing
an awful lot about what men are wearing. Not the usual red carpet reportage,
but the sort of debate once reserved for Jayne Mansfield’s décolletage. In this
case, the controversy is over two shirts (of very different styles,) worn by
two men (both of whom work the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics
fields, or STEM) and whether their sartorial choices are examples of
institutional sexism (particularly in the male-dominated STEM fields.)
The first shirt was a plain gray
cotton t-shirt seen on the torso of Facebook CEO and life-size Lego figurine
Mark Zuckerberg. Asked at a press conference why he always wore the same plain
outfit, Mr. Zuckerberg replied: “
I’m in this really lucky position where I get to wake up every
day and help serve more than a billion people. And I’d feel I’m not doing my
job if I spent any of my energy on things that are silly or frivolous about my
life.” This may seem like typical Silicon Valley
productivity-worshipping egotism to most people, but New York Magazine’s
fashion site The Cut published a blog titled
“Zuckerberg
Explains His Gray T-Shirts, Sounds Pretty Sexist” in which Alison P. Davis,
perhaps nervous that an editor would discover that she hadn’t yet been outraged
by anything that day, does some sexism exegesis and concludes: “Of course, male
CEOs are far too focused on changing the world or building the next Big App to
care about something as “silly” or “frivolous” as dressing professionally —
they’ll just leave that to Marissa Mayer.” The comments section of the article
shows that most readers saw this as a clear case of outrage overreach, considering
that Mr. Zuckerberg said nothing about gender at all, and if anything it
revealed more about the author’s own ideas on gender roles and the relative
vanity of men and women after she crowbarred open the lines in order to not
only read between them but insert her own prejudices. Some feminists winced at
the article, saying that people should avoid leaps of logic and knee-jerk
accusations of misogyny lest the movement be caricatured as a gang of
eggshell-skinned puritans examining every statement with a sexism decoder ring.
I was offended by Mr. Zuckerberg’s
statement, too, because it revealed a deep-seated prejudice against a small but
gorgeous minority group: dandies (and their female counterparts.) As the
co-author (with photographer Rose Callahan,) of
I
am Dandy: The Return of the Elegant Gentleman and the co-founder
of the
Secret Empire suiting company,
I take umbrage like snuff at the suggestion that paying attention to what you
wear is necessarily superficial, frivolous, or inconsequential. As Lord Illingworth
in Oscar Wilde’s
A Woman of No Importance says, “People nowadays are so
absolutely superficial that they don’t understand the philosophy of the
superficial.” Mr. Zuckerberg’s anti-dandyism bias is one tentacle of the insidious
“
normcore”
pseudo-trend, exemplified by The Gap’s stultifying “
Dress
Normal” ad campaign. These are microagressions that scuff the shoe and
chill the soul.
Some suggested that anybody discouraged
from studying science by something as inconsequential as a novelty shirt
probably wasn’t cut out for a career in the sciences anyway. Feminists
responded that this was merely one example of a pervasive sexist culture in the
sciences. The opposition asked why women don’t run in fear from art history or
English literature because of odalisques or Lolita. The feminists replied,
archly, that men were getting a taste of their own medicine now that people
were scrutinizing and criticizing their appearance, too. Their critics asked,
arch-archly, if they were suggesting that Dr. Taylor had been “asking for it,”
because of what he was wearing?
One could continue adding arches to
this arcade, but there were other points, chiefly that it wasn’t the
“appropriate” thing to wear for the occasion. Some asked why his colleagues
(including several women,) hadn’t said anything to stop him. This slightly more
subtle argument has more to do with occasion than intent: “don’t wear a pin-up
shirt to your rocket science interview, it isn’t appropriate - this literally
isn’t rocket science.” Dr. Taylor’s ersatz defenders said that it obviously
wasn’t his intention to offend anybody and the women on his team didn’t seem to
mind. Feminists argued that this just proved that sexism is so ingrained that
an obviously offensive shirt wasn’t seen as such by the team, including women. Casual sexism was their watchword.
As in the case of Mr. Zuckerberg’s
words, I found Dr. Taylor’s shirt mildly upsetting, but the “casual” bothered
me far more than the “sexism.” A man who just helped achieve a scientific marvel
wore that on the big day? If a presumably brilliant person’s idea of the
perfect celebratory outfit is a nudie-lady bowling shirt, slightly more
dignified than a piano-key necktie without rising to the same level of kitsch, we
may have crossed the casual-wear Rubicon. But the pro-Taylor camp had a more
interesting point than it knew when it said that he had a right to dress
however he wanted and it was nobody’s business to tell him otherwise: this is a
matter of free speech.
It has become axiomatic to the
point of cliché to say “I express myself in how I dress,” but there is truth to
it (although, to extend the speech metaphor, unless you’re designing and making
your own clothing you’re expressing yourself by quoting others.) Clothing
choices are generally protected as free speech by the First Amendment.
Exceptions might be made, as in the case of incitement to violence (a swastika
t-shirt is completely legal in public, one reading “Kill the Jews” might have a
harder time in court,) but for the most part we can wear what we want. And we live
in a time and place of unprecedented sartorial egalitarianism: women wear
pants, men occasionally wear dresses, and female “topless rights” advocates continually
insist on reminding everyone that they’re legally allowed to be just as
obnoxious as the sweaty men who walk around in public bare-chested.
So why does the average Western person’s
sartorial spectrum begin with Mormon and end with refugee? Some feminists
online recently lionized
a
male Australian newscaster who wore the same suit every day for a year;
when nobody commented on it, he concluded that he’d proven a double standard of
appearance. As far as I can see, what he
really proved was that men’s clothes
have gotten so boring that you can’t tell them apart. If he’d worn a different,
exciting, thoughtful outfit each day, people would be commenting on it. This
summer President Obama departed from tradition and wore a light-colored suit
while addressing the nation about ISIS.
He was promptly
pilloried by pundits who argued that his attire did not reflect the gravity of
his message. Again, the important point was missed by most: that suit was
an awful Ahmedinejad taupe, the color of the drop ceiling of a strip-mall MRI
office. Kudos to the President for trying something different, but it was an awful
suit, and it looked shabby and un-Presidential no matter the talking points.
Which brings us back to
“appropriateness.” If clothing is protected First Amendment speech, then it
follows that an abridgment of sartorial rights is censorship. In other words:
dress codes are speech codes. Naturally, private institutions have some control
over their dress codes: a restaurant can refuse a topless rights activist of
any gender, a church can ask that women cover their tantalizing shoulders, a
school can insist on a uniform to keep students focused.
When it comes to dress codes (and
speech in general, for that matter,) I’m a First Amendment absolutist. I object
to banning the headscarf for the same reason I object to making it mandatory:
in both cases it’s an authority telling someone how to dress, a government in
the first place and a deity (or his cronies,) in the second. I do appreciate some
exceptions - it seems right to me that full-face coverings shouldn’t be
permitted in government buildings for security reasons (and frankly, that
strictest of dress codes, the Burqa, is the apotheosis of everything I’m
against.) Ideally, our permissive and ostensibly equal-opportunity sartorial
culture should inspire people to experiment, to take the opportunity afforded
by freedom to clothe themselves with some personal panache and a modicum of
intellect. Instead, most people are trend-chasers and sartorial agnostics, the
sweat-panted and flip-flopped multitudes who consider ease a greater virtue
than style.
Perhaps it was the stricter,
pre-Woodstock, pre-JFK, pre-Silicon Valley dress codes which allowed dandies and
eccentrics to so magnificently push and bend the box they were put in. Maybe
dress codes are the convent’s narrow walls, the scanty plot of ground where
they paradoxically find freedom. When I interviewed the men in my book I asked
each one if he would dress the way he does if everyone else dressed that way.
About half of them were excited at the thought of more people dressing up, but
the other half confessed that they’d have to find some other way of standing
apart from the crowd. One can only hope that the excremental state of dress in
America will be apt fertilizer for new, bolder sartorial expression.
What needs to be refuted is Mr.
Zuckerberg’s cop-out dismissal of dressing as something separate or distracting
from the important things in life (like online socializing, presumably.) Clothes
are important - if you opt out you might freeze to death or get arrested. Like
food, they can be fun when approached with passion and thought. The Zuckerberg
theory that seriousness and dressing well are mutually exclusive is a complete
reverse of the previously accepted idea that dressing well is a sign of
professionalism, self-respect, and dignity. Look at the civil rights marches of
the 1960’s and you’ll see men and women deliberately dressed their best, even
when being attacked by dogs or hit by high-powered hoses. For black Americans
fighting for their human rights, nice clothes were a powerful symbol of
dignity, a repudiation of the dehumanization their ancestors endured as chattel
- naked livestock at auction.
One of the dandies in my book, Dr.
Andre Churchwell, tells a story about his father Robert Churchwell, the first
black reporter on the Nashville Banner. Although he was covering the civil
rights beat he wasn’t allowed a desk at the paper’s segregated offices and had
to work from home. But each morning he still put on his Brooks Brothers suit
and tie, even if he wasn’t leaving the house. He was a professional, and that’s
how his children learned about the power of dressing well. Nowadays people may scoff
at style as a superficial affectation, and insist that it’s wrong to judge
people by how they dress. But dress, like religion and philosophy and unlike
race and gender, is a personal choice, and for people like Robert Churchwell it
was anything but superficial; it was a way of insisting that they be taken
seriously as people who care enough about themselves to put effort and
intellect into every aspect of life no matter how mundane.
Should we judge Dr. Taylor by how
he’s dressed? Or should we be hypocrites like the dreadlocked hippy who screams,
“don’t judge me,” one minute and calls someone a “suit,” the next? At one point
it may have surprised people to see that the ESA doesn’t have a more “professional”
dress code, but people didn’t even notice until something as gaudy as Dr. Taylor’s
shirt assaulted their eyeballs. We take it for granted that scientists in our
time wouldn’t wear old-fashioned clichés like lab coats and neckties. In fact,
Dr. Taylor’s shirt may have been an example, like NASA’s “
Mohawk Guy”, of
scientists trying to show the public that they’re not a bunch of stuffy nerds.
“Hey,” they seem
to say, “We’re just like you!”
“No you’re not!” I
shout back, “You’re rocket scientists and you just put a probe on a
comet! This is the feat of a lifetime. You could be wearing gold tuxedos right
now. Why are you dressed for a barbecue?”
