Confessions of an Ex-Preppy

The 10th anniversary issue of Details is a particularly great example of just how intellectually and spiritually bankrupt men’s fashion journalism is, as is the culture of celebrity worship it promotes. For the editors of Details, if it didn’t happen to a celebrity, it didn’t happen.

Celebrities are modern recreations of pagan gods. Monotheism is unacceptable to human beings, who are hard-wired to perceive agents in all kinds of random phenomena.¹ Being so influenced by ancient Greece, our celebrities are modern incarnations of Greek gods, bestowed with great beauty and special powers but also plagued by human flaws. Both Greek gods and celebrities are not perfect, but they are held up as ideals for us to emulate, and they raise our status when they turn out to have feet of clay or get caught on a lurid sex tape or get arrested for drunk driving.

Watching Details try to act like it knows the difference between boys and men is almost embarrassing.

The cover subject, of course, is a celebrity. More specifically, it is the head of a celebrity occupying the spot where we would otherwise see a woman’s — excuse me, a girl’s — pussy. Obviously, the editors of Details are not calling their cover subject a pussy. They and other celebrity worshippers probably see this as a rich playboy wearing a faceless girl like a piece of clothing, but what this image is actually communicating on a purely visual level is the replacement of a pussy with the head of a (23-year-old) boy.

Although in reality the rich celebrity has a higher status than the anonymous prop, in terms of the cover as a frame the photographer has us looking through, the girl is occupying a higher, more powerful position than the boy is. He is lying down, but she is sitting up, and she is higher in the frame. A forceful, dare I say almost masculine, straight arm comes down to her hand firmly spread across his chest. She could be seen to be keeping him down.

Near the bottom of the cover story is the headline, “The Remasculation of the American Man.” For the last few posts I’ve been exploring the ideal of masculinity found in these men’s fashion magazines. Now here they are spelling it out for me. How convenient. This will be fun.

This cover is crazy on so many levels. First, there’s the juxtaposition of a headline about American men getting more masculine with a photo that unconsciously expresses the perspective that the ideal man is a pussy.

Second, the cover expresses the crazy idea that celebrities are real people. When you read the cover article you see that “the American man” doesn’t refer to American men in general but a few American millionaire celebrities the writer happened to see on TV in the last few weeks.

Third, it’s crazy that Details thinks it knows much about men, because beyond the style tips (which are actually very good and worth the subscription), the content of Details and GQ is basically aimed at frat boys.

1. I try to stay away from jargon, but sometimes it really is useful. Agent means a person or something that looks, feels, sounds, and walks like a person, such as a spirit in a gorge, a jinn in the desert, or an angel in a vision. [↩]

After bashing GQ for a while, I want to talk about why I love GQ: for their great style tips. They’re so good it’s worth having to deal with covers of frat girls every other month.

The first editorial section after the ads is Manual, which is a collection of columns filled with practical advice. For someone like me, who never thought in a sophisticated way about fashion, they’re a godsend. One of my favorites recently was a page in the December 2009 issue that made a great case for buying a tuxedo that fits rather than renting a baggy one that makes you look “like an out-of-work cater-waiter.” Considering that just a few rentals equals the purchase price and that the events at which you wear tuxedos are important, it’s worth it.

The column has before and after pictures showing a very impressive difference. It has savvy detailed recommendations: buy a semispread collar instead of winged collar, for the tie consider only solid black, show some cuff, and don’t ruin it with bad shoes. In other words; it’s a classic look; don’t fuck with it.

Here’s GQ appealing to our intelligence. Don’t worry, it won’t last long.

In the January 2010 issue, once you recover from the shock of the cover, the Manual section has thoughtful tips on ties, black men’s hair, and an easy lunch to pack for work. These tips are about sophistication. Our culture values lack of sophistication, so these pages seem almost rebellious. They certainly clash with the content of BQ (Boys Quarterly).

The Style Guy is an advice column. This month there are interesting questions and answers about cowboy boots with suits, black shirts with tuxes, and the finer points of wearing turtlenecks.

But the editors of BQ got a couple of questions in this column from their readers: one BQ reader asking advice about getting his eyebrows trimmed in the shape of lightning bolts and another one asking how to get rid of the sweaty smell in his apartment. Advice columnists usually make a point of choosing to answer questions representative of all the questions they receive, so there must be many men who know even less about fashion and personal appearance than I do. Except they’re not men, they’re boys who have yet to learn that they need to open the windows and have the carpets cleaned periodically in order to keep the place from smelling like sweat.

I wish there were a men’s fashion magazine for just men, not boys. I’d sure like to start one.

In church this morning, I was appalled at what some people were wearing. I’m a goddamned pagan, and I go to church only when Catherine asks me to, but I have enough respect for what’s going on there that I go to the trouble of changing out of my couch-potato clothes into a nice button-up shirt and dress pants.

It’s not actually about showing respect for God, religion, or the church as much as it is about showing respect for everything in general. But since church should be a place where people of every type feel equally welcome, including rich and poor, it is a great context in which to think about what it means to dress well and the minimum it is reasonable to expect from everyone. Even if you can only afford to buy all your clothing at Costco, you can still choose clothing that closely fits your body, and you can even find something that’s nicer than what you wear around the house.

In photos of church services from before the 1970s, you won’t see anyone in camping clothes, even at churches in working class neighborhoods, so this change in attitudes must be due to the influence of the Sixties. I looked around church today, and for the most part, the only people who were dressed well were people age 60 and older, that is, people born before 1950. Children of the Sixties rejected the fashion values of the elite and didn’t pass on those values to their children, who are now the slobs in church today.

I can think of two reasons why someone under 60 is a slob in public. One reason is being human: doing what everyone around them is doing without really thinking about it. We’re social animals. Most people don’t want to stray too far from the herd. They read books that are popular, they watch TV shows that are popular, and they dress in ways that are popular. And now it’s popular to dress like a slob. If these slobs had been born before 1950, they would have dressed up for church just because that’s what most people around them would have done. But now it’s the proletariat fashion values most people are mindlessly accepting. That’s just what most humans do.

The second reason someone dresses like a slob in public is because of ideology. Some people do question historically traditional fashion values and deliberately dress in public like they dress at home. I’ll explore their objections in future posts, but for now, I just want to point out that the second group is the real problem, not the first group, who will just go along with whatever is most popular. So those of us who want to rebel against the dominant fashion values should focus on people who justify slobbery.