I’m Probably Not Going to Have a Lot in Common With Most Men Interested in Fashion
As I read more, I am becoming more aware how different my motivations are than those of many other men who get interested in fashion.
In the Details Men’s Style Manual, the first spread has eight style rules. Based on my conversations over the past few months with Catherine and with other intelligent people who are interested in fashion, this set of rules strikes me as intelligently chosen. Furthermore, several of the rules point to the role of one’s character as the most important influence on one’s choice of clothing.
Giorgio Armani: “Clothing is the outward expression of the inner person.”
The same book also has a handful of spreads with eight to ten small paragraphs from famous designers. One designer is Giorgio Armani, and his spread begins, “Clothing is the outward expression of the inner person.” It was another encouraging indication that I may encounter kindred spirits in the fashion world. Of course, it depends on what exactly he means by “inner person.” I don’t know anything about him. Maybe he thinks it’s just a nice-sounding thing to say, or he could have spent 20 years in Buddhist monasteries for all I know. At any rate, I doubt he’s into the kind of Olympics-level navelgazing I do.1 Still, Armani’s quote is nice to see, because so many people who are into fashion seem so shallow. For example, other people’s spreads in the Details book give every indication that they have little inner life. They almost all seem like nice people, but I probably wouldn’t be able to relate to them because they seem preoccupied with the surfaces of things.
Fashion began when Eve asked Adam: “Honey, does this fig leaf make me look fat?”
Take the Introduction to another one of the books I bought, The Style Bible. It’s totally schizophrenic, or maybe I’m just misreading it. It starts out pretty good: “As boys, we are taught that masculinity and a concern for style are incompatible. Fashion is the domain of the woman, and too early an immersion in it might put us on the path to becoming sissies.” There’s a lot of stuff there that triggers my Jungian reflexes. I set in boldface key words that point to the power of formative experiences. I think this writing is profound. For me at least, experiences in adolescence certainly contributed to my hostility towards fashion. I was raised in a very damaging form of Christian fundamentalism where anything involving the human body was seen as sinful. For me, a healthy attitude towards fashion demands examination of my childhood and youth. It feels a little like therapy.
Socrates on fashion: “Know thyself. Hey, does this toga make me look fat?”
The next paragraph also has a powerful nugget: “What we are advocating is the simple act of setting oneself as the primary criterion in dictating what one wears.” The phrase I set in bold triggered memory of teachings in various religious, philosophical, and mystical traditions I’ve been involved in. You find the same thing in ancient Greek philosophy, yoga, the Bible, Buddhism, and shamanism: a moral injunction to know thyself. If you don’t know yourself, you can’t be confident of your judgments about anything. A lot of people seem to grasp that intuitively, but in my youth, life was all about unthinking obedience to somebody else’s rules. My intuition and emotions were not to be trusted, because that’s where Satan could lead me astray. Many ancient traditions set one’s self as the primary criterion for making moral judgments. Everything has moral implications, and I want to consider the moral implications of my fashion decisions.
Don’t believe I’m a nerd? This is me at age 12.
The Introduction goes on to make really stupid jokes, like the kind of lame attempts at humor that copywriters in ad agencies create for big, stodgy, bureaucratic corporations that try to brand themselves as though they were rappers. The I.Q. of this book has just plummeted. Then a few paragraphs later there was something that made me mad: “We know that you are not interested in boring historical backgrounds, so we will stick to the practical, functional advice….” I’m a nerd. I started wearing glasses in the fourth grade. I used to have a problem with compulsive book buying. I own a copy of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. In the last few days I printed out long encyclopedia articles on aesthetics, the philosophy of art, and the history of Western fashion. The writer isn’t saying that he’s only against those historical backgrounds that are boring; clearly he thinks that all historical backgrounds are boring. He has just declared himself to be my enemy.
So now I’m curious to know more about who’s produced this book. The cover has before the title, “AskMen.com presents.” So I go to AskMen.com. Wow, that explains it. That is one of the dumbest web sites I have ever seen. It is for frat boys. It should be AskFratBoys.com. I appreciated that the Details book contained the phrase “inner life,” so for fun I decide to search AskMen.com for that phrase. (Actually, the phrase in the book was “inner person,” but I didn’t realize that at the time.) For some strange reason, the search engine changed the query to “emily proctor,” the name of an actress. I didn’t see at first that the query had changed. I clicked the first result. It seemed to be part of a section devoted to celebrities. I searched the page for “inner,” and it yielded no results. I scrolled down. In her biography, it lists various films she’s acted in, and about one film, the only detail the site editors felt was important to mention was that it “called for her to appear topless.”
I guess if I want Jungian insights into men’s fashion, I probably shouldn’t ask the frat boys at AskMen.com.
- If everybody in the world were like me, then navelgazing would be an Olympics sport, though I have to admit it wouldn’t make great TV unless the Olympics went back to the way they were in ancient times, where everybody was naked. [↩]