Next Step: Make Finer Distinctions and Understand My Values
There’s something I’ve been wondering ever since the beginning, when Catherine got me to start wearing plain-front pants: How should I have been able to determine that plain-front pants are better than pleated pants? How much of the choice between pleats and plain fronts is objective, and how much is subjective? Was there something obviously wrong with pleats I wasn’t seeing, or is it just a matter of personal preference? And that’s just one example among a possibly infinite number of fashion choices. In general, how do people evaluate one fashion over another — by what criteria?
Until recently, my only criterion for choosing one fashion over another was whether it was one I’d worn before. If I was familiar with a style, it was okay. Being a fashion bumpkin sure makes shopping easy! I’m used to getting everything from L.L. Bean, so why should I consider Banana Republic? Or when I’m in a Banana Republic store thinking about buying a shirt, what exactly should I be looking for in that shirt (other than the word SALE)?
Moses: “Before I give people the fashion commandments, God, tell me — does this robe make me look fat?”
Is there a fashion God like that of Judaism or Islam, or a group of gods like those of the ancient Greeks, from whence come unquestionable commandments and demands for bloody sacrifices of subservience? Will I be expected to renounce my old faith by throwing out all my L.L. Bean clothes? Is anybody going to expect me to bow at the altar of High Fashion with the priests of the runways mediating my relationship with Fashion God? Is GQ the Bible? If all this is the case, then some fashion pope somewhere is really going to hate me, because I’m going to make the mission of this blog busting his (or her — ha, ha!) balls. I’m going to lead tribes of pagan tree worshippers into the forest and put hexes on the priests of High Fashion. I have a problem with authority — not all authority, just authority for its own sake, incompetent authority, and authority whose main use of power is preserving its power.
Or is the fashion world full of sects based around charismatic, narcissistic leaders who encourage us to be happy and self-fulfilled? Is navigating the world of fashion going to be like encountering well-meaning but insensitive Christians, Buddhists, and ashramites whose leader makes them feel so good because they’re the perfect mother or father? Will devotees of different designers or styles earnestly try to proselytize me, politely pressurizing me to dress just like them because it’s good for my soul? If all that is the case, then I’m not going to want much direct engagement with the fashion world and will always feel like an outsider. I just won’t find many people who have a lot in common with my approach.
Click for larger image of an ad of tennis-inspired fashion.
Or is the fashion world more of a polytheistic, tribal world where different groups worship different deities with different values, none of them ever presuming to claim supreme authority over all the others? Is the fashion world kind of like the tennis world (another world, like politics, with which I’m extremely familiar), where some people like Federer, some like Nadal, some like this player, and some like that player, with no one even thinking of trying to argue that someone else’s choice is wrong? If all that is the case, then I’ll be much happier, because I’ll be free to grow naturally and organically into the style that’s healthiest for me, and I’ll be much more likely to find kindred spirits. I like the idea of discovering a San Francisco Bay Area style instead of something handed down from New York or Paris. I’d rather worship a god of the nearby river than a sky-god dictator of the universe or an arid scientific principle like a law of nature, which is just a sky-god in disguise.
So how do I set about learning how to make my choices in fashion? I feel a little bit like an anthropologist who moves to Alaska to work with Eskimos and needs to learn all their different words for snow. Whatever has been going on in the analysis of pleats vs. plain fronts has been too subtle for me. When making choices in any area of life, there are two things to think about: criteria and values.
Criteria: Deciding How to Make Choices
Snow on the ground is one thing, snow falling is another thing, snow in a pile is another thing, and snow shoved down your pants by your big brother is yet another thing. (The Eskimo word for that is the same as ours: asshole.) So, one criterion for distinguishing between types of snow is movement, a distinction we don’t normally make often enough to create separate words for it.
I need to learn to make different distinctions in fashion, and to do that I need to create a list of criteria by which to do so. Obviously, many people choose styles largely because they’re popular. That’s one question I have about plain-front pants — did Catherine want me to wear them just because they’re more popular, or is there some other criterion I’m not aware of yet?
Knowing her, there has to be more to it than just popularity. One thing that occurs to me is that human beings need variety. To some degree, car styles of the present are objectively better than styles of the 1960s because they’re more aerodynamic, which saves more fuel, which helps us use less oil, which helps keep us out of wars in the Middle East. Hmmm. Well, I guess car designers can do only so much about foreign policy when Christian fundamentalists are determined to start World War III because killing Arabs will cause Jesus to come back sooner. But not all fashions in car design can be attributed to aerodynamics. Some aspects of car design change just because so many people like significant changes in their environment every now and then. It’s the same impulse that causes us to rearrange our furniture every few years. So maybe plain fronts are not objectively better but nonetheless more desirable just because pleats were the dominant fashion for so long, and maybe 30 years from now some fashion bumpkin will get a girlfriend who convinces him to switch to pleats because plain fronts are so old-fashioned and he’ll start a blog about it. OMG maybe that will be me in my next incarnation.
So, popularity is just one criterion. There must be many more, such as color, proportion, type of material, and so on. Figuring this part out calls for list-making, something else I’m very good at, like I’m good creating categories out of masses of undifferentiated information like the kid on the X-Files.
Values: Deciding What Choices to Make
After I build a list of criteria by which to evaluate fashions and I’m able to make finer distinctions, the second thing to think about will be which distinctions I care to make. I may learn to make certain distinctions only to disregard those distinctions after all because they aren’t useful to me. Maybe I’ll end up deciding that I don’t care to distinguish between snow on the ground and snow in the air, but I will want to continue distinguishing between snow being pulled to the earth by gravity and snow being pushed down my pants by my big brother. That would be because I value physical comfort, and making that distinction might help me avoid my big brother, a constant source of physical discomfort. But maybe I don’t do anything that makes the distinction between snow on the ground and snow in the air useful to me. Maybe the one word snow will continue to serve me just fine when describing both those things.
If I were dictator for life, all offices would have to be this beautiful.
I probably won’t end up thinking about fashion the way D&G customers do unless I’m blinded on the road to Damascus by the sky-god, so what is the set of criteria that makes the most sense to me? Who knows, after I learn why people make a distinction between pleats and plain fronts, maybe I’ll end up deciding that I don’t care to make that distinction anymore. (Please don’t tell Catherine I said that.) In life in general, I value truth and beauty, so when I come to the subject of fashion, I want to figure out how my fashion choices can be more truthful and cause me to experience more beauty. For me, in the context of fashion, “truthful” means that my outer appearance reflects my inner character. Beauty is something I feel, and it’s like a wave of sensuality and intellectual insight all mixed together in one indivisible experience. I live for beauty. I want to see it everywhere. Offices should be as beautiful as cathedrals. I understand why I haven’t thought about fashion until now, but still, it kind of surprises me.
When I investigate subjects for the first time, I always begin with encyclopedia articles. They draw the landscape of an area, and that’s incredibly helpful for exploring it. It’s like cresting a ridge while hiking and stopping to study the lay of the land. Later, when you’re in the middle of a forest and you can’t see more than 20 yards ahead of you, you still have a sense of where you are. You know you shouldn’t accept a mediocre camping ground when there’s a beautiful lake another hour ahead of you. After some encyclopedia articles, I’ll have a better sense of the fashion landscape, and I will be better able to avoid fashions that don’t suit me because I’ll know what all the major options are. I’m reading articles in Encyclopaedia Britannica, Wikipedia, and The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy on the philosophy of art, the history of clothing, and the history of fashion. I’ve also read the first chapter of Men’s Style: The Thinking Man’s Guide to Dress by Russell Smith. I’m going to begin writing about ideas in these articles that have sparked interesting thoughts about criteria for evaluating fashions.
A Note on How Often I’ll Be Posting
It makes me sad that it’s been a whole month since I’ve last posted. I love writing this blog and am committed to it. The last month a combination of work, long illness, and vacation made it extremely difficult to find time to write. I’m now going to give myself deadlines: I will try to post twice a month, on the 15th and the 30th. So check back here by August 15 for the next post.
Don’t forget, the most efficient way to keep up with this or any blog is to set up an RSS feed. If you know how to set up a feed, use the RSS icon on the right side of the location bar to get the feed. If you aren’t familiar with RSS feeds, they work just like email. Instead of your email program checking for new mail, an RSS reader checks for new blog posts. But you don’t use the regular URL, you use a special URL. For a good introduction to RSS, check this CNET page.