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.

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.

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.

The cover provides a mild shock that momentarily tests my resolve to undertake my journey and forces me to remind myself why it is worth the risk to my mental faculties.

January 2010 cover of Frat Boy GQ

Is it worth dealing with page after page of Frat Boy GQ just to find those few pages out of Grown-up GQ? See, when you subscribe to GQ you actually get two magazines in one. It is as though two completely separate magazine staffs write under the single banner labeled “GQ.”

The staff of Grown-up GQ seems to be composed of mature, thoughtful, sophisticated gentlemen who are no less traditional than they are contemporary. They would feel at home with the gentlemen of any age because they dress and behave with high standards, and they go below the surface of things. They show me all kinds of details about style, nuances that I would miss on my own because I do not have much experience with men’s fashion.

By contrast, the staff of Frat Boy GQ seems to be composed of immature, stupid, shallow peasants who seem to actively work at keeping their intellectual and emotional development from going past that of adolescence and who are going to take Western civilization back to the Dark Ages unless we figure out some way to keep them down.

For Frat Boy GQ, women don’t even exist. You will never see them in its pages. Frat Boy GQ likes girls, and the younger and nekkider the better. These are not women who will challenge the frat boy to grow up, make him think, or encourage him to share his introspection or thoughtful analysis of the world around him. These girls are interested in only one thing: having sex with a frat boy. With covers like these, it’s kind of ironic that the G in GQ stands for Gentlemen’s. BQ would be more appropriate. You get two magazines in one: GQ and BQ.

The covers aren’t always so stupid, so it’s invariably a mild shock when I pick up a new issue of GQ and see the cover of BQ. But as much as I loathe BQ, I know that it is what I must endure to reach the nuggets of style gold in GQ. And they are there. I’ll show you in a future post.

There seems to be some weird kind of self-hatred in men’s fashion magazines. These magazines are based on the idea that a man gets some benefit from thinking about what he wears, and they always have great spreads with models (instead of celebrities) showing current and affordable clothing with thoughtful pointers on what kind of nuances to look for. But so many times these same magazines act as though spending time thinking about fashion is boring or difficult. They’re schizophrenic.

Take the article I mentioned in my last post, where three “real men” (meaning that they’re merely young, attractive, and wealthy, not famous) are interviewed about how they buy clothes. The article, written by a woman who, according to her LinkedIn page, has been out of college for all of three years, starts out by saying, “Let’s face it: Guys hate shopping.”

Let’s face it: Gals hate thinking about politics.

Look here young lady, I am a man. Why is it that calling a woman a gal would get your ass sued so fast your head would spin but it’s perfectly okay to call a man a guy? Stop using that stupid word. That is so unbelievably condescending. Imagine that I, a man, wrote an article for Vogue or Cosmopolitan that began: “Let’s face it: gals hate thinking about politics.” That’s right, you can’t imagine it, because there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell that such a sexist, pigheaded moron would even get as far as a phone call with an editor at a women’s fashion magazine. But it’s okay for women to dumb all of us down, and apparently there’s so much self-hatred among men’s magazine editors that they hire twentysomething gals who think they know what it’s like to be a man.

A Men’s Vogue kind of guy: “Gimme my suit jacket, hon, I have to close this deal!”

This gal says the objective of shopping should be “to keep it swift and painless.” She says we should shop for clothes “with all the urgency of closing a deal—pick one brand, one store, or one neighborhood and knock out everything at once.” The cover of that same issue has a headline that says, “11 DEAL-CLOSING SUITS.” Ah, closing a deal, that’s a manly activity I can relate to, me being a real man and all. Can you imagine a corresponding article in a woman’s fashion magazine to act as though closing a deal is a typical feminine experience? This is an asinine stereotype of masculinity, and by the way, it’s not even a very good way to make deals. The best deals come through a patient process of back and forth, of two sides getting to know and respect each other. Only alpha males in movies urgently close deals; real men don’t. This gal wants to show us men how three men “get in, get out, and get on with their lives” as though shopping for clothes couldn’t possibly be enjoyable or meaningful. Why should I take advice on what to wear from someone who thinks shopping for clothes is like going to the dentist?

One person our gal interviews is an art-world executive who says, “I have no opinion. Just hand me stuff. I have two jobs—I’m too busy to shop.” First of all, anybody who has two jobs is twisted, and the editors of men’s fashion magazines should not be holding up sick people as my role models for anything, including what to wear, even if having two jobs means they close twice as many deals as the rest of us. This workaholic has a disease and needs treatment; don’t be his enabler. Anyway, he likes to go shopping with his son because he says that “otherwise, my attention span for shopping is about the same as his.” So if he hates shopping for clothes so much, then why the hell is he being interviewed? To get ideas about how to shop, why not interview somebody who actually likes to shop?

This article is totally ridiculous, and it’s totally representative of mainstream men’s fashion journalism. One cult of guyness controls all three major men’s fashion magazines, and it also permeates our culture judging by the popularity of Beavis and Butthead, and Homer Simpson, and the fact that a frat boy could even get close enough to the presidency to be installed in a judicial coup d’etat. One narrow model of masculinity is being given far too much power over us, and I will fight it with everything I have. It’s personal. All my life I have been injured by so-called teachers, managers, and peers who actively persecuted my sensitive, feminine side. This cult of guyness, this poorly disguised self-hatred, has real consequences in individual’s lives.

Men have it very difficult. Feminism has contributed to a culture of discrimination against perfectly benign masculine qualities such as assertiveness, especially in bastions of fanatical political correctness such as my hometown of Berkeley. So many Birkenstock-wearing men around here have completely internalized the feminist criticism of masculine qualities. But if we’re too soft and sensitive we run the risk of being called gay, which doesn’t really mean “gay” but rather, “not masculine enough,” the same way a person with one white parent and one black parent can be called black but not white. The June/July 2008 issue of Details has an article titled “Does Everyone Think You’re Gay?” in which it lists things to avoid if you don’t want to be called a faggot. One of them is tennis, which is the closest thing I have to a religion, so fuck all you assholes over at Details. Also on the list are Mini Coopers, vodka cranberry cocktails, E.M. Forster, and yogurt.

Question for the editors at Details: What’s the most gay sport here?

The fact that this is tongue-in-cheek makes such a ridiculously arbitrary definition of masculinity no less hurtful because it encourages us to doubt our masculinity at every turn. It’s especially annoying given that so many of the advertisements in men’s fashion magazines express a vision of masculinity that is strongly influenced by gay sexual aesthetics. The ad columns of men’s fashion magazines have a well-rounded picture of masculinity, but the news columns are stuck in the mid-20th century frat-boy caricature of masculinity. This is another aspect of the schizophrenia of men’s fashion magazines that I will explore in future posts. I think that gay men have a hell of a lot to teach straight men about what it means to be a man, and it’s far deeper than the superficial stereotypes exemplified by Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.

In America, it wasn’t even until 1920 that all women could even vote, but women have made a huge amount of progress becoming more balanced, winning options to pursue traditionally masculine roles and qualities. But men are decades behind this curve of integration of qualities of the opposite sex. It is more acceptable for men in my generation than in my father’s generation to show traditionally female qualities such as sensitivity and an appreciation for yogurt, but dysfunctional attitudes such as those of men’s fashion editors still have way too much power over our lives.

Well, this post is already a healthy length. So much for keeping this rant brief and going to my happy place. My next post will start describing my search for my own approach to beauty in men’s fashion. For now, I need to calm down. I think I’ll go practice my serve to release some tension. After all, using sticks to smash the daylights out of small furry things has been a pretty manly thing to do for tens of thousands of years.

Feeling insecure yet?

One advantage for the editors is that putting celebrities on covers provokes a response of insecurity in us. By setting the standard impossibly high — that all of us men should emulate eternally young alpha males — the editors increase our sense of unworthiness. This reminds me a bit of fundamentalist Christianity, where there is the deep feeling of unworthiness that comes when you realize that you will never measure up to God’s standards. In men’s fashion journalism there is the chronic feeling of unworthiness that comes when you realize that you will never achieve alpha male status. Forgive us, Most High Magazine Editors, for we have sinned. We have developed wrinkles and have not made our first million and haven’t achieved anything particularly noteworthy in your eyes. We are not worthy to grace thy covers.

Just as individuals can have complexes, so can cultures, and a feeling of unworthiness is one of Western civilization’s favorite cultural complexes. We’ve been working on that one for thousands of years. The editors of men’s fashion magazines and the advertisers who support them benefit financially from us feeling a constant sense of inferiority because then we’re that much more in need of their product. They appear to be selling information on fashion, but what they’re really selling is redemption. They say they can save us from our uncoolness, if we only listen to the word!

Only impatient Americans could believe that instant coffee could taste better than fresh coffee or that you could stock your closet in under an hour.

This month’s cover of Men’s Vogue has a headline that says, “STOCK YOUR CLOSET IN UNDER AN HOUR.” Instant salvation, my brothers! Somebody say amen! Man, I have totally been headed down the wrong track. I was thinking that my clothing might be an outward expression of my inner character, and that it was going to take a year or two to experiment and find out what kind of fashions are best for me, but now the editors of Men’s Vogue enlighten me that there’s no need for me to think deeply about what I should be wearing. I just need to thoughtlessly follow their formula. I’m sure it’s completely irrelevant that the clothes they recommend are made by the some of their biggest advertisers. The magazine editors are the Pat Robertsons and Jerry Falwells of the fashion world. They are trying to convince me of my original sin — my inability to make fashion decisions for myself — and therefore of my dependence on them to show me the way.

The contents for Men’s Vogue has this intriguing item: “IN THE BAG: Three real men hunt for a fall wardrobe, returning spruced up and unscathed.” The mention of “real men” caught my eye. It’s a tacit admission that the boys they put on their covers aren’t real men but are artificially manufactured products of the U.S. celebrity-making machine. So I turned to page 124 to see what the editors of Men’s Vogue consider real men:

• an executive from the upper echelons of the New York art gallery world
• a 30-year-old venture capitalist who says, “on any given day, I might go from a formal board meeting to speaking at a conference to a casual meeting in a university lab with a Nobel Prize–winning scientist”
• a doctor in Manhattan who is married to an architect

Well, then. If you’re young, attractive, famous, and wealthy, then you’re cover material, but if you aren’t famous, then you’re just a “real man.” Not only am I not an alpha male, I don’t even qualify as a real man.

The most honest editors would say, “We’re not evil, just greedy. We put beautiful morons on our covers because it makes more money. We’re just giving people what they want.” True, but that is just the mindless mantra of corporate journalism. The editors are cowards. They do not hold themselves to the highest standards. They care more about their magazine’s sales and ad revenues than about fashion, which is just a way to make money for them.

The magazine editors may not be evil. But what is evil is the part of us that deals with insecurity by compensating in unhealthy ways: compensating for a small ego by building up one’s muscles into a grotesque caricature of a male body,¹ wearing puffy down jackets², or buying a Hummer³; compensating for the cowardice that led one to avoid National Guard service by cloaking oneself in the flag and invading another country based on lies; or compensating for one’s general insecurity as a man by mindlessly following the style choices of the editors of men’s fashion magazines.

Just a few of the ways the insecure male ego has found to compensate.

The magazine editors couldn’t manipulate people if they weren’t weak enough to be manipulated in the first place, like the people who think it makes God happy when they send money to multimillionaires such as Pat Robertson. There has been such a failure in this country to develop healthy models of masculinity that there are hundreds of thousands of men who mindlessly swallow the advice of magazine editors and advertisers who cynically appeal to their basest instincts.

Real men. Ha. The editors of Boy’s Vogue wouldn’t recognize a real man if he walked up and kicked them in the balls.

1. Note that I do not mean to imply that all bodybuilders have small egos. Only most of them.
2. Note that I do not mean to imply that all wearers of puffy down jackets are insecure, especially if said wearers are prone to pop a cap in my ex-preppy white ass.
3. Note that I definitely do mean to imply that anybody buying a Hummer has not only a small ego but also a small dick and absolutely no grasp of foreign affairs.

All the covers have men who are young, attractive, famous, and wealthy. GQ has James Franco, a 30-year-old actor. Men’s Vogue has Eli Manning, a 27-year-old athlete. Details has Shia LaBeouf, a 22-year-old actor. Catherine recently told me that fashion magazines used to have anonymous models on the covers because the emphasis was on the clothes, but now it’s just celebrities, our modern recreation of the pantheon of Greek gods.

These morons are supposed to be my role models? Are you serious?

Here I am at age 43 getting interested in men’s fashion because of some character development in the pursuit of wisdom, and when I go to the editors of fashion magazines to see what they might teach me, they tell me to sit at the feet of pretty boys. These aren’t men. Why are boys monopolizing the covers of men’s fashion magazines?

There’s nothing wrong with youth, physical beauty, fame, or wealth. There’s not even anything wrong with all four in one person. (Are you listening God? I’m ready to win the lottery now. Oh, shit, I forgot — I don’t believe in God, do I. Damn.) But there is something unhealthy about being interested in only one model of masculinity. There are so many different ways to be a man. But our culture idolizes the ideal of the alpha male.

Think about all the people you personally know who are all of the following: young, attractive, famous, and wealthy. It’s probably zero, because an unbelievably small number of people have all four. But of the three men’s fashion magazines, not only do all three put such people on their covers, they do so for every single issue. This is totally unbalanced and unhealthy. I have known so many wonderful men in my life, and some have been alpha males, but most have not been.

What I would like to see on the covers of men’s fashion magazines is some variety. Sure, put pretty boys on the cover every now and then, just not every damn issue like this is some kind of Soviet dictatorship. This country has three separate major men’s fashion magazines, and they are all controlled by the same cult.

Fuck you editors of men’s fashion magazines. I will not join your mindless, anti-intellectual cult of celebrity.

Hmmm. Maybe a complex is getting triggered here…. I may need some more fashion therapy.

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Hastings Hart Starts Blog on Men’s Fashion by Dan D. Lyons BERKELEY, Calif. — Hastings Hart, a writer in Berkeley, California, has started a blog on men’s fashion, titled Confessions of an Ex-Preppy (http://www.confessionsofanexpreppy.com/). It is an unusual move for Hart, 43, who has spent most of his free time in life obsessively reading the news, writing about political psychology, and avoiding popular culture like a politician avoids responsibility. He has not thought about what he has worn since high school, when he learned to dress like the Southern preppy he was. Hart, who for years had been wearing the same style of khakis every single day and whose shirts were nearly all the same, said, “I used to think that anybody concerned with fashion was as dumb as a box of rocks.” But then he fell in love with a woman who is fascinated with fashion and who is smart as heck. “Naturally, I had to conclude that the empirical evidence was strongly indicating that thinking about men’s fashion wasn’t going to lower my I.Q.” “I still want to publish my book on politics, because it would bring about world peace, but if this fashion thing takes off, then that will have to wait,” Hart said. Because of this psychological aspect, Hart’s blog is an unusual take on the fashion world, which by definition is all about extraversion. For example, in one recent post, he wrote about a fashion advertisement, but he wrote hardly anything about the clothes. Most of the post was analysis of a psychological complex of Hart’s that had been triggered by the ad. “If my blog becomes a movie, it will be titled Revenge of the Introverts,” Hart said. Ex-Preppies Start 12-Step Organization by Sue Flay CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — A group of former preppies today announced the foundation of Preppies Anonymous, a 12-step organization to help ex-preppies escape their addiction to L.L. Bean. Biff Stanwick, the founder, said that a blog by Hastings Hart, Confessions of an Ex-Preppy (http://www.confessionsofanexpreppy.com/), was the catalyst that led to the group’s formation. “I had been in denial,” said Biff, whose addiction to L.L. Bean cost him several hundred dollars and led his wife and kids to leave him for Dolce and Gabbana. Reading Confessions of an Ex-Preppy helped Biff see specifically how he’d been buying the wrong kinds of clothes and helped him to make amends. “I’ve been wearing collars without buttons for three months now,” Biff said. “I know I’m only one Bean catalog away from being a preppy, but as long as Hastings keeps posting, I’m confident that I can stay this way.”

Yet Another Blog Created by Hugh Jass BERKELEY, Calif. — According to Technorati, there are more than 112 million blogs in existence, with 175,000 being added every day. But after thinking hard for years about all the world’s political problems, Hastings Hart decided that what the world needs now is one more blog, Confessions of an Ex-Preppy (http://www.confessionsofanexpreppy.com/). One of Hart’s friends, reached by phone, told a reporter, “Great, another damn blog to keep up with. Tell Hastings thanks.” A Berkeley liberal named Tom, who asked that his last name not be used because of Hart’s well-known propensity to take revenge on his enemies with blistering sarcasm whose erudition makes it undefeatable, said, “A blog on fashion? We’re trying to save the whales, Free Tibet, and stop the occupation of Berkeley by the Marines. Hastings wants us to give up our tie-dyes?” When asked why he felt he had to foist yet another blog on the world, Hart said, “The empirical evidence strongly indicates that there’s never ever been a blog like mine!”

Click for full-sized image. Ctrl-click to open in a new window so you can refer to it as you read the post.

I have to deal with something that I’ve been obsessing about for weeks: my reaction to the D&G advertisement I mentioned in my first post. You may remember that I screamed that these are the kinds of people on The Tonight Show With Jay Leno who can’t find Mexico on a map. The ad produced a feeling of disgust in me so strong that I could barely look at the page, almost as though I’d come across an advertisement with a two-page picture of a bunch of cockroaches. It was a physical reaction. This scene is my version of hell. When I first saw the ad I might have said, “If you want to punish me and you’re trying to come up with something worse than prison, give me a job at a nightclub that looks like this. This is where intellects are beaten to death.”

Cojo, patron saint of irrational fashionistas

This very strong emotion wasn’t a flash in the pan; it lasted for months. And closely related to all that emotion were a lot of thoughts about anti-intellectualism and how letting people dress in D&G clothes was probably going to bring about the end of Western civilization. What I have here is a classic example of what Carl Jung called a complex, which is the worst kind of poison to the mind. I’m setting out to understand a new subject, and if I don’t defang whatever monsters get awakened, they will severely damage or even destroy my ability to be rational about fashion. And Lord knows that we don’t need one more irrational fashionista running loose in the world.

Complexes are notoriously difficult to deal with, so I am not under the illusion that I’m going to resolve this in one blog post and move on. Complexes cannot be eradicated. It’s hard enough just making them conscious. And even if I did succeed in making it fully conscious, I sure won’t be spilling it all onto the Web. Even ex-preppies have limits to how much they’ll confess in public. The roots of all complexes form in childhood in those experiences that were so painful that we aren’t able to discuss them except with our most intimate partners in our most vulnerable moments.

The source of my D&G complex

I will say that anti-intellectualism in the form of fundamentalist Christianity was the cause of the most painful traumas in my childhood. (Some perspective: if that was the worst trauma, and it was, then I had a pretty good childhood.) I still struggle with hate and fear of anti-intellectuals, often to an irrational degree. I sometimes feel like they want to destroy me, because the most powerful authority figures in my youth all tried to destroy my intellect. But hey, I’m not bitter or nothin’. Christian fundamentalism rests on assumptions so out of touch with reality and contains logical contradictions so profound that even the most casual intellectual analysis exposes it as a bunch of pathetic lies based on hate and fear, so naturally a big focus of fundamentalism is teaching people that they shouldn’t trust their own minds. So 30 years later, just a bunch of harmless young airheads dressed in D&G clothes can make me feel threatened, defensive, and angry. Okay, so maybe I am a little bitter.

For a long time I resisted the whole idea of fashion, and I was content to wear the same ill-fitting, mediocre clothes every day. Other people may have different reasons, but many other people also have complexes that prevent them from dressing more attractively, which is too bad, because I think everybody should dress in ways that provoke the beauty response in themselves and in others. I lost the ability to believe in God (ironically in large part because of fundamentalist Christians — ha, ha, assholes!), and for years I was critical of the idea of belief in anything, but Jungian psychology has helped me realize that human beings have to worship something. We’re just wired that way. Even fanatical atheistic Communists reproduce the whole intellectual structure of Christianity:

• Marx = Jesus
• the Communist Manifesto = the Bible
• the proletariat = the unsaved
• Communists = believers
• the Politburo = the church leadership
• capitalists = those who actively reject the faith
• a communistic society after the disappearance of capitalism that we can never realize in our lifetimes = heaven
• the gulag = hell

The Christ and the Christ complex

Communism wouldn’t have been able to exist before the marriage of Christian theology and Roman religious institutions. The theology was that of a desert, tribal culture, and the institutions were those of a highly centralized and hierarchical culture.

Since I can’t accept evidence for what philosophers call an agent¹, I have chosen to worship truth, beauty, and love. My interest in fashion is part of my worship.

One evening after my first experience of the D&G advertisement, I came across it again in a state of heightened awareness. I felt the same reaction, but I decided to face it head on and left the magazine open to that spread and forced myself to tolerate my discomfort. After a minute my reaction was very different. I had much less resistance to the scene. I still didn’t like it, but I nevertheless found it very interesting. I was drawn to the young man sitting on the left. His pose is so unnatural, so fake.

A D&G ad in the May 1386 issue of GQ

I looked around the photo. Almost everybody is posed that way. The ad reminded me of a medieval or Renaissance religious painting. It’s hyper-stylized. Everybody is in a very unnatural pose, as though somebody carefully arranged everyone. Painters used this device as a way of communicating narratives and ideas to a preliterate audience. For the purposes of exploring my complex, it didn’t matter whether someone actually arranged everyone or not. All that was important was that I found some meaning in this ad, even if I was projecting that meaning onto it. I was almost certainly projecting intentions onto the mind of the art director for this ad, but at least it is healthier than projection of hate and fear onto silly young people and acting as though they were destroying civilization.

So here’s what I decided: the young man sitting on the left is holding his hands up to shield himself from something, as though out of fear. But he’s also drawn toward it, so he’s also attracted. He feels ambivalent. Toward what?

He’s looking at the man at the bottom of the scene. The lowest position in the scene is used for what the painter’s audience hates, the way hell is always below us and heaven is always above us. It’s a simple status equation.

The man on the bottom is on drugs. He’s got his shirt off, is lying on the ground, and is making strange hand gestures. He has his eyes closed, further indicating that he is paying no attention to society and is inner-directed. All this signifies that he has transgressed the normal boundaries of society. That could be bad as in the case of a lunatic or criminal, or good as in the case of a shaman or artist. I decided that he’s a benign figure.

So the upper half of the scene is about society, a vivacious party scene, and the lower half is about the inner life, opening one’s psyche up to the unconscious. And the man sitting now becomes very important and interesting, because he forms a link between the upper and lower halves of the painting. He is the only person sitting, neither standing nor lying down. He straddles both worlds. He is between the ego and the unconscious, and he is simultaneously attracted toward and repulsed by the unconscious.²

The man on the far left is the only person pointing outside the scene, indicating that he’s rejecting its values and is on his way out. He’s on the left side, the sinister side, which is further reinforced by his looking over his left shoulder. He feels like some kind of Judas figure. I think he’s going to betray everyone by going to Brooks Brothers. It’s interesting that he’s the most conventionally dressed person. However, in order to call him a Judas figure, we need a Christ figure. This scene doesn’t really have that, so we could just call him a scapegoat or martyr, a powerful archetype that has reappeared throughout history in myth, art, and politics. By going to Brooks Brothers, this man is dying to fashion (at least from the airheads’ point of view), expiating their sins of not studying enough geography in high school.

Zo, Hastinks. Tell me about your mother.

Anyway, my Jungian fashion analysis went on like this for a while, but you get the idea. I’ll probably make more posts containing extremely strange interpretations of fashion advertisements, and Lord knows what dark things I’ll be revealing in my psyche, but I’ll try to make it fun.

In the meantime, I’ll try to not be so judgmental about how airheads dress. Oh, there I go again. Seriously, one thing this whole exercise left me with was much less emotion towards this ad and toward this approach to fashion, and that was the whole point. I know I’ll never dress like this, and I will always think this scene depicts a bunch of airheads who should spend more time reading, but I no longer feel nearly as much emotion about it.

Because I deprived my complex of a little energy, I was able to realize something more rational: that clothing as art, for example, the existence of clothing designed specifically to be worn for a party in southern California in the summer, is okay. Some people like to do that, and there’s nothing wrong with it.

1. An agent is an entity that shows intent. This is not the same thing as consciousness; for example, a dog can be an agent because it has its own will. So God could be a dog.
2. The unconscious is another word for God, by the way. Pay attention to how people attribute agency to the unconscious. For example, Jung said that sometimes the unconscious “takes control [of the conscious mind]. Thus, without noticing it, the conscious personality is pushed about like a figure on a chessboard by an invisible player. It is this player who decides the game of fate, not the conscious mind and its plans.” Another modern substitute for the word God is “laws of physics.” For example, physicist Stephen Hawking says they “govern the universe.” I have to admit, I like these versions of God better than the drunken alcoholic father figure of Christian fundamentalism, but I just wish people would be intellectually honest about the God constructions in their theories. Sorry for the long footnote, but one more thing for my Christian readers: through Catherine, I have become acquainted with an extremely healthy version of Christianity and appreciate it probably more than a lot of Christians do, so keep in mind that when I am talking about Christian fundamentalism, I am talking about a completely different religion than Christianity. They use the same symbols and concepts, but they are separate religions because they worship completely different gods.

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.