Take pleasure in your dress
Posted: Thu Feb 05, 2009 10:12 am
I have removed this post written by Montauk from its thread and am posting it here because it is excellent and sums up neatly a good deal of our common ethic in the LL:
It seems to me that Flusser, by spending so much time in this interview discussing such relatively esoteric sartorial points as collar shape, missed a rare opportunity to address the state of men's dress more fundamentally before a large and general audience. The primary issue, after all, is not that men don't wear higher-quality or better-chosen tailored clothing, but that they don't wear tailored clothing at all if they can help it. Whatever his (and our) finely-tuned and highly-held notions of dressing well, the fact is that it's all well over the heads of the Average Joe, who would perhaps like to look better but who probably requires a more philosophically robust rationale for "dressing up" than that doing so will slim his face or fatten his paycheck.
I believe that that rationale can still be found where it's always been--in a sense of pleasure rather than knowledge (or "information" as Flusser rather apologetically terms it). Having absorbed the fundamentals of sartorial grammar while still schoolboys, men in the 1930s looked great because they unabashedly had FUN with the tailored clothes which they wore elegantly and appropriately in social contexts far beyond business or work. Fashion was something they followed with a conneuseur's eye rather than a consumer's anxiety. I suspect that the aspirational "dress for success" school of sartorial instruction has, ironically, done more to dampen popular enthusiasm for tailored clothing than to expand or refine it, robbing it of the "cool" it possessed before the term was coined. As all the great dressers have known, traditional men's clothing is worn best--and most effectively--with a healthy dollop of unpretentious bonhommie rather than starchy prescription or corporate ambition. Power, if one is bothered with such a thing, is after all conferred by ease.
A gentleman in the true sense, of course, is NOT concerned with power, or prestige; he genuinely loves his clothes for their own sake, wearing them with care and confidence and without ostentation or shame. That kind of unapologetic authenticity is the real stuff of masculinity; it's never lost its power to impress, but even more importantly, it's every bit as much fun as it ever was. Remind men of that much and they'll teach themselves the details.
It seems to me that Flusser, by spending so much time in this interview discussing such relatively esoteric sartorial points as collar shape, missed a rare opportunity to address the state of men's dress more fundamentally before a large and general audience. The primary issue, after all, is not that men don't wear higher-quality or better-chosen tailored clothing, but that they don't wear tailored clothing at all if they can help it. Whatever his (and our) finely-tuned and highly-held notions of dressing well, the fact is that it's all well over the heads of the Average Joe, who would perhaps like to look better but who probably requires a more philosophically robust rationale for "dressing up" than that doing so will slim his face or fatten his paycheck.
I believe that that rationale can still be found where it's always been--in a sense of pleasure rather than knowledge (or "information" as Flusser rather apologetically terms it). Having absorbed the fundamentals of sartorial grammar while still schoolboys, men in the 1930s looked great because they unabashedly had FUN with the tailored clothes which they wore elegantly and appropriately in social contexts far beyond business or work. Fashion was something they followed with a conneuseur's eye rather than a consumer's anxiety. I suspect that the aspirational "dress for success" school of sartorial instruction has, ironically, done more to dampen popular enthusiasm for tailored clothing than to expand or refine it, robbing it of the "cool" it possessed before the term was coined. As all the great dressers have known, traditional men's clothing is worn best--and most effectively--with a healthy dollop of unpretentious bonhommie rather than starchy prescription or corporate ambition. Power, if one is bothered with such a thing, is after all conferred by ease.
A gentleman in the true sense, of course, is NOT concerned with power, or prestige; he genuinely loves his clothes for their own sake, wearing them with care and confidence and without ostentation or shame. That kind of unapologetic authenticity is the real stuff of masculinity; it's never lost its power to impress, but even more importantly, it's every bit as much fun as it ever was. Remind men of that much and they'll teach themselves the details.
