The Fashion-Haters
Dressed as he was in indifference to the winter weather and current trends, the Latino youth still looked stunning. I stood in a subway car, gazing at his gleaming black hair cut Caesar-style, combed forward at the front and sides. Each cluster of bangs along his forehead came to a perfect filigreed point whose tip was bleached nearly platinum white. Conversely, the hair at the back feathered into only one inverted triangle, which twisted coquettishly into a single curl against the soft, tobacco-colored skin of a strong neck.
He had softened his very prominent brow ridges by razor-nicking a series of vertical lines along each of his eyebrows, turning them into barcodes. These complemented the shadow of a goatee, shaved to pencil-lined proportions around pouting lips and a dimpled chin.
His tee-shirt was of black net, revealing the shadow of nipples and striped vertically by two violet suspenders, which held up baggy, zoot-suit trousers. However, the most astonishing elements were his accessories: thick fake-gold and silver rings encircling three of the stout fingers of one hand, ropes of fake gold hanging from his neck, and an enormous green rhinestone sprouting from the lobe of each ear. His was, unmistakably, a kind of dandyism, a street version that only accentuated a ferocious masculinity.
The Latino was living proof of the power of fashion, recently defamed in middle class circles as a tool of hierarchy, a form of mediatic control or a symptom of superficiality. Fear of fashion is part of a new suspicion about surfaces coming from the claim that beauty is inner and hidden and that the surfaces of our bodies are cynical fields of deception. Fashion, once a universal tool of originality, fantasy, personal power, and communication—open to anyone with imagination and a capacity for sensuality and harmony—has suddenly become suspect. A new anti-aesthetic conformity has prevailed, cloaked in anodyne terms like “casual.” Anyone who broaches this conformity is thought to have moral failings, for our bodies have been recast as indifferent packages containing inviolable souls.
I believe that people who speak dismissively of fashion are the superficial ones. Or, as my friend, the deceased novelist Ursule Molinaro, said, “Why speak ill of the surface when only the void has none?” That fashion is surface is, of course, undeniable. But what exactly is surface? Fundamentally, it’s the only data available on a day-to-day basis to our senses. It follows, then, that a denial of surface, always espoused on moral grounds, is inevitably a denial of potential information. Those who seek what they call a “deeper meaning” may actually be regressing into an imageless world of darkness, a kind of unintentional narcissism.
Surface is the shining perimeter of our existence, just like the surface of the Earth upon which we live. Beneath it is formless, unintelligible matter. Then how did surface get such a bad name?
The answer to that question is complex because the denial of surface as the fount of meaning was an unintended collaboration between two supposedly opposed schools of thought: idealism and empiricism. Plato reduced surface and sensory images to shadows on the wall of a cave, a seductive spectacle for unenlightened fools. The empiricists dissected it into meaningless atoms, from which they composed a paint-by-number world. But like Aldous Huxley, I see surfaces as magical doors to perception, the canvases upon which the secrets of the soul appear as clearly as if written on a wall.
What creates the multitude of difference on the surface of the human body? Biology, genetics, yes, but also personal history. What magic art of horticulture grew the creases at the corners of that person’s lips, the welling saucer eyes of that other, that one’s upturned chin or hunched shoulders? Worry and childhood trauma, wonder at the behavior of others, entrenched pride, a sense of defeat. Why do satin skin and a face of classical proportions fill us with a sense of wonder, disbelief, desire, or resentment? Because the visceral language of surface, which is beauty, touches us at the deepest levels of meaning.
“You’re a ‘lookist’!” shrieked a feminist friend as she watched me ogle prominent cheekbones, plush lips, and columnar necks in a men’s fashion magazine. “I don’t care how a man looks,” she continued proudly. “I’m interested in his mind.” Did she think I was paging through a manual for embalmers? Why couldn’t she understand that the surface of the living body is form animated by spirit, a crystal ball revealing human character?
In fact, the romantic ideal of love at first sight has a more realistic basis than most would claim. Written on the face, body, and gestures are many of the signs of a person’s inner life and entire past. All it takes to read them is a spectator who hasn’t shut down his senses in the name of a so-called higher purpose. I’ve rarely met anyone who wasn’t a near match in character to the way he or she looked. Getting to know that person better has merely filled in the categories.
Which brings us back to fashion. Fashion is the surface that further articulates our very articulate surfaces. It’s the more conscious appendage of the involuntarily communicating human form.
When you think about it, fashion may be the only universal, classless form of communication. Consider, in light of this, the urban poor, who have little more to call their own but their bodies. Hence, the high incidence of physical culture and action among the lower classes, their proud, exaggerated strutting on the street. Such people also possess the clothing on their backs, however humble or paltry that wardrobe may be. Fashion, or dress, then, is an inalienable power, granted in some form to all but the naked. And in the United States, beginning in the late seventies, designers suddenly discovered who was setting some of the fashion trends. It wasn’t the rich. It was the street person. The story is familiar now. First athletic suits, then banjee jewelry, and finally tattoos found their way into the mainstream lexicon of design. This is another power of the medium of fashion. At the very moment when classes seem to be sequestered from one another, fashion steps forth, cynically or celebratingly, to proclaim bridges of identification among them.
However, in this new century, fashion has suddenly found itself facing a huge crisis. In the name of a fantasy, and only a fantasy, of a new classlessness, fashion has falsely set itself up to play the great leveler. The trend away from stylization in contemporary fashion is in my opinion a false ideal with a hidden, predatory agenda. It’s an attempt to convince the world that elitism is dead and that no one holds the power—for the very purpose of wielding that power more subtly. To me, the drab world of the new casualness is a sinister threat, not only to the future of fashion but to the future of individuality, to the future of communication and its resultant community among humankind.
In defiance of my favorite philosopher, Georges Bataille, we’ve forgotten that the unconscious structure of all human groups is ritualistic, sexual, or sacred, and that ritual requires costume as well as pomp, etiquette, and other stylized structures. Covertly aided by puritanical ideals and a resurgence of the platonic, intellectuals are urging us toward anti-fashion as a way of escaping “the Spectacle,” which, according to French theorist Guy Debord, has hijacked language; these post-Debordian intellectuals are convincing us of the need for the neutralization of surface signs, projecting distrust onto our senses and appearances. In the geometric-field uniforms of a sports player, the tee-shirt and jeans of a manual laborer, or the summer shorts once reserved only for children, we are supposed to prove our sense of equality and freedom from social control. But is this clothing any different from the dove-gray uniforms once worn by all the supporters of Mao? In our boastfully casual clothes, we now go about lives programmed for drabness, like stunted Pilgrims in a Protestant community devoid of libidinal expression. Our alibi? That fashion was once a harmful way of distinguishing the rich from the poor. That merchandising is part of the delirious Spectacle designed to keep us enslaved.
I know that this is a mistake simply because the visceral language of fashion has always been and still is the most flexible appendage of the involuntarily communicating human form, transcending all language barriers. Whether we like it or not, fashion remains a way for the poor to invade the sight of the rich with inescapable, aggressive imagery. Fashion, then, is power. It is speech that can’t be silenced.
In our current, sham utopias of imagined equality, how have we come to exile the multiple delights of adornment? Could it be that the leveled, denatured world of contemporary clothing is a disguise? Today ,even the rich dress down, calling it discretion, attributing it to a new humility. But, to me, this new blandness resembles the cover effected by a double agent, wandering unchecked among the common people, concealing his vicious strategies for power and control.
*This is a re-edited, shortened version of an essay that appeared in the collection Sex and Isolation and Other Essays by Benderson, University of Wisconsin Press, 2007. https://uwpress.wisc.edu/books/4398.htm