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Thursday, April 16, 2009

"Now where were we? Oh yeah - the important thing was I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time."
Posted by Jill | 9:21 PM
"They didn’t have white onions because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones..."

George Will gets in touch with his inner Grandpa Simpson:
Writer Daniel Akst has noticed and has had a constructive conniption. He should be given the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He has earned it by identifying an obnoxious misuse of freedom. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, he has denounced denim, summoning Americans to soul-searching and repentance about the plague of that ubiquitous fabric, which is symptomatic of deep disorders in the national psyche.

It is, he says, a manifestation of "the modern trend toward undifferentiated dressing, in which we all strive to look equally shabby." Denim reflects "our most nostalgic and destructive agrarian longings -- the ones that prompted all those exurban McMansions now sliding off their manicured lawns and into foreclosure." Jeans come prewashed and acid-treated to make them look like what they are not -- authentic work clothes for horny-handed sons of toil and the soil. Denim on the bourgeoisie is, Akst says, the wardrobe equivalent of driving a Hummer to a Whole Foods store -- discordant.

[snip]

Denim is the carefully calculated costume of people eager to communicate indifference to appearances. But the appearances that people choose to present in public are cues from which we make inferences about their maturity and respect for those to whom they are presenting themselves.

Do not blame Levi Strauss for the misuse of Levi's. When the Gold Rush began, Strauss moved to San Francisco planning to sell strong fabric for the 49ers' tents and wagon covers. Eventually, however, he made tough pants, reinforced by copper rivets, for the tough men who knelt on the muddy, stony banks of Northern California creeks, panning for gold. Today it is silly for Americans whose closest approximation of physical labor consists of loading their bags of clubs into golf carts to go around in public dressed for driving steers up the Chisholm Trail to the railhead in Abilene.

This is not complicated. For men, sartorial good taste can be reduced to one rule: If Fred Astaire would not have worn it, don't wear it. For women, substitute Grace Kelly.


Yeesh. And conservative pundits say LIBERALS are elitists? I can't wait to hear him hold forth with George Stephanopoulos this Sunday on why men should go back to wearing suits, ties, and fedoras to baseball games.

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6 Comments:
Blogger Bob said...
Yipes. i used ride the subway daily with Wall Streeters, talk about conformity. That winter, every suited male was wearing a camel hair coat.
4/16/09, 11:19 PM  
Blogger Unknown said...
What an insufferable prig. I only have one pair of jeans, largely neglected in my closet, but now I want to go out and buy a bunch more.
4/17/09, 6:57 AM  
Anonymous tata said...
I met Grace Kelly, and George Will, friends, is no Grace Kelly!
4/17/09, 8:16 AM  
Blogger Ideal Garment said...
I hate it when I agree even a little with Mr. Will. But here it is. Denim is a fine thing, when the temperature is between 45 and 85 degrees F, which is pretty much the case all the time in California. But most of the world gets much colder and much hotter, and so denim is just not really all that practical.

Furthermore, the fit of denim is difficult. Miners and cowboys in the historical context didn't care, they just wore them plenty big and with a belt or suspenders. Which also makes them cooler in the summer, and allows room for undergarments in the winter. The obsession with finding "jeans that fit" is a sad distraction, and has led more than anything else to women feeling as though they need to be slimmer than they are, whatever that maybe. Unforgiving fabric insists that a woman be exactly one size and not another.

Almost anything else is more comfortable and more flattering on almost everyone, but jeans have a cachet, which they once merited. It is mysterious to me, the continued wearing of jeans and I work with people and their clothing daily. A great and bizarre thing, this jeans phenom. Perhaps it is because denim is cheap and fairly easy to work with, and so manufacturers profit from higher margins off of jeans than from many other kinds of garments. Especially now, in the age of the 200 dollar jeans.

Meanwhile, I again agree, but we use a different model: What would Myrna Loy Wear?" We don't have a male, as there is no male who has really dressed sensibly in the western world, as far as we can see.

(Except Jeff, in his Ideal Garments. Always handsome and happy, warm when it is cold, cool when it is hot, and everything into the wash. We are sad to report he took a desk job, and wears the ubiquitous suit-type things now, which look fine, but are less graceful, in form, to wear, and to care for.)
4/17/09, 3:00 PM  
Blogger Unknown said...
Fedoras? Straw boaters, more like.
4/17/09, 4:42 PM  
Blogger Phil said...
That ignorant cocksucker can lick my fucking balls.
If he were handy, I would bitch slap him with my greasy, calloused hand.
4/20/09, 12:52 AM  
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