I Am Not a Man of Fashion

Whenever someone compliments me on something I’m wearing on or carrying with me—a belt, a pair of shoes or pants or gloves, a shirt or sweater, a watch, my backpack, my wallet, even my cellphone—I am forced to make an embarrassing admission: “Thanks, my wife Kathy bought it for me,” or “My stepdaughter Alma gave it to me as a birthday present,” or “Kathy’s mom Cora got that for me,” or “My mom sent it to me.” Everything I wear or carry that shows the least bit of the current taste or fashion or style, everything that exhibits the smallest hint of being chic or dapper or Esquired and GQ-ed, was given to me by the women in my life. In the realm of fashion, I must foreswear the active voice in favor of the passive: I do not dress and accessorize. I am dressed and accessorized.

One morning I came downstairs wearing a short-sleeved knit shirt that I thought rather becoming, but before I got out the door, Kathy uttered what are perhaps six of the more fearsome words in the English language: “You’re not wearing that, are you?” It was, I knew, the launch sequence of a disquisition that would “chasten me sore.” “Well, yeah,” I said; “what’s wrong with it?” She replied with four more fearsome words: “Where do I begin?” Evidently, the shirt was an eyeball kick to the current style: its colors, collar style, cut, and fabric were, I was informed, hideously antiquated, a relic from a bygone era of fashion. Where had I been, she wanted to know, when the caravans of style had each had their stopover at the oasis of prevailing fashion, then disappeared into the desert of forgetability? I thought the shirt was a classic look. She thought it was a Jurassic look. I changed the shirt.

How is it that I have watched this planet swing around the sun for more than sixty years and still remain an avatar of fashion ignorance? How is it that what I know of au courant style is the size of a finger bowl with room left over for a cantaloupe? How is it that I find the world of men’s fashion such a terra incognita, its map so filled with white spaces, that, to enter and circumnavigate it, I must rely on the female Magellans and Columbuses related to me by blood or marriage? When, exactly, was it that I was inattentive? Was a lesson presented at some point during which some Zen master should have rapped me on the head with a keisaku to corral my stray thoughts and restore them to the present? Is there a fashion gene missing from my genome? Surely such a gene would be evolutionarily adaptive, smartly attired forebears being more likely to secure mates by thus advertising their affluence. Why, then, has evolution given me the stiffarm? Why have I been rendered deficient in whatever region of whatever cortical fold contains the neuronal resources for recognizing the vogue?

Now, I could, I suppose, plausibly defend my fashion blockheadery. I could offer the “critical age hypothesis.” My mother laid out my clothes each morning until I was 14 years old; thus, as with language, having passed puberty without exposure to the syntax of fashion, I lost the capacity to speak it with confident fluency. I could offer the “maturation fixity thesis.” Having come of age in the 60s, where relevance, authenticity, and nonconformity defined our existential credo, fashion represented irrelevance, inauthenticity, and capitulation to “the man.” I could offer the closely-related “professionalization bias thesis.” As an English professor credentialed to profess literature, ever on the interpretive lookout for the inflections and innuendos of deep meaning, a concern with fashion seems flat-souled and trivial. I could offer the “context-impoverishment thesis.” It quickly became apparent to me, upon a desultory scan of the fashion catalogues that periodically arrived mysteriously, as if by elfin hands, in my mailbox, that the context in which fashionable people moved—the boat parties, the club scene, indeed, any occasion in which the smart set dressed so smartly—was not the context in which the tenor and pulse of my life was situated. Finally, I could trot out the old standby, the “socialization thesis,” and claim that being born male and learning to perform maleness, made my interest in fashion about as likely as witnessing the process of evolution happen right before my eyes.

Rather than defend the impervious density of my fashion ineptitude, I could rectify it. I could read the fashion press to discover the designers and their creations that will, in five or six months’ time, insistently shout from the florescent covers of glossy-paged magazines over the rooftops of the world. I could carefully consider what the celebrities, the glitterati, and the anointed opinion leaders are wearing and saying. I could debate the relative merits of cotton and wool and corduroy and denim and gabardine and polyester and tweed and twill, analyze the aesthetic intricacies of pinstripe and windowpane check and solid and plaid and herringbone. I could study the pages of Ralph Lauren—Marc Jacobs—Michael Bastian—Calvin Klein--Michael Kors—Giorgio Armani catalogues, taking notes, annotating, thoroughly metabolizing the latest spasm of trendy sports-casual-business-evening out on the town wear.

I could sing in the key of design, cut, color, and cloth, the only iPod-ed songs of a true fashionista. But I won’t. I would hate to be known as a “man of fashion.” Fashions are fads, and I prefer exercise other than jumping onto bandwagons. For me, a “man of fashion” connotes a man for whom taste is dogmatic frivolity, a man not fully present to himself, a man on a pivot, continually monitoring, 360 degrees, the fashion centers and designers of the moment for his marching orders, a man uniformed and uniform, stepping in time to the incantatory music emanating from Paris and Milan and New York and London. A “man of fashion” ignores the 1800-year-old advice of the Greek Stoic Epictetus: “Know, first, who you are; and then adorn yourself accordingly.” A “man of fashion” does not really adorn himself according to who he is, but, rather, according to what and how he wants others to think he is. His adornment is an image of an image, a tailored tailoring. He does not really wear clothes; clothes wear him. I would rather be a man who is never out of fashion, a man fashionable beyond fashion, a man for whom self-expression is not a pose, a man reflective not reflecting, a man committed to Mark Twain’s observation: “Be careless in your dress if you will, but keep a tidy soul.” I doubt keeping a tidy soul requires owning a Yigal Azrouel anorak or a Bastian cotton khaki suit or knowing that olive green is the color of the season. I would rather be a man who holds his hue in all seasons.

Besides, were I to become style-conscious and fashion-competent, I would complicate what, for the women in my life, is an easy choice about gift-giving for their benighted husband, step-father, and son. And I would suffer as well: I would no longer receive Kathy’s wifely lectures on the current trend in male garmenting. Now, these lectures largely fail to achieve their aim. I still consider fashionable whatever does not cause statues to flee their pedestals. But I relish those lectures nonetheless, not for what they say but for what they mean. Kathy cares how I look, how I present myself to the world, how I cut a figure in it, even if I am unable to muster much enthusiasm for acquiring that knowledge. In other words, it is her way of saying, in other words, I love you. And that beats a Kors chunky cardigan or a Bastian thin-wale corduroy sports jacket any day.