What do I wear?
A search for self in clothing
“What do I wear?” is the question of how we live – this year as distinct from the last. Beyond what’s in one’s wardrobe or in the shops, how we dress is swayed and blown by circumstances and fashion. Can you be sure of your identity when fashion cues are tornado-ing around every moment of your waking day? Can you separate taste from zeitgeist?
Two things happened. I embarked on a year of no-clothes-shopping (now in Month Five). Then, unrelated to the first, I got a new job editing a youth magazine, which inspired meditation on how work has tugged and twisted my personal mufti: a 30-year-old hoodied teen while co-writing a children’s encyclopedia, an escapee from Cool Hand Luke while scribing for the denim industry, tailoring and wet shaves to take newspaper commissions on Savile Row, and an inexplicable fondness for boring chinos – generally. While there’s a frustrated inner child that wants to dress in Japanese robes, my conservative taste combined with twenty years of fashion exploration has refined my wearables to a single category: democratic classics.
Classics because they’ve been crowd-tested for decades. Democratic because they’re widely available and affordable, as in less than £200. I own a vintage Omega Seamaster, but prefer to wear a Timex. I have a beautiful angora-blend sports jacket (in American parlance), but wear a Barbour. Designer jeans and aficionado Japanese denim don’t excite me much because there’s Levi’s Vintage Clothing in the world. It delights me something stupid that Nike has stopped the rot at Converse by investing the Chuck Taylor II shoe with sole-supporting Lunarlon technology.
And there’s something satisfying about respecting the clothes you’re in. In Marie Kondo’s zeitgeisty and strangely fascist ‘Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up’, you throw away anything you don’t find beautiful. It’s an odd position because tastes change, and sometimes we’re not sure of ourselves. Yesterday’s eww becomes today’s kewl.
The TV show ‘Seinfeld’, in the episode ‘The Boyfriend’, suggested that by your 30s you are closed to new friends. Too much fuss. Too much adjustment. “Sorry, we’re just not hiring.” The same is true of clothes – and drugs and contraceptives. By 30, we’ve decided what works. And what works may be to buy a lot of shit at Primark. Just not for this camper.
By restricting purchases this year, I’ve discovered that my shopping lusts are for what I already have: a slightly different Barbour jacket, pair of Levi’s, pair of Converse, Lyle & Scott jumper and Oxford shirt. All of which were buy-able after a 20-minute bus ride to Epsom in 1987 when my fashion awareness first blossomed. I dress for outdoors. I dress to be bullet-proof. I like a design that serves my lifestyle and environment, not LA’s, Milan’s or Tokyo’s. Nature? Nurture? Or a trend gone round…
In William Gibson’s ‘Pattern Recognition’, the protagonist deletes the logos from her environment: labels picked off, buttons ground smooth of engraving by a New York locksmith… Cayce Pollard has a sensitivity to, a revulsion of branding. In one nightmarish scene she risks a visit to Harvey Nichols and is nearly unmade via a confrontation with the Tommy Hilfiger concession.
Many of us have a diluted version of Cayce’s condition. Some guys see Lacoste as cheesy; to others the alligator is a terrace classic. There are people who like Superdry. Quite a lot of people actually like Superdry. For me certain branding gets a pass – three stripes on sneakers, a laurel wreath on a polo shirt – branding that’s kind of refined, branding that for the most part pre-dates my birth. Everything else is for the herd.
A dark joke from ‘Father Ted’: “You remember that fashion designer who was so good they had to shoot him?” But true designers aren’t at Versace: the real designers engineer fabrics, they work for the military or sports companies, they develop workwear; they create clothes that perform, often to be mass-produced. Democratic classics get you close to that source. They’re fit for purpose. Everything else is styling.
Which makes me wonder, since my get-up may as well not have changed in 30years, has the brain-time spent on fashion been worthwhile, the for-the-cause trips to Berlin and Bangladesh, Tokyo and Toronto? Well, yeah, maybe.
Well yeah: clothes are self-expression and empowerment, they keep us safe and warm and dry, they win us friends and sometimes jobs and bank loans and airplane upgrades. They envelop us 95% of every day. They surround us and bind tribes of us together. Clothes deserve a little consideration.
