Today, George Will takes to the pages of The Washington Post to complain about people wearing jeans. Which begs the question: When do Will and Andy Rooney get their joint T.V. show off the ground?
On a mildly more serious note, I'm sympathetic to his argument. Though wearing jeans even now, I've long been a proponent of more variety in and attention to men's fashion. My colleagues (cough Serwer cough) question my decision to sport flashy neckties in the office (wait until I bring out the seersucker after Memorial Day). Will himself would appreciate that I actually own several bow ties, and probably be miffed that I've worn them with jeans. That said, I'm a freedom loving liberal, and I don't think we should be telling people how to dress. Will, like many conservatives, prefers the soft authoritarianism of shame:
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.
Ironically, perhaps, these two style icons were old when Will was a child. Will's cries for authenticity, and apparently limiting denim-wearing to manual laborers, fall flat when he asks people to adopt fashion choices that were solidified generations ago. He condemns conformity, but he thinks we should all conform to the era of the grey flannel suit. Of course, you have to appreciate the boldness of a man obsessed with the sport of baseball as a metaphor for all things decrying the infantilization of America because some people wear jeans and play video games.
Ultimately, Will is mad because he can't tell who is poor anymore. He claims his quibble is merely with those who don't take any care about their appearance, but that's a matter of taste; people who wear jeans still put a lot of time into looking nice by their own standards. Will's implicit argument is that if we could only tell social classes apart, the classic social order would return: If the bourgeois would dress like the bourgeois, and the working man like the working man, then we'd be a much more "mature" nation. His assertion that "it is a straight line from the fall of the Bastille to the rise of denim" makes me wonder where he stands regarding authoritarian governments; after all, the fashion and taste Will praises was invented by the Sun King to keep his nobles busy getting dressed and not plotting to kill him. If only the American middle class focused more on their own appearance, they wouldn't be so busy electing radical socialists to redistribute income. Or something like that.
For a more erudite discussion of the politics of fashion and culture, particularly in reference to the French Revolution, I'd recommend Gilles Lipovetsky's "Empire of Fashion," which is really quite good.
-- Tim Fernholz
