I'm not interested in embarassing people on this list, people who often mean well, so I'm not going to recite examples. Whatever thoughts people might harbor or not, it's irrelevant. IT's a fact of life, just as racism and sexism is. Surely you'd agree that people on this list harbor sexist and racist thoughts, even about people on this list. IT's not likely people on this list have shed status bigotry.
I'm not sure what your point is. The retail status hierarchy is real; everyone in the industry is aware of it, and most people who shop are aware of it as well. Is it not supposed to be spoken of?
You wrote a piece for _White Trash_. What can it possibly mean when men in that study you were fond of said that they wouldn't marry someone with big cassabas because they consider those women trashy?
Huh? Is this guilt by association? Because I wrote a piece for that collection argying that the usual American habit of treating poor as synonymous with black and rich as synonymous with white was way off base, I'm participating in a class judgment about breast dimensions?
That pedicure comment was made WRT an article (in The Nation?) written by some guy claiming that dressing like a dandy was a way of exhibiting care about your fellows. The implication was that people who dressed sloppily didn't care about their fellows. A few people were rightly annoyed with that because they can't afford to dress like a dandy.
You're talking about Steve Duncombe's piece, appended below. It's not about what you can afford. His father is a minister, not an investment banker, and he dressed like a dandy on a grad student's income.
Doug
----
Rant
So you see a guy walking down the street: well-shined leather shoes, nicely cut suit, lightly starched shirt, silk tie. What do you think? The Man. A walking symbol of all that is wrong with America. Hierarchy, conformity, order, repression and an all around uptightness. In your eyes the well suited man is John Ashcroft, a man who doesn't dance, who clothes nude statues, and whose father taught him that a starched white shirt is "the mark of a civilized man". (I'm not making that one up).
No doubt John Ashcroft is a problem, just as there's little doubt that repressive order is rising in post 9/11 America. But the real problem of the United States, contrary to what so many of us on the libertarian Left believe, is not order. Instead it is this country's seemingly unsurpassable capacity for self-deception. Americans deceive themselves into believing that our country is a beleaguered underdog and not the most powerful imperial power on the globe. We deceive ourselves that driving SUVs are not draining the worlds resources, making us dependent upon repressive foreign regimes, and kicking a hole the size of Ohio in the ozone. And we deceive ourselves into thinking that The Man is easily identifiable in a white, starched shirt.
Nothing symbolizes this awe inspiring capacity for self delusion than the clothes that we Americans prefer to wear: Sweats, leggings, cargo pants, and pleated chinos. Polo shirts and T-shirts. Running shoes on grown men and women. Baseball caps. Yes, my comrades, the problem I'm talking about is leisure wear.
Let me explain.
As most of you here know I habitually wear suits. As many of you probably don't know I have a rather intimate relationship with my tailor. If I gain (or, less frequently, loose) weight I have to go to him to have my waist band altered. "Steve," he says to me, "You have gained (or, rarely, lost) weight." And there I am, forced to be honest with myself and to the world. I have gained weight.
But if I was wearing sweats would this happen? No. The elastic would merely conform to my new girth and my invariably un-tucked polo shirt would make my expanding belly almost unnoticeable. I could sustain the lie that things have not changed in my life. I'm still a "medium." Everything is just as it was. Everything is A-OK.
Running shoes also facilitate the great lie, allowing you to deceive yourself as to just how boring your life really is. They are the SUV of footwear. As you know, every advertisement for a Sport Utility Vehicle shows the owner climbing mountains, forging rivers, charging across the Serengeti Plains. But we also all know where most SUVs are sold: where most people live: the suburbs. And what are these eight cylinder, four wheel drive behemoths really used for: picking up the kids at soccer practice, packing in the groceries at the supermarket, driving to the office, and maybe, just maybe, driving to the Home Depot to pick up supplies for the weekend handyman project. But the promise of every SUV sold is that you could be doing something else. Except for the kids, the job, the mortgage and the spouse, you could be, would, be on safari.
The same goes with running shoes. Who runs in them? Not many of us. But the sneaker beguiles us into thinking we could: we could be training for a marathon, we could dash into the street swift as lightning and snatch that child from in front of the speeding taxi, we could be loosing weight. My mildly uncomfortable hard leather street shoes with their slippery soles do not allow me to practice such self-deception. I can not escape the fact that I am doing nothing more athletic or adventurous than walking from my apartment to my office. A careless child may be the less fortunate for my decision to wear dress shoes, but at least I am honest about what I'll really do that day.
I know what you are thinking: But Steve, leisure clothes are so comfortable. Maybe for you, but how about for the rest of us who have to look at you? When was the last time you walked down the streets and commented on how nice someone's Hard Rock Café T-shirt looked? Or when you noted how a person's fluffy white Reeboks complimented their ankles? I'll take a guess: Never.
When a woman or man takes time to dress in the morning: Making sure their shoes are shined, their jacket pressed. Tying on a scarf or tie that picks up a color in their shirt or a line in their pinstripe. Checking themselves in the mirror to make sure the whole assemblage looks right before heading out the door. When a person does this they give a gift to the world; they are a walking piece of self-generated art. Sure it might hurt a little: the shoes pinch and the jacket is hot, but it's a selfless sacrifice. Such a person dress for the public, not merely for themselves.
But what of the person dressed in comfort clothes? Who are they dressing for? An easy answer: themselves. We are used to calling those women and men who dress to the nines vain, condemning them for being obsessed with themselves. This gets it all wrong. It is the man and woman who dresses without a thought to what the rest of us on the street have to look at who is selfish. They give us nothing and themselves everything. Leisure wear is the manifestation of an alienated bourgeois individualism; the well turned out man or woman is the paragon of public, socialist virtue.
Again you raise objections: but everybody wears leisure clothes, they're egalitarian. You have half a point. Everybody does wear leisure wear. Last week I opened the newspaper and there's our president relaxing on the golf course wearing expandable waste trousers and a polo shirt. He looks just like the rest of us. And that, comrades, is the problem.
At one time the elite was nervous about us all looking alike, passing sumptuary laws to preserve visual laws of power. An English proclamation of 1597, for instance. forbid all those below the rank of Earl and Knights of the Garter from wearing "Silke of purple color." Later, on these shores, the New York Tribune of 1895 sniffed about the "dress parade" of African Americans who dressed above their station as they strolled up and down "African Broadway" on 7th Avenue between 27th and 40th streets
But we live in different, more "democratic," times now. A pinko like me can dress like a proper bourgeois and George Bush can dress like a retired postal worker barbecuing in his back yard. Surely this is progress, a triumph of egalitarianism. It is not. We may all look the same but we are decidedly not the same. George Bush has more money, more power, and more privilege than me or you or that retired postal worker will ever have. In the old days you could tell who the elite was: they were the ones with mutton chop sideburns, long black coats and high stovepipe hats. That's also what made them vulnerable: their distinctive dress was an open rebuke to a so-called democracy. Today, however, they walk among us, blending into the sea of khakis. Over the past few centuries of democracy the elite may have had to abandon some of their arrogant privilege - no longer can they ride rough over the fields of peasants during their fox hunts - but they've received something far more valuable in return: invisibility.
Let the elite have leisure wear, it's time for us to reclaim the suit!
>From a Rant-a-Thon held as a fund raiser for the
direct action protest group Reclaim the Streets
on August 6 2002 at the KGB bar in New York City.
Participants paid a dollar a minute to rant;
after three minutes they were gonged off the
stage. Proceeds of the benefit went to pay for a
new sound system for RTS's protest parties to
replace the last one seized by police.
Stephen Duncombe is an admitted dandy, an ardent socialist, and an organizer with Reclaim the Streets. He also teaches the history and politics of media and culture at the Galatin School of New York University and is the editor of the recently released Cultural Resistance Reader (Verso: 2002).