My dear boy,
“The clothes do not make the man,” but they certainly tell you loads about the man. A popular adage, which I have taken seriously, says, “dress how you wish to be addressed.” I have often been accused of dressing too seriously. It is no fault of mine that I have a destiny far too serious for most, and I do not apologize for that. You have one too. An apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
Each day I see is yet another opportunity to fulfill purpose, and such opportunities must not meet me poorly dressed for them. For a man who has attended sorely important interviews, met with world leaders, and has been found deliberating time and again with policymakers, all in the cocoon of his mind, I know better to step out and make them happen. You see, I did not become the day the world met me; I became even before I was born. Oscar Wilde, offering his two cents, said, “It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances: the true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.” I can discuss this, seeing that we are still on the subject matter of personal grooming.
Hence, fashion becomes a navigation tool in the world. But what is fashion? American fashion historian, curator and director of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, as well as editor of the journal Fashion Theory, Valerie Steele, defines fashion as “the cultural construction of the embodied identity.” Carolyn Mair, in the Psychology of Fashion, commenting on the foregoing quips, “fashion encourages all forms of self-fashioning, including street styles and high fashion.”
It therefore follows that in self-determination and expression, fashion is an integral element. As such, it is disingenuous to engage in the enterprise of identity and self while conveniently leaving out fashion. Clothes are our second skin, and so great is the burden of human stratification borne by skin colour.
I may, for the purpose of intellectual gymnastics, tire this matter. However, we cannot feign oblivion to the influence that what we wear has on us. It is an instance of the right hand washing the left and vice versa. As captured by Ernest Ditcher in Why We Dress the Way We Do, “fashion expresses the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, and in turn can influence it.”
That said, our first disposition towards fashion forms from within: who we are and how we estimate our place in the world. Do not confuse this with mental health. Jordan Peterson aptly captures it as thus: “Your mental health is the harmony between your existence and the future and others.” We shall explore the intriguing landscape of mental health in another letter. Anyway, there are instances of fashion as escapism, a means to belong to another world. But doesn’t that lend credence to the argument that fashion is an integral component of identity formation and expression?
Nevertheless, fashion is not style. Style is born from “imperfection that requires imagination.” It’s not primarily about the clothes but how you choose to wear your clothes. More importantly, it is how a man ought to comport himself. This is what some refer to as “carriage” or “presentation.”
As Glenn O’Brien puts it, “today’s goof is tomorrow’s standard of excellence.” Style is about being comfortable. This, even so, is not an invitation to the mad men’s parade. You have confidence when you “dress with taste and care, if you wear nice clothes and still leave something amiss”. As such, you are aware of what you’re doing and what you’re not doing.
Think of fashion as lemons and style as lemonade. Fashion is what we do, while style is how we do it. Style has a personal, distinct tone. It is “a combination of personal expression and social norms influenced by dominant values.” Thus, style echoes a person’s social standing, their socio-economic position, and stage in their life journey, everything that a person might want to weigh in on in the discourse of self-preservation.
The clothing-fashion code which culminates to meaning as described by Fred Davis as “heavily context-dependent; second, there is a lot of variability in how its constituent symbols are understood and appreciated by different social strata and taste groupings; and last, it is much more given to “undercoding” than to precision and explicitness.” It therefore follows that the meaning supplied to clothes worn by an individual is influenced by “the identity of the wearer, the occasion, the place, the company and even something as vague and transient as the wearer’s and the viewer’s moods.”
Invariably, the biases of both the wearer and the viewer are called to bear in search of meaning. Considering the varying contexts listed by Davis, meaning is subjective, where the loudest voice carries the accepted meaning.
This further establishes that what is signified (connoted, understood, evoked, alluded to, or expressed) is at first different for different publics, audiences, and social groupings. Moreover, that clothing style can evoke different responses from different social groups points to the distinguishing feature known as “undercoding.” Davis referencing Eco highlights that undercoding occurs when “in the absence of reliable interpretative rules persons will on the basis of such hard-to-specify cues as gestures, inflection, pace, facial expression, context, and setting presume or infer, often times unwittingly, certain molar meanings in a text, score, performance, or other communication.”
The above is true if removed from the broader arc of culture. As such, within a cultural milieu, it is easier to arrive at meaning more consistently. Invariably, style, as individualistic as it is, is not arbitrary within the broader spectrum of culture. It is therefore not uncommon to be viewed through the lens of culture: a widely accepted interpretation of fashion, which, according to Robert and Jeanette Lauer, is “simply the modal style of a particular group at a particular time.”
As a consequence, you can develop a style, but remember that you will be viewed through the lens of the culture of your society. Ergo, do not be an enemy of the people, nor conform to their ways.
Love,
Dad.
