{"id":229,"date":"2005-11-28T08:48:02","date_gmt":"2005-11-28T13:48:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=229"},"modified":"2005-11-28T09:24:20","modified_gmt":"2005-11-28T14:24:20","slug":"anti-fashion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=229","title":{"rendered":"Anti-fashion"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Manolo the Shoeblogger writes in <a href='http:\/\/www.shoeblogs.com\/wordpress\/2005\/10\/25\/the-paradox-of-not-caring\/'>The<br \/>\nParadox of Not Caring<\/a>: &#8220;claiming to not care about the clothes, to<br \/>\nnot be concerned about what one wears, it the paradox, for the clothes<br \/>\nworn by one who claims not to care make as much the statement as those<br \/>\nworn by one who dresses with the purpose.&#8221;  He&#8217;s got a point. And yet,<br \/>\nthere is a difference between fashionistas like most of his fans and<br \/>\nanti-fashionistas like me, and it&#8217;s an important one.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s what I wear.  Rockports or hiking boots, good-quality black<br \/>\njeans (usually Land&#8217;s End), chammy shirts a la L.L. Bean in the winter<br \/>\nand polos or four-pocket bush shirts in the summer.  Unlike most<br \/>\ngeeks, I don&#8217;t wear T-shirts very often. My color tastes run to solid<br \/>\nhigh-saturation &#8220;jewel tones&#8221; and outdoorsy plaids.<\/p>\n<p>I have an A-2, a classic brown-leather flight jacket, that I wear<br \/>\npretty much whenever it isn&#8217;t so hot I&#8217;d stifle, and I bought a<br \/>\npolar-fleece vest specifically so I can keep wearing the A-2 in deep winter<br \/>\nweather. Occasionally I wear Aussie-style bush fedoras.<\/p>\n<p>The last clothing fad I actually liked was the vogue for safari<br \/>\ngear in the mid-1980s; I&#8217;d still wear that stuff, but I wore almost<br \/>\nall of mine out.<\/p>\n<p>I tend to buy somewhat better-quality and more expensive clothing<br \/>\nthan my peers, but in styles that are designed for durability and ease<br \/>\nof maintainance rather than flash (nothing I normally wear requires<br \/>\nironing or dry-cleaning). I favor simple designs in good materials, and<br \/>\nI don&#8217;t buy anything I don&#8217;t expect to be wearing for at least five<br \/>\nyears (except that my shoes unavoidably wear out faster than that).<\/p>\n<p>To use terms that Manolo wouldn&#8217;t, my clothing choices have both<br \/>\na functional level and a semiotic one.  Manolo&#8217;s point is that the<br \/>\nsemiotic level will be there whether it&#8217;s intended or not.  The<br \/>\nfunctional level is obvious, I wear clothes that minimize the amount<br \/>\nof time I have to spend worrying about clothes.<\/p>\n<p>But I know what the semiotics of my clothes are, too. What I wear<br \/>\nis a modern spin on classic no-nonsense men&#8217;s clothing, with an<br \/>\noutdoorsy masculine emphasis &mdash; the sources for its design<br \/>\nelements are explorers, soldiers, aviators, and engineers.  There&#8217;s<br \/>\nan implied contrast with high-maintainance indoor clothing designed<br \/>\nprimarily to express the wearer&#8217;s position in a social hierarchy;<br \/>\nthe implication is that I don&#8217;t care to play that game, and<br \/>\ndon&#8217;t have to.<\/p>\n<p>(But there&#8217;s another level to that. When you consider durability<br \/>\nand how often one has to buy new clothes, the L.L. Bean\/Lands&#8217; End<br \/>\nversion of outdoorsy clothing I wear is almost certainly less<br \/>\nexpensive over the long haul than most of the ostensibly cheaper stuff<br \/>\nat your local mall. Nevertheless, it requires larger lumps of<br \/>\ninvestment, so it is in its own way a form of wealth display.)<\/p>\n<p>My choices also intentionally suggest that I have no use for<br \/>\nfashion trends &mdash; that I&#8217;m self-assured enough to wear what<br \/>\n<em>I<\/em> like, not what&#8217;s hip this season.  And that&#8217;s why, at least<\/p>\n<p>for me, Manolo&#8217;s Paradox of Not Caring is more apparent than real.<br \/>\nFashionistas are concerned with what everybody else thinks is cool, and<br \/>\nthat changes randomly and rapidly; anti-fashionistas, like me, seek a<br \/>\npersonal style to settle into that expresses what <em>doesn&#8217;t<\/em><br \/>\nchange about them.<\/p>\n<p>For me, that&#8217;s adventurers&#8217; clothing, sort of Indiana Jones lite<br \/>\n&mdash; except I liked that look before the movies.  I can make it<br \/>\nwork because I&#8217;m a muscular guy with a strong physical presence;<br \/>\npeople look at the way I dress and carry myself and then aren&#8217;t very<br \/>\nsurprised to learn that I&#8217;ve lived on three continents, visited over<br \/>\nfifteen countries, been fluent in three languages besides English, and<br \/>\nthat I&#8217;m a serious martial artist who can fight hand-to-hand in any of<br \/>\nthree styles or with sword or pistol.  They aren&#8217;t supposed to be<br \/>\nsurprised; semiotically, conveying toughness and competence and<br \/>\nresourcefulness is exactly what my clothes are for.<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s a subtler message in there as well.  I&#8217;m an intellectual,<br \/>\na thinker, a geek.  I could dress to emphasize that, but why bother?<br \/>\nIt&#8217;s going to be obvious whenever I open my mouth.  It&#8217;s much more fun<br \/>\nto play off the fact that people don&#8217;t expect intellectuals to look<br \/>\nnatural in adventurers&#8217; clothing, or people who look natural in<br \/>\nadventurers&#8217; clothing to be intellectuals.  Yeah.  I want to <em>bust<\/em><br \/>\nthose categories!  I want to make it clear that I don&#8217;t fit neatly in<br \/>\neither box, or for that matter in any box at all.<\/p>\n<p>So, even if I weren&#8217;t attracted to flight jackets and safari gear<br \/>\nand the adventurer look, I would make something of a point of not<br \/>\nusually dressing like a generic computer geek.<\/p>\n<p>But getting back to Manolo&#8217;s point&#8230;the high-level message of<br \/>\nfashion is &#8220;I am a herd animal, a follower, concerned primarily with<br \/>\nthe opinion of others&#8221;.  When people claim not to care what they wear,<br \/>\nthan can be sloppiness or it can be an individualist impulse trying to<br \/>\nbreak the herd-animal pattern.  OK, so he&#8217;s got it right that we<br \/>\ncannot avoid sending messages with our clothes &mdash; but at least<br \/>\nsome of us try to look like ourselves, rather than like everybody else.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Manolo the Shoeblogger writes in The Paradox of Not Caring: &#8220;claiming to not care about the clothes, to not be concerned about what one wears, it the paradox, for the clothes worn by one who claims not to care make as much the statement as those worn by one who dresses with the purpose.&#8221; He&#8217;s&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=229\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Anti-fashion<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-229","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=229"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=229"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=229"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=229"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}