Today is the Best Time in Fashion
Everyone in menswear seems to believe his part of the world is in decline. Ivy Styleâs Christian Chensvold, for example, yearns for a preppier past, when Brooks Brothers still made proper button-downs. A Continuous Leanâs Michael Williams romanticizes a time when America still had manufacturing. The Art of Manlinessâ Brett McKay is trying to revive traditional masculinity. And StyleZeigeistâs Eugene Rabkin canât seem to find one good thing about designer fashion. For him, clothes are hurtling towards greater superficiality, hype, and crass commercialism. In a Business of Fashion op-ed about how âfashion has become unmoored and lost its original meaning,â Rabkin is so down and depressed, he canât even get worked up about his own indictment. He dispiritingly ends his essay with: âIn other words, whatever.â
Samuel Huntington calls such writers âdeclinistsâ for how they assert things are getting worse. He was talking about weightier matters than menâs trousers, but the idea of an earlier, better time runs deep in the history of Western intellectual thought. In his book The Idea of Decline in Western History, Arthur Herman outlines the long shadow of Western pessimism. âWhile intellectuals have been predicting the imminent collapse of Western civilization for more than 150 years, its influence has grown faster during that period than at any time in history,â he notes.Â
Herman starts his book with 19th century thinker Arthur de Gobineau, who resigned himself to the idea that the Aryan race would one day be tragically âcontaminatedâ through its contact with the Latins, Gauls and other âlower orders.â He then moves on to declinists of every stripe, âfrom philosopher-pessimists such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault, cultural pessimists such as Henry Adams and Brooks Adams, and historian-pessimists such as Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee.â Â
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