Cools // McDougal // Bruh

Everyone in menswear seems to believe his part of the world is in decline. Ivy Style’s Christian Chensvold, for example, yearns for a preppier past, when Brooks Brothers still made proper button-downs. A Continuous Lean’s Michael Williams romanticizes a time when America still had manufacturing. The Art of Manliness’ Brett McKay is trying to revive traditional masculinity. And StyleZeigeist’s Eugene Rabkin can’t 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 “fashion has become unmoored and lost its original meaning,” Rabkin is so down and depressed, he can’t even get worked up about his own indictment. He dispiritingly ends his essay with: “In other words, whatever.”

Samuel Huntington calls such writers “declinists” for how they assert things are getting worse. He was talking about weightier matters than men’s 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. “While 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,” he notes. 

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 “contaminated” through its contact with the Latins, Gauls and other “lower orders.” He then moves on to declinists of every stripe, “from 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.”  

The problem with buying nice things is never the cost of the items themselves, but the costs that can come after. Anthropologists call this the Diderot Effect, which is named after 18th century French philosopher Denis Diderot, who penned the essay “Regrets on Parting with My Old Dressing Gown.”

In it, Diderot rues throwing away his old gown after receiving a beautiful scarlet one from a friend. While initially delighted with the gift, his pleasure turned sour when he realized that nothing in his home properly reflected his new garment’s elegance. His tapestries were too shabby; his chairs creaky. So, one by one, he replaced his familiar, but well-worn furnishings with things that were fancier. He replaced his straw chairs with an armchair covered in fine Moroccan leather; his old desk with an expensive writing table; and his previously beloved prints with pricier paintings. 

In the end, Diderot found himself in debt and not even that comfortable in his new surroundings, as he realized his old possessions were just as good, if not better. “Why didn’t I keep my old dressing gown,” he lamented. “It molded all the folds of my body without inhibiting it; I was picturesque and handsome. The other one is stiff, and starchy, makes me look stodgy. There was no need to which its kindness didn’t loan itself, for indigence is almost always officious. If a book was covered in dust, one of its panels was there to wipe it off. If thickened ink refused to flow in my quill, it presented its flank. Traced in long black lines, one could see the services it had rendered me. These long lines announce the litterateur, the writer, the man who works. I now have the air of a rich good for nothing. No one knows who I am.”

I’m thankfully not in debt, but I think about Diderot’s warning to those with more taste than fortune when I find myself upgrading the smaller areas of my wardrobe. For the past year or so, I’ve been buying some of the more specialized and (at times) stylized running gear brands that have recently hit the market – Tracksmith, Iffley Road, Soar, Fourlaps, and Nike’s Gyakusou among them. 

Men in suits love nothing more than to talk about how no one wears suits anymore. And it’s true that with each passing year, fewer and fewer people wear traditional tailored clothing. One retailer tells me that he mostly considers his necktie inventory part of his store decor these days, like bars that display antique liquor ads or currencies from exotic nations now defunct. But the reasons given by fashion writers for the decline of the coat-and-tie are often shortsighted, missing some of the more fundamental reasons why men’s style has continually gotten more casual. Since my own theory crosses paths with the reasons why we celebrate the Fourth of July in the US, I thought I’d share it today. 

Almost every story about the death of the suit starts in 1945, the end of the Second World War and roughly three decades before the suit would eventually wane. For Americans, the end of the war was a turning point in the 20th century, not only because it came nearly halfway through, but because the war revolutionized America’s role in global affairs. The US shaped the new post-war order with organizations such as the UN and NATO, which together with American diplomacy and military strength gave rise to the Pax Americana. America emerged from the Second World War as the only power virtually undamaged, its vast military and economic capabilities fully intact, and the only country with nuclear weapons. American power was at its height. 

For American men who loved tailored clothing, however, the apogee of the 20th century was a little earlier, in the 1920s or 1930s – the Golden Age of Hollywood, the well-dressed set, and the coming of age of classic American Style. The post-war period, on the other hand, was fractious, confused, and noisy. Sportswear thrived. Ready-to-wear proliferated. Designers eventually replaced tailors. This revolution in menswear coincided and overlapped with the culture wars of the 1950s and ‘60s. Establishment types wore the suit; anti-establishment types took to white tees, leather jacket, and jeans. That shift towards what Bruce Boyer calls “rebel clothing” was the first meaningful move away from the coat-and-tie. The suit has been trying to wash itself clean of the stench of Establishment ever since, never with complete success. 

There are dozens of other theories on why the suit has died, ones that are often less convincing and more cantankerous. Some say people are lazy and lack personal pride. Others say the availability of cheap clothing has crowded out the market for quality tailoring. The worst takes are the ones that link the decline of tailoring to Western civilization itself – as the suit has declined, so has morality and virtue. These are about as bad as people who base their conception of the 1950s off film noir.

Bonus:

There’s something fascinating about people who’ve committed themselves to a personal uniform – a tightly edited look they wear no matter the occasion. Think of Steve Jobs in his mid-blue jeans and finely knitted black turtlenecks, or Tom Wolfe in those dandy all-white suits, white ties, and two-tone shoes. Then there’s Karl Lagerfeld, who’s fashioned for himself one of the more unusual ensembles. His seemingly powdered, frosty white hair – which he wears tightly pulled back into a ponytail – is paired with austere black tailoring, impenetrable sunglasses, and high-collared, starched white shirts (he supposedly owns 1,800 of those same shirts, each custom tailored for him by the Paris branch of Hilditch & Key). A few years ago, an interviewer from Elle Magazine asked Lagerfeld if she could see him without his shades. He answered: “There are perhaps a few ambitions one should not satisfy in life, so as not to be disappointed.”

In some ways, the personal uniform has never seemed more anti-modern. In an age where most of us revel in having choices, the idea of limiting yourself to just a few items seems weirdly monastic. Robert Muller only wears white dress shirts and demands the same of anyone working for him. There are stories of FBI agents, who had to brief Mueller in the morning, scurrying out the night before to get the right clothes. Similarly, Bill Cunningham is famous for having only worn a battered French chore coat and straight-cut khakis for much of his life, and President Obama once famously said he only wears navy and grey suits. “I’m trying to pare down decisions,” he said. “I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing because I have too many other decisions to make.” Some call this decision fatigue. 

On the other hand, having purposefully cultivated a personal uniform also seems like a uniquely modern concern. A hundred years ago, people’s dress choices were tightly prescribed by time, place, and social mores. Country clothes were worn in the country, city clothes in the city, and rarely did the two mix. As dress codes have broken down, clothes in some ways have taken on more meaning. Choosing an outfit today requires answering some very personal questions. Who am I? Who do I wish to be? What do I want to express? The idea of having a distilled uniform can be alluring because it suggests we can actually answer those questions. That there is, in fact, some stable and true sense of self to be expressed. 

A warm, heartfelt thank you to everyone who nominated me for “Best in Media” in this year’s Permanent Style awards. To be honest, I was surprised to see my name come up even once, and the fact that this award was given through a popular vote means a lot to me. By the end of the voting period, I did feel vaguely horrified for Simon, knowing he’d have to write the words “Die, Workwear!” on his otherwise beautiful site. Mine is easily the worst name for a blog – let alone one about workwear. Still, Simon was nice enough to do an interview with me about winning the award, which you can read here. 

While I’m at it, I should say most of my writing is at Put This On, and I’m really proud of the work my colleagues do there. We’ve been working for months – months – on a re-launch. Fingers crossed, the new website will go up in February and I think it’ll be something special. 

Nina Simone in France  (July 1988)

Freelance writer Kathleen Hale had a great interview with Fran Lebowitz a few years ago, which was published online at Elle Magazine. The two met at the illustrious diner-style restaurant Burger Heaven in New York City, where Lebowitz laid down some pretty grumpy pronouncements about today’s fashion while drinking a large soda. Supposedly, yoga pants are ruining women, platform shoes embody everything that’s wrong with the youth, and all men look atrocious in shorts. It’s the kind of harrumphing that usually turns me off, but somehow comes off charming here. Perhaps it’s because Lebowitz herself is known for her distinctive sense of style, which doesn’t at all conform to traditional rules. She pairs softly structured Anderson & Sheppard sport coats, cut like they were built for an NYC financier or editor in the 1980s, with straight legged jeans, white French cuff shirts, almond-toe cowboy boots, and two gold rings. Regarding her signature tortoiseshell glasses, she said:

I feel very strongly that almost the entire city has copied my glasses. I went to a fashion show during fashion week, and everyone there had on my eyeglasses. Warby Parker has also copied my eyeglasses. Here’s what started happening: A few years ago, kids – and by which I mean, my friends’ kids – started coming up to me and saying, ‘Fran, where’d you get those vintage glasses?’ And I said, 'They’re not vintage. I’ve just owned them for a long time. They are vintage in the way I am.' 

Like everything she wears, Lebowitz’s glasses are custom made, but take after something she picked up eons ago when she first developed her style. Her white dress shirts, for example, are made by the British shirtmaker Hilditch & Key, but designed after something she previously bought at Brooks Brothers – at least before the company discontinued the model. (She groused: “If you’re going to discontinue an item that thousands and thousands of people buy, announce it. Say, ‘We will no longer be making our excellent Brooks Brothers cotton shirts that we made for 5,000 years. We’re going to change them in some awful way. We’re alerting you so you can buy a lifetime supply.’”). Similarly, she says her oversized frames are an attempt to "recover what she once had,” and of everything in her wardrobe, these were the most expensive. She refused to reveal how much she paid for them, but when pressed, admitted they ran her about as much money as one would pay for a car.