Last February, the Professional Golfers’ Association let players for the first time in its history leave their trousers behind and walk onto practice rounds and semi-pro games wearing knee-length shorts. While this sounds like some sort of Bare Calf Revolution, the length requirement makes the PGA slightly conservative; clubs like Saint Andrews in New York have long allowed players to flash onlookers with four inches of skin above their knees. The course staffers scurrying around with measuring tape are a small price to pay for the privilege.

Saint Andrews, meanwhile, requires all shirts to be tucked in. This might seem like a standard rule unless you have suddenly teleported from The Heritage at Marion Country Club in Kentucky, where shirts can stay untucked provided they come with pressed collars and, possibly, pineapples.

The National Club Golfer is particularly fed up. In 2019 alone they published four articles calling for the relaxation or complete end of golf’s dress codes. But while pumping out editorials might convince a stray reader here and there, it’s clear nothing drastic has changed. I have a better idea.

Between 1998 and 2006, interest in golf seemed to soar, so developers, understanding the basic business law that when demand rises, it never ever stops rising, sprinkled the land with courses.

What a great time for that popularity to decline. By the end of the 2010s, courses had shed almost six million players, and as the supply of holes rapidly outpaced the number of people willing to smack balls in their general direction, the excess courses set about languishing unused.

Now here’s the plan: while those abandoned courses spend upwards of a year in limbo, waiting as the city hunts for developers and settles lawsuits, everyone who was once sent home for wearing black socks should turn these courses into Casual Communes.

It starts with a meeting place. All the bedraggled souls will gather near the course at the home of a family sympathetic to the cause. At dawn, after porridge, they will creep onto the course wearing porridge-covered t-shirts and inappropriate shoes, their drivers and putters glinting as the sun rises. And afterward, they will drop their clubs at the clubhouse and play wordless games of cards until night comes and they skulk back to their hideout.

Of course this plan has challenges. To stay silent, commune members will have to mow the green using manual reel mowers or, for a dash of mysticism, scythes. I hear there are bikers and meth cooks lurking about, but once they learn about the cause, they’ll surely see golfing in cargo shorts is more important than petty territorial disputes.

Compared to local newsrooms, the floor traders of the New York Stock Exchange face the opposite situation: photos suggest more of them exist than actually do. The picture that ran alongside an August 17 Washington Post article follows a well-hewn tradition of cramming traders as tightly into the frame as possible, this time between a row of flat screens and another trader’s back. Squeezing out almost all empty space like a Zip-Loc bag makes it easy to forget that, thanks to the industry’s overwhelming shift toward automating trading, the number of firms on the NYSE floor has shrunk from the hundreds in the 1990s to something closer to 35.

Nonetheless, it turns out our culture is so endeared by the thought of a marble room teeming with unstructured mesh-backed trading jackets that the New York Stock Exchange sees its floor traders as valuable branding tools. Even though the human touch’s actual advantage over automatic trading is disputable, the NYSE is convinced that investors feel more comfortable when a cast of familiar faces shares the same room as the stock ticker. Cable networks can slather their finance shows with a sense of legitimacy knowing Peter Tuchman lurks somewhere behind the news anchors.

The lesson is clear-- local newspaper reporters need a look. Just like pandas attract more conservation dollars than, say, the Western Long-Beaked Echidna, local journalists might be able to turn to something other than questionably intentioned tech giants if they doubled the number of hearts they could capture. And we need not mimic the frightening standards and chin implants of television reporters, nor should we expect most reporters to have the budget to pull off a Tom Wolfe.

An obvious choice is the Rollable Paper Hat. First, it resembles most people’s idea of an old-timey reporter costume, lacking only the cardboard Press insert. With its casual shape and fabric, editors could dole them out one day in a t-shirt cannon, and the journalists could plop them on their heads without worrying about disrupting their outfit.

Second, since it’s rollable, journalists can keep them stored next to their laptops until the politician they’re trying to interview lets his guard down, and then oh no! What’s that on their head? They’re a newspaper reporter. What a ruse.

The report, which was published without consulting the fashion industry, found that every year for the past 250 years, an average of two plant species have gone extinct, while plants discovered since 1900 have disappeared even faster. When questioned about the study, plant researcher Dr. Maria Vorontsova said, “we suffer from plant blindness. Animals are cute, important and diverse, but I am absolutely shocked how a similar level of awareness and interest is missing for plants. We take them for granted, and I don’t think we should.”

If we are to take those scientists at their word, things seem dire indeed. The Wall Street Journal reported last year that widespread disinterest in plants leaves government agencies scrambling for employees who can handle policy related to plant extinction and invasive species.

But these scientists are wrong. Plants are reappearing, in the form of floral fabrics that decorate the bodies of fashion conscious men. As every men’s magazine has by now observed, we are in the midst of a floral shirt revival. More pineapples roam the streets than ever in recent memory. To embrace a man in 2019 is to hug dozens of little trees at once. If wearing a sports jersey is to flaunt your fandom for all to see, then we are bigger fans of plants than we have been in years.

This wasn’t always the case. In 1999, floral shirts’ cachet was less certain, so it made sense for James Wandersee and Elisabeth Schussler to coin the phrase “plant blindness” to describe our habit of shafting plants to the background while cooing over the adorable animals that stomp over them. But if those researchers overcame their own blindness, they would see how legions of men walking out their front doors with seed packets printed across their torsos show that things couldn’t possibly be as bad as they say.

If plant researchers looked up once in a while from their field studies and data, they would see that ecological health has always corresponded with the number of floral shirts existing at a given moment.

In 1957, the government was too busy passing the Federal Plant Pest Act to see the only real plant pest was Frank Sinatra, who with his Aloha shirt had for years been starting fights for no reason with other men in Aloha shirts in From Here to Eternity.

Instead of building the Mauna Loa observatory in 1958 to keep track of atmospheric carbon dioxide, government officials could have gathered around the peeling Fauxna Loa at their nearest tiki bar and, judging by the beautiful bouquet of off-hour office workers doing their best to look relaxed, noticed that nature was well accounted for.

In 1961, scientists were so busy raising the alarm over the invasive miconia tree’s rapid land-grab in Oahu that they failed to observe Hawaii was also being invaded by Elvis and his swarm of gawkers in Blue Hawaii, surely replenishing any lost flora with its rayon equivalent.

And, as the Endangered Species Act evolved throughout the 70s to protect an expanding roster of plants, none of the officials behind it realized how futile their efforts were, as plant life far more colorful and numerous was being promoted in the same period by the evolving career of Jimmy Buffet.

In tailoring, where elegance is synonymous with graceful curves, flatness feels more like a curse than just another aesthetic possibility. Internet forums are littered with similar stories: a man has entrusted his suit to a dry cleaner, only to find the cleaner has flattened the lapels against the chest. A landscape of sloping fabric now halts at a crease, and the wearer’s claim to elegance and taste, once assured, now wobbles on its perch. And so, a menswear enthusiast walking to his dry cleaner carries the same recessive fear as a New Yorker whose path takes him right beneath a row of second-story air conditioning units.

In Marisol’s world, sudden flatness is the point. Her portraits frequently look as if a genie turned a magazine illustration into a real person and gave up as the transformation began. And that battle between two and three dimensions is where the work draws its power.

A Hugh Hefner portrait in Marisol’s hands morphs into a lopsided monstrosity. Hefner’s face, painted on a hulking block of wood carved like a hammerhead, reaches so far beyond the shallow slab on which his body is painted that he looks as if he wants both to tip over and challenge the viewer to a duel.

Change the shape of the slab, and the whole meaning shifts. MoMa’s placard for Marisol’s sculpture of Lyndon B Johnson notes its “coffinlike shape,” which might recall both Kennedy’s assassination and the staggering death toll of The Vietnam War. The portrait’s shoulders, far more square than any amount of padding can hope to achieve, suggests the artist saw in Johnson a sort of exaggerated, even bloated, self regard.

Marisol’s portraits aren’t all mocking exaggerations. Her rendition of Andy Warhol is comparatively unassuming, a ghostly outline of the artist holding his arms tight against his chest as if to hide inside the chair-shaped confines Marisol gives him. If there’s evidence of her close relationship with Warhol– they partied together after all– it’s her decision to paint him three times, each panel getting its own angle in what looks like a spell of loving fixation.

But introducing a band collar jacket to a room full of Americans is a gamble. The band collar in the US is like a Thursday concert in 1958. A hummingbird without direction, it hovers between meanings, unsure of which one to slurp up next.

On October 8, 1958, New York Times reporter Harold Schonberg captured the orchestra’s reactions as they tried on their uniforms:

“You look like a bellhop at the Astor.”

“Like a bandmaster.”

“Like a field marshal.”

“Like Father O’Malley.”

“Like a space cadet.”

“Like Chiang Kai-shek.”

The confusion spread beyond the orchestra. Guest conductors Herbert von Karajan and John Barbirolli refused to wear the uniform. And out of all the feedback that made its way back to Bernstein, the conductor told the New York Times the following January, only half was positive.

Continuing the long tradition of men standing their ground in the face of overwhelming criticism, Bernstein dropped the whole idea. The uniform, Bernstein announced before January’s final Thursday concert began, would go down in history as “Bernstein’s Folly.”

But as the country’s clothing tastes would later suggest, Bernstein’s real mistake was introducing the uniform a decade early.

Americans in the 60s endured a decade-long session of band collar exposure therapy. Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s meetings with John F. Kennedy beamed the prime minister’s band collar jacket across American television screens until the jacket was no longer separable from his name. In 1962’s “Dr. No,” the jacket appeared on both James Bond and the titular villain. And in 1965, the Beatles in their Nehru jackets performed at Shea Stadium in front of 55,600 fans.

And whereas for Bernstein the jacket functioned as a paper cup phone to the past, in the 60s it absorbed the opposite meaning, satisfying the futurist yearnings of an increasingly fashion conscious crowd. The same jacket whose Indian and Chinese roots gave men with Orientalist appetites a whiff of spirituality was sleek enough to speak to their Space Age techno-optimism.

In 1968, the Nehru jacket’s popularity reached a boiling point. The Washington Post declared on February 10 that “1968 may be the year of the stand-up collar.” And indeed, as mall stores raced to stock the jacket, wearable utopia was one trip to Macy’s away.

Now, long after the trend’s collapse at the end of the 60s, the band collar once again hovers between meanings. When Jack Dorsey wore a shirt with a towering version to his congressional hearing last June, the internet transformed into the digital equivalent of Bernstein’s incredulous orchestra. Quartz compared him to a priest, Esquire to an evil space wizard.

And for Wired Magazine, David Pearce can’t praise the scooter’s environment-saving potential without weaving in some comments about its dorkiness. “But they're not cool, he writes. They've never been cool.”

Seeing so many wrinkled noses takes me back to a time when new transportation technologies could drop into a city that not just accepted but romanticized them. You might think I’m referring to the Vespa, which rolled out of Piaggio’s factory into an Italy ravaged by World War II and in need of a way to zoom literally out of economic malaise. And still, Vespa from the start bathed itself in the sort of glamour that may rest forever out of reach for the likes of Bird and Lime.

But I’m talking about the scooter. In the year 2000. While dismissing electric scooters as dorky is practically part of newspapers’ style guides in 2018, you can almost imagine John Leland wiping drool from his keyboard as he writes about the Razor for the New York Times:

“As a mode of transportation, sadly, the scooter proved the stiletto heel of the two-wheeled set: great to look at, lousy for carrying laundry to the dry cleaner. Do not be seduced, as I was, by images of dapper men and women in graceful glide, cool breezes slicing through the hot city.”

Already among the glowing reviews, however, was a budding wariness toward the machinations of Silicon Valley. An LA times article written two months before the collapse of Pets.com describes startup workers barrelling atop their scooters to meetings, “liability be damned.”

If liability was an afterthought then, it’s a myth now. By dropping their scooters into cities unannounced, Bird and Lime contributed to a culture already steeped in data scandals and regulation-shirking ruthlessness. Even if they manufactured rideable clouds made of pure sexy, it’s hard to imagine city-dwellers trusting them any more.

Now, Bird and Lime could have paddled against this perception by prefacing their rollouts the way Vespa did-- with a good ol’ fashioned ad campaign. Rather than leaving image-making duties entirely in the hands of journalists, Vespa romanticized its scooters in magazine ads that recall the clean lines and perpetual motion of Italian Futurism. Teetering yuppies tend to look sleeker when rendered in pen.

But dorkiness is like a finger trap: on the rare occasion that 2018’s scooter companies do craft their own images, the grip of dorkdom clenches further. UScooters’ Instagram, as Pearce points out in Wired, tries to surround its stark metallic product with sensuously lit trees with unintentionally comical results.

Divisor plays so freely with the tensions bespoke tries to resolve-- tensions between cloth and body, ideal and reality, that I’m convinced the piece is sent onto the streets every few years like a sacrificial goat to cleanse bespoke customers of any shame they might feel when tasking tailors with bringing to life the Platonic ideals swimming in their heads.

A ready to wear garment that is never really ready, Divisor is always getting in the way. One of several bits of footage on Youtube shows participants walking slowly to avoid stepping on each other’s feet, holding the fabric aloft with whatever hands they’re not using to adjust the fabric around their necks. It’s a constant, gentle bickering with a garment that will never submit to their bodies’ needs.

The entire possibility of an ideal form disappears under the sheet. It shapeshifts as the crowd expands and compresses, sagging in some sections while taut in others until concepts like fit and proportion become completely alien.

And when participants themselves aren’t reshaping their giant communal suit, outside forces are. Staff members direct them to jump, crouch, spread apart, rush together, and even duck back under the sheet to trade places with others. And when Elisa Wouk Almino participated in Divisor at the Met Breuer, she found city officials working as de-facto tailors:

“We were sadly given only one lane of traffic, which meant that the sheet was not entirely unfolded, accommodating only 60 people. The rectangle of fabric sagged between us, rather than appearing taut and expansive as I’d seen in archival footage. Police and Met staff were on either end of us, making sure we kept within our limits, watching out for the cars and curb. This, to me, defeated the point of the whole thing. We were supposed to take over the street, not be dictated by its laws.”

But submitting to someone else’s idea of order is always what the piece was about. Pape originally intended the sheet to occupy an entire room in a gallery where parallel jets of air would flow, hot air blasting the participants’ feet while cold air refrigerated their faces. Had Pape secured the funding, participants would have let her control the very air they breathed.

And yet, in spite of sacrificing their basic comforts to a giant white sheet, participants come away seeing the experience, like another Hyperallergic writer did as “wonderful” and “intimate.”

If there is an escape, menswear magazines can’t seem to find it, judging from the articles Esquire and Fashion Beans published about what to wear to a nightclub. Both articles advocate for a sort of minimalist chameleon look, a dark sombre ensemble that gels so perfectly with the room’s level of formality that everyone’s attention drifts away from your clothing and toward your face. Your poor, work-addled face.

But this year, we can try another model for partying, one that might actually let us transcend our unbalanced lives. It comes from a scrappy group of New Yorkers who thwarted the Cabaret Law, oh, until the leader’s murder conviction brought their whole scene to a halt.

In the late eighties, Michael Alig and his Club Kids would hold “outlaw parties” in spaces like Dunkin’ Donuts and McDonalds, none of which expected or wanted to play host to dense crowds of social-climbing youngsters. For years, I read interviews about the Club Kids and their legendary outlaw parties. Then I found footage of one.

A 1989 outlaw party at McDonalds comes across like a leaky liferaft in an ocean of boredom, where the guests use their sheer force of ego to bail out the grey encroaching water. The most impressive thing about it is how much faith they have in their own ability to keep it afloat. Aside from the tinny squeal of a stereo in the corner, loud enough to cue maybe a handful of bodies to dance, the only sound is the clatter of personalities trying to assert themselves as flamboyantly as they can.

Partying with the Club Kids wasn’t, after all, only about the physical pleasures of dancing and drugs. It was about total obliteration of previous identities. Many of the kids came from outside New York, Midwestern cities too cramped for their galaxy-sized ambitions.