Miss Manners on dressing

Patentleathershoes

VFG Veteran
VFG Past President
Clothes Minds

Sunday, October 30, 2005

How can we tell when it is Halloween now that
everybody is playing dress-up all year?

Businesspeople dress up as vacationers. Urban
residents dress up as cowhands. Travelers dress up as
sunbathers. Respectable ladies dress up as hussies.
Honest gentlemen dress up as thugs. Grownups dress up
as children. Schoolchildren dress up as all of the
above.

Miss Manners supposes she wouldn't mind if everyone
were having a rollicking good time at this. She would
still regret the confusion and the aesthetic mess, but
she would manage to bear up. Etiquette is supposed to
keep track of the proper dress for particular
occasions, but if no one cares, she would gratefully
retire to the hammock and let them play.

The problem is that people do care. The more liberty
that is taken with dress, the more severe the
etiquette problems that arise.

Some are complaints that people have about the way
other people dress. Other people, Miss Manners is
told, are indecent, disrespectful and just plain
disgusting. They spoil the cityscape by going around
half-naked. They spoil the workplace by making it look
unprofessional. They spoil social events by refusing
to dress up. They spoil public events by exposing
those near them to smelly and unsightly body parts.

The rest are equally vehement complaints that people
have about others who complain about the way they
dress. Those people, Miss Manners is told, are
shallow, narrow-minded and dictatorial. They judge by
appearances instead of intrinsic worth. They have
puritanical notions about the body. They think they
can interfere with others' comfort and
self-_expression.

This is a classic etiquette fight, in that both sides
are highly emotional and neither side really
understands the subject. They work themselves up
attacking or defending particular fashions and expand
that to condemn one another's characters. But because
they fail to understand the social function of
clothing, they miss the point.

Everybody talks about comfort, especially those who
are wearing pants too tight or too loose for them. And
everyone talks about self-_expression, especially
slaves to fashion. What no one articulates in these
arguments is that clothing is a social language that
everyone reads, consciously or not. Any job counselor,
costume designer or defense lawyer will attest to
that.

Is this shallow? Well, it is undoubtedly on the
surface. But sometimes that is all one can see, and
even those with the opportunity to dig deeper still
have to deal with the surface.

Unlike beauty or other physical characteristics, dress
is presumed to be subject to some degree of choice.
You may choose to be as close or as remote from the
prevailing convention of the time and occasion as you
like, but the distance will be read as reflecting your
attitude. This is why movie stars and hip-hop
musicians dress so differently when they go to court.
Such symbolism is powerful, and those who use it to
lie should not be surprised or offended when others
take these statements at face value and presume them
to be childish or criminal.

Except on Halloween, of course. That's symbolism's day off.
 
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