Suitably dressed

National Review, Oct 13, 1997 by Hadley Arkes

A PHOTOGRAPHER caught the scene, on a street in London, for the New York Times: a couple in their thirties were encamped for the evening on the sidewalk opposite Westminster Abbey, prepared to live that night on the streets for the sake of being present for every moment, the next day, of the funeral of Princess Diana. What the photographer caught and the editors noted was that the man had with him, on a makeshift valet, the suit and shirt he would wear the next day. Apparently there was no tolerance, in his own mind, for the flippant and the casual and apparently no doubt that his dress reflected his judgment on the solemnity of the occasion.

In that reading of the situation, he reflected the sense of things that pervaded the British public throughout the week. The public wanted something emphatically public and communal and it would not brook the McDonalds version. It wanted High Church, with the presence of the Queen and the trappings that marked dignity, expressed reverence, conveyed respect.

But all of this is to say that, as ever, fashion is rooted in the logic of "decorum: the ordering, or scale, of things. As the old saying went, a man from Mars could look at the Parthenon and recognize at once that it was not a hamburger stand. We have a vocabulary, in architecture, to mark the difference between hamburger stands and buildings devoted to higher, civic purposes, or to things that are transcendent. And we would not dress for McDonalds as we would dress for a wedding or church.

But in the late Sixties and early Seventies we suffered a sea-change in the codes of dress another phase in a movement that began at the turn of the century and accelerated with the world wars. In London, after the First World War, it was no longer thought necessary to wear cutaways to the law firm or the investment house. That mode of dress was replaced by what was called the "country suit, or what we would consider today a business suit. As late as the Sixties, jackets and ties were expected on airlines; but these days it is no longer surprising to see people in tank tops and shorts.

Advancing along this scale starts producing patterns that describe a state, not merely of confusion, but of moral distraction. And so, several years ago the chairman of an academic department in another college began musing aloud to his colleagues: Why is it, he asked, that colleagues think it fit to show up for their classes wearing blue jeans, but when they are encountered in the evening at a fashionable restaurant they are wearing three-piece suits? Dont we have there a rather precise measure of their ranking of things? My own suspicion is that if professors were obliged to wear cutaways or academic robes in the classroom, they would be embarrassed to walk in unprepared and run out the clock in rambling "discussions.

In my own case, I guess I must rank my appearance in class as the most important thing I do in public, apart from being in synagogue or church, for I have been part of a vanishing breed who still wear ties and jackets to class. Just last week, after I had taught a class and met for a few hours with students at the end of the day, I was suddenly seized with a Trollopean angst. It was the state described in Trollopes novel Can You Forgive Her? when a few people were walking up a mountain, and they suddenly suffered a pang of fear: that they would not be able to make their way down in time to dress for dinner. I had a meeting of my department that night, and just enough time to catch dinner. Walking home I passed a colleague and remarked that I was on my way home to get a bite and to change for the meeting. I offered this report breezily because I was wearing, at the time, French cuffs, striped suit, silver-grey tie (my working clothes). But in this time of dressing down, it could be quite indecorous to arrive at a meeting with colleagues in anything much above the familiar casual mode, with khakis and sport shirt.

I HAPPEN to be serenely comfortable in my suits. They fit well, they offer pockets discreetly tucked away, and they frame me aptly for all manner of occasions. The spread collars are made for me, and they are, as they are, exactly as I wish them to be. But the curious result of course is that I find myself persistently having to apologize for arriving "dressed. And so I have spun out a repertoire over the years, drawn from Oscar Wilde and others: Reworking a line from The Importance of Being Earnest, I explain that "I make up for being over-dressed by being over-educated. Or I will adapt a line from a Gridiron dinner of several years back: "Oh, Im sorry, but Ive just come from one of those Republican come-as-you-are parties.

Woody Allen once included, in his catalogue of courses for college, "Economics 203: Inflation and Depression How to Dress for Each. But we know now that the connection is not what we would suppose, since even ordinary men and women dressed to a higher standard in the Depression than they do today. Photos of Harlem in the 1930s, or of New York and Chicago in the 1940s, show men in hats and suits, women in dresses and wearing gloves. As Thomas Sowell has pointed out, it was also possible for blacks and whites to walk in the streets at night more safely than it is today. In her novel in the Forties, Northbridge Rectory, Angela Thirkell records the convention, in Britain, of wearing "siren suits something in which a woman could appear on the street when her house had been bombed out and she had no time to dress. No one imagines that there is a causal connection between the standards of dress and the current conditions of our cities, but almost everyone senses a connection of some kind: The sense of decorum in dress was bound up with an understanding of the codes of conduct that governed people in public places. But in the early Seventies the Supreme Court started teaching very different lessons on the matter of language in public. In Justice Harlans famous vacuous phrase, "One mans vulgarity is anothers lyric. With that premise, Harlan and his colleagues offered a new maxim: that it was unreasonable to expect people to restrain themselves, or their expression, out of a respect for the sensibilities of other people in a public place. The disregard, even solipsism, shown in habits of dress is bound up with this new ethic, which has made city life far less livable.