Wolves in cheap clothing: in search of substance in the new downscale style - Cover Story

Washington Monthly, July-August, 1992 by Katherine Boo

In search of substance in the new downscale style

With hundreds of nightclubs in Manhattan alone-clubs with palm trees, red velvet, strobe lights, men showering in litde glass stalls--you'd think there'd be no shortage of places for two guys to throw a party. But when events planner Edward Jowdy and jewelry designer Simon Wilson decided to fete 250 artists, writers, and fashion types this May, they knew none of the usual clubs would do. "The club scene is totally contrived, totally segregated," says Jowdy. "We wanted a more natural setting." They wanted --they had to have--Al's.

For nearly 50 years, Al's bar in the Bowery has catered almost exclusively to men with lousy luck and shaky hands; the atmosphere accords with that niche. The house wine is fortified Wild Irish Rose, which starts to flow promptly at opening--8 a.m. The decor consists of POW-MIA flags and an Elvis poster. Still, Wilson and Jowdy were willing to pay for visitation fights. So on a Saturday night last May, Al's became, for a brief moment, the place for Manhattan's beau monde to be featured.

And featured they were, the next Sunday in the style section of The New York Times, a week later in The New Yorker, and a week after that in Newsday. The consensus: the Bowery bash was a style coup. While party chatter centered on the usual things--furniture prices and newly bankrupt young designers--the guests arrived, not in Armani, but in thriftshop high heels, retro-chiffon, and sweat suits. "Hip," approved the Times, "in a Charles Bukowski kind of way."

If Al's seems about as far away from eighties' boites like Indochine as you can get in Manhattan, that seems to be the point. "I'd be embarrassed now to step out of the back of a stretch limo," Jay Mclnerney recently confessed during an interview at the once-chic, now empty restaurant Odeon. As usual, Mclnerney's articulating a trend. According to the marketing gurus at DDB Needham, who publish regular reports on American living and buying habits, our urban elite is in the process of a significant style shift-down-- and the circumstantial evidence is everywhere.

Had Vogue's 100th anniversary occurred three years ago, no doubt its cover would've drowned in haute couture. But it came this April, so it featured a bevy of barefoot models in white T-shirts and jeans. Richard Price's tale of a Jersey drugdealer, Clockers --Bonfire Without the Vanities, as someone put it-- threatens to be the book of the summer. Washington Post matriarch Kay Graham has parked her limo in exchange for a four-wheel drive. And a recent issue of Money magazine--one of the prime purveyors of the eighties' show-show ethic--actually celebrated people who left Wail Street to hang wallpaper or work at Jiffy Lube. Naturally, haute-yup advertisers are scrambling to adjust to the gestalt. Perrier, which for years channeled its water through French countryside and operatic soundtrack, has launched a new ad campaign featuring neighborhood bars and a rundown snack shack.

From the exclusivity of Nell's to everybody's Al's, urban trendies young and old seem to be atoning for the overt materialism and snobbery of the eighties. Even the remnant fetishes, like Shaker furniture, seem penitential. "I think that's one of the big stories now-denial of the eighties," wrote Michael Thomas recently in The New York Observer. "Everybody's looking around in a faintly guilty manner, the way people do when someone has silently broken wind at a tea party." And every night, that guilt-or whatever it is--propels the fashion-forward past the fin-de-siecle fussiness of the eighties' restaurantes d'etre to danker environs like Acme, where chickenfried steak is a specialty and the industrial sign at the entrance crystallizes the lowered expectations of the age: "An OK place to eat."

Care society is yielding, it appears, to a sort of lunchcounter chic. And while that may not indicate, as a Time cover story panted recently, "a revolution in progress," it is a somewhat hopeful sign. Instead of hankering for Hermes and other means of telegraphing superiority, the urban elite are searching for common ground: plain food, cheap clothes, basic cars, down-to-earth places like Al's. In a hyperdivided country, as politicians and sociologists wring their hands, the affluent, of all people, seem to be launching a top-down assault on snobbery, insisting that class distinctions be minimized and communal values exalted in the name of style.

Could it be, possibly, that fashion is hinting at an anSWer tO American class isolation? Sure it's hinting. It just can't commit.

Radical cheap

The nineteenth-century French toasted it as nostalgie de la boue; in the sixties Tom Wolfe singlehandedly put an end to it with his acid "Radical Chic." But nineties-style downscale chic differs in a few key ways from its predecessors. First, the privileged aren't just importing the underdog into their penthouses like Gruyere and tulips; they're stepping out themselves. And second, the impulse is less political or "artistic" than economic.