Molly
Young is a contributing writer at the New York Times
Magazine where this review originally appeared.
Although
COVID has brought an avalanche of new stressors into our lives,
it has also eradicated a number of minor ones. For example:
the anguish of wondering whether you are dressed appropriately
for a social occasion. Social occasions — ha! When this
is all over (a clause that, by the way, I first typed one
year ago for a completely different article), will anyone
remember how to iron a shirt, much less affix a cummerbund?
Well,
at least one person will. Dress Codes: How the Laws of
Fashion Made History is a new book by Richard Thompson
Ford, a Stanford Law School professor who has terrific personal
style. This is an irrelevant biographical detail for most
academics but a qualification here. Ford is not only a decorated
scholar and fashionisto but a Best Dressed Real Man, as we
learn in the book’s introduction. In 2009, Ford writes,
he entered Esquire’s Best Dressed Real Man contest on
a lark. His second child was 10 months old at the time. Family
life was a whirlwind of plastic baby toys and diaper changes.
It struck him as potentially entertaining to submit himself
as “a harried 43-year-old dad versus a bevy of lantern-jawed
aspiring actors, sinewy fashion models, and athletic-looking
frat boys.” The contest winner would receive an all-expenses-paid
weekend in the Big Apple. One of the submission photos, reproduced
in the book, depicts Ford in a blue pinstripe suit with a
squirming infant in his lap. To his own astonishment, he made
it to the semi-finals before being eliminated in favour of
the ultimate winner.
But
the joke is on that guy, wherever he is, because he didn’t
go on to write a 464-page survey of Western fashion legislature
with full color inserts and sections like “Hip Hijabs”
and “Decorative Orthodontic Devices (a.k.a. Grillz).”
Ford was also probably the first to offer a detailed analysis
of Donald Trump’s “disturbingly long” neckties,
which he published a few years ago in op-ed form as a kind
of sneak preview of this book. In the opinion piece, he outlined
the aesthetic felonies of Trump’s accessory: too shiny,
improperly knotted, and misassembled so that the short end
couldn’t properly moor in its loop and was instead doomed
to flap in the breeze. The piece made strong points. Nothing
about a president should “flap.” The overlong
tie, Ford argued, might even constitute a sort of fraud; after
all, in Renaissance England, a man caught overstuffing his
codpiece was forced to march through the streets with the
stuffing pulled out as a public admission of stealing penis-size
valour.
How
we should be dressing now, and how we’ll want to dress
when this is all over, is an open question.
The
joy of Ford’s book comes from learning about all the
things people have historically been banned from doing to
or with clothes. And by banned I don’t mean that a gauzy
societal opprobrium might have descended if you stepped out
in the wrong “payre” of pants but that a Scottish
man who wore a kilt in 1746 could be tossed into prison (no
bail) for six months. Governing bodies absolutely live to
sweat the small stuff.
Those
bodies are no longer determinant forces of how we dress. During
COVID, the tacit guidelines for dressing — the ones
that deal with coolness or professionalism or gender —
have disintegrated even further, opening a wormhole into realms
of unprecedented sloppiness, eccentricity, discovery, and
creativity. There has likely never been a point in U.S. history
when the populace has spent so much time being unobserved
by the public. You may have experienced this as a relief,
or you may have experienced it as a loss.
I
know that my inability to observe the self-ornamentation of
others in real time over the past months — the stark
removal of people watching as an available activity —
has turned down all the saturation levels on life. There was
a lady in my old neighbourhood who was entirely green, for
example. Green hair, green clothes, green accessories. Her
age: mid-60s? Who knows, doesn’t matter. Nothing about
the green goddess suggested that she was enacting Greenness
for the pleasure of the world. It was a private quest that
only inadvertently revealed itself in the course of her going
out to buy milk or hit the ATM.
It
is perhaps because I’ve not had access to such people
that my own COVID dressing has slipped over the months from
adult swaddling clothes into green-goddess territory. In autumn,
I transitioned from pants to tights and from tights to sheer
leopard-print stockings. In winter, I collected fluffy bits
of lichen from the yard and tried to sew them into a wig.
(Too crumbly.) Last week, I Googled images of Marie Antoinette
with a model frigate woven into her hair and wondered if I
could Do It Myself. Without external stimulation, some of
us are driven to “be the person you wish to randomly
walk past in the world.”
