For quite a few years now, academic philosophers and sociologists, as well as popular social commentators who get paid to pronounce on such matters, have been telling us that people have been abandoning their formal personas in favor of the whims and behavior of their individual selves. The point of all the ink seems to be that public ritual behavior has given way to personal freedom, and that while we all used to have two personas, a public one and a private one, we now only have a private one which has gone public. Richard Sennett’s The Fall of Public Man appeared in 1977, followed by Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism in 1979, and then the deluge. The publishing climax may well have come in 2000 with Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, in which Putnam argued that individuals were increasingly disconnected from one another and social structures.
While not putting an emphasis on dress itself, most commentators who have discussed the relationship between the public and private person have made reference to both dress and manners when discussing the abandonment of the formal public self. And perhaps nowhere can the loss of public self be so readily seen as in the clothes we wear. One commentator remarked, “A ‘gentleman’ no longer tipped his symbolic hat to a ‘lady’ to show the conventional respect due her sex; he no longer had a hat to tip.” And no one doubts that the hat is gone, as well as the suit, the tie, and the polished leather oxford. The word I’m searching for is casualization. There’s been, in the past couple of decades, a Great Casualization of the business wardrobe. The suits and white dress shirts and discreet ties that most businessmen wore for a hundred years and more started to disappear after the 1970s. When this casual business trend began in earnest in the following decade, fashion writers started referring to it as “the third wardrobe”—an alternative to both the tailored business clothes and athletic-inspired clothing that had traditionally comprised a man’s wardrobe for much of the twentieth century. Today, traditionally tailored clothing—suits, sports coats, and their accompanying accessories—might legitimately be considered the third wardrobe, a luxury wardrobe worn for dressy occasions by many, and daily by those in positions of real power in society.
To complicate things even more, there has been the gradual gentrification of the proletarian wardrobe since mid-century: the work-wear of what used to be known as “blue-collar” workers, clothes that included blue chambray and denim work shirts and trousers (jeans), civilian uniforms of various types (postal workers, garage mechanics, etc.), farm and range clothing, and active field-and-stream outdoor sports clothing. Prole gear has firmly joined military clothes and athletic sportswear to make up the bulk of men’s wardrobes today. The fashion garment of the moment, for example, is the olive green military field jacket issued to soldiers during the Vietnam conflict, complete with cinch-waist cords, epaulets, bellows pockets, and concealed hood. You can buy one from the original military suppliers for less than $200, or from an Italian designer collection for over $1,000. But perhaps the most telling clue to this prole luxe gear category is that humblest of blue cotton work shirts itself, which used to be the staple of the steelworker and ranch hand’s daily wardrobe, and sold for around $3 to $5 forty years ago in Army and Navy stores across the country, and is now found to be the mainstay of international designer collections and boutique offerings, selling for anywhere from $100 to $500. The hip Wallace & Barnes label has a little chambray number for $118; Drakes of London, a favored haberdashery with the young and well-dressed, offers a blue denim shirt priced at around $200; and the super-chic Saint Laurent’s washed vintage blue denim shirt is a mere $950, but it’s advertised as being “oversized,” so presumably you get more shirt for your money.
How is it that we have gone from wearing suits and ties to the office to wearing T-shirts, baseball caps, and a variety of military garments and ranch hand wardrobes? Everyone who’s ever perused photos of baseball games (or almost any other crowded venue for that matter) in an old Life magazine from the mid-twentieth century finds it remarkable that the majority of men in the crowd are wearing white shirts and ties, and business hats (a category of menswear now extinct). The metamorphosis over such a relatively short time to polo shirts and cargo shorts on most of the crowd is a bit staggering, almost as though we were looking at two different species. The history, the sociology, the psychology of dress all seem to come rushing in to confound my thoughts. But then I’m not alone.