The most absolutely fabulous thing happened to me after I read Anne Hollander’s new book, Sex and Suits. Before, when I had to look presentable, I’d stand in front of the mirror and agonize for half an hour. “Is this skirt too short for someone of a certain age and breadth?” I’d think, tugging at a hem. “If I wear a jean jacket with this slinky black dress will it look witty and ironic or just dumb? Are these backless shoes slutty, or are they actually kind of cool?” I was ashamed of myself for caring, but helpless to stop.
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But the book is more than a simpleminded fashion history. Hollander thinks the clothing of both sexes must be seen together to reveal anything about the culture that created it. In her scheme male dress led the way and made “the esthetic propositions to which female fashion responded.” Moreover, she writes, “Preserving the good looks of men’s suits has not been a deliberately conservationist, antiquarian effort….It has happened by itself, in response to some huge collective fantasy that is obviously still potent.”
The nature of that collective fantasy is revealed in her detailed history of the evolution of the suit. Before around 1100, she tells us, men’s and women’s clothes were virtually the same dresslike garment. She illustrates the point with a Byzantine mosaic, and, sure enough, you can’t tell the girls from the boys.
Hollander thinks that even the monochromatic tones of contemporary men’s clothes have a classical source. Dandies used to be peacocks, in brightly colored satins and brocades that caught and reflected the light, but by the late 18th century that sort of display had become suspect. “Sir Joshua Reynolds,” she tells us, “has written that lavish color in a painting made a base appeal to sensuality, and that the play of light over rich textures had similarly vulgar attractions.”
Blended with Hollander’s art-historical approach to dress is some tart, pointed criticism of the current wisdom about stylish clothing, which is that fashion is a conspiracy against women engineered by gynophobic male designers. This theme has been sounded by pundits from Susan Brownmiller to Naomi Wolf to the otherwise level-headed Susan Faludi, and it sometimes surfaces in letters to the editors of glossy magazines after particularly bizarre photo spreads. (Why the correspondents were reading said mags is an interesting question. Maybe they’re like the fundamentalist preachers who cat around just so they can get a better feel for sin.) A recent Image magazine piece, for instance, implied that four-inch heels and tartan mini-skirts were this fall’s path to rediscovering femininity. This provoked an outraged reader to write: “I’m all for being feminine. It’s the definition of femininity served up by male fashion designers I don’t buy.”
And some of her glosses on current street fashion are so subtle they’d probably give Jacques Derrida a fit of the giggles. One such fancy: “The mode for trousers that begin to expose the underpants” in men is “an unprecedented allusion to the female vocabulary of decolletage.” I floated this idea by a teenager I know, who just shook his head with a mixture of pity and contempt. He explained that the point of the style is to have really baggy pants that puddle at the feet; exposed boxer shorts and tush cleavage are merely epiphenomena. (He may not have used the word “epiphenomena.”)
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): illustration/Jim Flynn.
