The major fault lines of American decline are familiar to most of us: The Crisis of public education, Police violence, Structural racism, Income inequality, the Lack of health insurance, the anachronisms of the Electoral college, the outsized role of Money in politics, Climate change denial, and so on. These are the “upper case” issues. But the picture is not complete without the small, seemingly less important shifts in people’s behaviors, the way we shop, eat, sleep, dress, speak, raise our kids, read, drive, etc. These “lower case” shifts are all of a piece with the bigger issues, they are just so every-day that they’ve become less noticeable.
1. The way we dress now.
The GAS (Great American Slob) era has arrived. An article in the Washington Post of 7/28/20 declared: “Goodbye, jeans. The pandemic is ushering in an era of comfort.”
Now, the article would have us believe, casual wear (e.g. jeans) has given way to sweatpants, jogging suits, pajamas, baggy shorts and flip flops. In contrast jeans seem like formalwear. A good “fit” means little, belts are dinosaurs; too tight, too constraining. We’re almost at the one-size-fits-all stage. The word in clothing today is “forgiving.” And what is it that the era of (extreme) comfort is forgiving? Our excesses, our lack of food discipline, our hedonism, selfishness, lack of good health, and perhaps most telling, our lack of pride. Of course, the “era of comfort” has been around for years now; the pandemic has simply dumbed it down further; to a nation of folks who almost defiantly seek to look their worst. An airplane full of people in sweatpants, jogging suits, flip-flops and “leisure suits” that look like pyjamas (and sometimes actually are) has become a familiar sight. Now, during the hot summer, the sight is becoming familiar in big cities; cargo shorts on short fat stubby people making them look shorter, fatter, stubbier; huge paunches overhanging pastel colored shorts placed so low that they seem about to fall off, fatties bending over so we see the crack in their asses, loose overlarge tee shirts of every hue decrying every conceivable sentiment and joke, along with advertisements for the maker (for which the wearer is unwittingly paying). Yet so committed to comfort are we, whatever vanity we possessed is gone.
Picture Childe Hassam’s wonderful painting Sunday on Fifth Avenue (1891). What comes through is elegance; strolling men and women dressed to the “nines,” tipping hats to the ladies who walk with furled parasols. Now juxtapose that picture with a contemporary shot of Fifth (or any other) avenue. It’s jarring. 1891 was a time (another Gilded Age) when people would not be caught dead not looking their best, no matter what class. And pride in being “dressed up” continued well into the 1960s. Look at any gangster movie from the 30s, 40s, or 50s – every crook, thief, conman, murderer wore a white shirt, coat and tie, and a hat. Around 1960 someone told JFK to “lose the hat” and maybe that was the beginning; the other bookend of the long downward trajectory of Americans to slobdom, is the recent demise of Brooks Brothers (née 1818); the immediate cause is the pandemic to be sure, but really, it’s a victim of our loss of pride in how we look.
You don’t have to be an anthropologist to know that clothes have multiple meanings. A well-dressed person invites others to look at him or her; their dress sends endless messages about status, personality, cleanliness, trustworthiness, self-worth, civility and care. But there are internal effects as well. Native American tribespeople took great care in their decorations, as have tribal groups everywhere. Every feather, bead or shell meant something, not just to the tribe but to the wearer. When you are dressed up you feel stronger, more powerful, you feel better about yourself, renewed, more ready to function in the world. And part of that is because a well-cut suit or dress covers up a multitude of personal failings many of which one has no control over. Dress can make a fat person slimmer, a tall person shorter, a short person taller, and make someone handsome or pretty. Of course there is a price to pay, beyond the cost of the clothes. That is the work it takes and the discomfort that comes with all the layers – undershirt, shirt, tie, vest, jacket, coat, socks, shoes; and that’s just the men; for women it’s more complicated still. The relief that comes when the tie comes off at the end of the day; when one can “loosen the belt” and sign “ah” speaks to the fact that dressing-up is decidedly not about comfort. Especially on a hot day (remember that in the past we did not have air conditioning) the price of dressing up was a considerable cost in sweat. Not anymore. Today we don’t bother. “Why sweat when you don’t have to?” “Why feel constrained?” “Yeah, I overeat and don’t exercise, so what’s it to you buddy?” Why try to please others?” “My comfort comes first.”
And like many aspects of our culture, things are turned on their head. Today on a plane flight the only well-dressed people are the crew members; in a hotel, the clerks and the bell-hops are far better dressed than the guests; celebrities in a fancy restaurant arrive in sweatpants and keep their baseball caps on while the servers are in tuxedos. It used to be that the masses took their cues about how to dress from Hollywood, the elegance of Hepburn, Cary Grant, Bette Davis, Edward G Robinson and Cagney. It used to be that movies encouraged us to be our best and to dress with pride, and we often followed; today movies imitate us at our worst. And it’s part of our larger decline – sloppy people, sloppy thinking, sloppy nation.