Fashion and Identity, Charles Taylor (is one of Canada’s best-known philosophers)

    I wear my own kind of hat, but in doing so I am displaying my style to all of you, and in this I am responding to your self- display, even as you will respond to mine. The space of fashion is one in which we sustain a language together of signs and meanings, which is constantly changing, but which at any moment is the background needed to give our gestures the sense they have. If my hat can ex­press my particular kind of cocky yet understated self- display, this is because of how the common language of style has evolved between us up to this point. My gesture can change it, and then your responding stylis­tic move will take its meaning from the new contour the language takes on. 

The resulting general structure is not that of common action but rather that of mutual display. It matters to each of us as we act that the others are there, as witnesses of what we are doing, and thus as co-determin­ers of the meaning of our action.

 Spaces of this kind become more and more impor­tant in modern urban society where large numbers of people rub shoulders, unknown to each other, with­out dealings with each other, and yet affecting each other, forming the inescapable context of each other’s lives. As against the everyday rush to work on the sub­way, where the others can sink to the status of obsta­cles in my way, city life has developed other ways of being-with, for instance, as we each take our Sunday walk in the park; or as we mingle at the summer street-festival, or in the stadium before the playoff game. Here each individual or small group acts on its own, but aware that its display says something to the others, will be responded to by them, will help build a common mood or tone that will color everyone’s actions.

 Here a host of urban monads hover on the bound­ary between solipsism and communication. My loud remarks and gestures are overtly addressed only to my immediate companions, my family group is sedately walking, engaged in our own Sunday outing, but all the time we are aware of this common space that we are building, in which the messages that cross take their meaning. This strange zone between loneliness and communication strongly impressed many of the early observers of this phenomenon as it arose in the nineteenth century We can think of some of the paintings of Manet, or of Baudelaire’s fascination with the urban scene, in the role of dandy, uniting observation and display

Of course, these nineteenth-century urban spaces were topical; that is, all the participants were in the same place, in sight of each other. But twentieth- century communications have produced meta-topical variants, when, for instance, we watch the Olympics or Princess Di’s funeral on television, aware that mil­lions of others are with us in this activity The mean­ing of our participation in the event is shaped by the whole vast dispersed audience we share it with.

 Just because these spaces hover between solitude and togetherness, they may sometimes flip over into common action; and indeed, the moment when they do so may be hard to pinpoint. As we rise as one to cheer the crucial third-period goal, we have undoubt­edly become a common agent; and we may try to pro­long this when we leave the stadium by marching and chanting, or even wreaking various forms of mayhem together. The cheering crowd at a rock festival is similarly fused. There is a heightened excitement at these moments of fusion, reminiscent of Carnival or of some of the other great collective rituals of earlier days. So that some have seen these moments as among the new forms of religion in our world. And Durk­heim gave an important place to these times of collec­tive effervescence as founding moments of society and the sacred. In any case, these moments seem to re­spond to some important felt need of today’s “lonely crowd.”

 And so the new, more individualized pursuit of hap­piness, loosening some of the ties and common lifeways of the past, the spread of expressive individu­alism and the culture of authenticity the increased im­portance of these spaces of mutual display, all these seem to point to a new way of being together in soci­ety This expressive individualism, which has been growing since the war, is obviously stronger in some milieus than in others, stronger among youth than among older people, stronger among those who were formed in the 1960s and 1970s; but overall it seems steadily to advance.

Being Dandy, Mark Kingwell (is a Canadian philosopher teaching at University of Toronto)

** Important Note: This particular excerpt is incomplete. If the uniforms he wore were not always sartorially interesting, like the Italian Air Force designs supplied by Giorgio Armani in the 1980s or (more darkly) Hugo Boss’s sharp silver- and-black outfits for the Gestapo in the 1930s, they nevertheless presented a stop-action essay in male attire. And when my father emerged, periodically, in the full glory of the mess kit, a peacock fanning to display, he was a brilliant reminder of the beauty masculine clothing can achieve when its vanities are unchecked. The military uniform is the primeval suit, the source of the norms that have for almost two centuries governed the presentation of the male form in everyday life. It spans both the range of ordinary working clothes, from the overalls of sappers to the T-shirts of naval gunnies, and the high-end, almost foppish finery of the dress uniform, an ensemble that, in its way, is the intrusion of dandyism into the serious male business of killing people. The spectacular military uniform is a kind of suited repression, an incongruous mixture of the lovely and the deadly. And so an encounter with the uniform is the first step on the road to the rich and edgy territory of male dress, perhaps the discovery of a personal sense of style, a long-overdue revival of dandyism at the dawn of this new century ...

 ... In the end I didn’t follow my father into military service, though I thought about it more or less constantly during the final years of high school. I had a real twinge just once, at a Christmas Day mass in 1979, a few months before I was to graduate. In jeans and an old football jersey, number 60 for my hero, Bubba Smith of the Detroit Lions, I shuffled into church with my family. I had argued with my father even as we were leaving the house, an old argument that neither of us really cared for any longer. God doesn’t care what I wear, I had said. God deserves your respect, he’d replied. Now we were in the church, Pope John XXIII in the West- wood section of Winnipeg, and there was a collective turning of heads at something behind where I was sitting with my parents and two brothers. I looked back. A young man in the belted red tunic and black trousers of the Royal Military College, clearly back from Kingston, Ont., for the holidays, was walking up the nave, his mother on his arm. He wore white gloves and had his pillbox under his arm. He was upright and tall and beautiful, and I suddenly felt like an idiot in my football sweater. My father said nothing but I could feel him radiating I-told-you-so’s down the pew. I thought: I want to look like that. I want to be the young warrior at home, earning admiration and envy as I float through the crowd or congregation. The appeal of the uniform, like the violent conflict that created it, is atavistic and troubling. Wearing one establishes a young man’s relationship with a community, and with his own masculinity Putting on a uniform is also, therefore, taking one’s place in the larger order of things; it is a rite of passage that asserts adulthood. The badges of rank and regimental insignia, the orders of valour and corps identifiers, speak a complicated semantics of hierarchy and accomplishment.

 Nowadays I shop for clothes by myself or in the company of one or two trusted female friends, who can be counted on for accurate flattery and good advice, but it was my father who took me to buy my first suit for school. And when I was in university, on a rare visit to take me out for lunch, he offered to take me shopping afterwards at Harry Rosen on Bloor Street in Toronto. It was 1984 and the fashions were all English and collegiate, long rows of striped ties in garish colours arrayed like confections in wood-and-glass cabinets. The shirts were fanned out in swathes of pastel broadcloth, multi-hued couches of cotton. Thinking of Tom Cruise in his underwear in Risky Business, and my then-girlfriend’s recently communicated fantasy, I picked out a pale pink oxford-cloth button- down. My father smiled and got out his credit card. I kept that shirt for years, wearing it through at the collar and cuffs, fading it almost to white with many launderings, and finally left it in a closet during one of many moves in my late twenties. It no longer fit me at the neck or across the chest: I was no longer the boy my father treated that day in Toronto ...  There is a depth of unrealized feeling in male attitudes to fashion and dress. My friend Russell, a novelist, for a couple of years wrote a weekly newspaper column about men’s fashion. His sartorial advice was tart and peremptory but, to my mind, almost always accurate: no shirts with ‘swanky’ designs on the collar, no backpacks, no crummy shoes. He received a lot of mail, much of it intemperate to the point of derangement, from men who felt slighted by his pronouncements. He speculated that the reason for this lay in the fact that these men, like all men, acquired whatever basic understanding of fashion they possess from their fathers — or from role models to whom they stood in some kind of quasi-filial relationship.

 Traditional Islamic Dress, Clifford Geertz

 I want to turn to a recent study by a young anthropologist, Suzanne Brenner, of some, also young, Javanese. For these women displayed interesting reactions after they suddenly adopted an emphatic form of “Islamic” dress, called after the Arabic for traditional women clothing, jilbab.

 Indonesia in general, and Java in particular, have long been religiously variegated to an extraordinary degree: Hindu, Buddhist, and Hindu-Buddhist states arose and was then subjected to Christian missionizing, both by Catholics and by the various sorts of Protestants. Now, even though 80 or 90 percent are nominally Muslim, the country was, in fact, a forest of beliefs.

 In the1980’s an intensified seriousness began to appear among some of the more self-consciously Muslim Javanese—”an Islamic resurgence,” as it has come to be called—stimulated to some degree by the so-called return of Islam generally across the world, but for the most part home-grown, inter­nally driven, and locally focused. There have been a number of expressions of this heightened seriousness—the proliferation of new devotional organizations, the expansion of religious education, the publication of books, journals, magazines, and newspapers and the appearance of a class of, often foreign-educated, Islamic-minded ar­tists, intellectuals, and politicians associated with them, the critical reevaluation and reinterpretation of local traditions from a Koranic point of view, and so on. But one of the most striking, and most controversial, of such expressions has been the adoption by a grow­ing number of young women, most especially educated young women, of Middle Eastern-style clothing: a long, loose-fitting, monochrome gown, reaching to the ankles, designed to conceal the shape of the body, and a long, winding scarf, usually white, designed to conceal the hair and neck.

 Such dress (the aforementioned jilbab) was occasionally found previously, especially among older, pious women, especially in the countryside. But the adoption of it by younger, urban women -- a sharp contrast to the form fitting, low-cut blouse, tightly wrapped sarong, and carefully arranged hair the vast majority of Javanese women traditionally affect -- stirred opposition, suspicion, puzzle­ment, and anger. Intended as a statement, it was taken as one. The women found themselves criticized as “fanatics” or “fundamental­ists,” often by their own families and their closest friends, some of whom tried strenuously to dissuade them from making the change. (“Why didn’t you bring your camel, too?” one girl’s enraged father asked her.) They were gossiped about as self-righteous, hypocritical, magically malignant. They were sometimes discriminated against in the job market, and Suharto’s “New Order” state instituted dress code regulations (or tried to, in the face of angry demonstrations) designed to discourage them. Occasionally they were even physi­cally attacked, stones thrown at them, their shawls torn from their heads. The decision to wear the jilbab, Brenner says, was not one to be made lightly: 

The remarks that women made about the psychological and practical obstacles to adopting the jilbab that they encoun­tered indicated that it was a decision that required much soul- searching, determination, and even stubborness on their part. wearing the jilbabj marks a woman as “different” in Java, where norms of behavior are very strong and where defying convention has immediate repercussions for an individual’s rela­tionships with others. Donning jilbab often leads to a marked change in a young woman’s social and personal identity as well as to a potential disruption of the social ties on which she has hitherto relied.

Brenner interviewed twenty women who had made what she calls the “conversion” to jilbab. Most were university students or recent graduates in their twenties. All resided in the large central Javanese court cities, Yogyakarta and Surakarta, where religious di­versity, even syncretism, has always been particularly marked. Most came from middle- or lower-middle-class backgrounds. Many grew up in religiously undutiful households. All were active in organiza­tions and devotional groups connected with “the Islamic Resurgence.”

 “The women who spoke to me,” Brenner writes,

 "were intelligent, strong-minded people who consciously and in­tellectually struggled with the contradictions of everyday life and who had their own, highly personal reasons for choosing the routes they had chosen. Most women chose to wear jilbab partly out of religious conviction, insisting that it was a re­quirement of Islam. Beyond this, however, their narratives exhibited certain themes that showed that adherence to reli­gious doctrine was not the sole impetus. Their motivations were simultaneously personal, religious, and political. Even the most personal and emotionally laden stories of con­version to jilbab contained within them elements of a larger story that encompasses the contemporary Indonesian Islamic movement."

 Brenner has much to say about the connection of all this to Indonesian political developments, to modernization, to the broader movement to reinvigorate Islam, to the revision of gender defini­tions and expectations, and to the search for personal and collective identity in a rapidly changing world. But for us, what is most to the point is the sort of answers she got when she started asking these young women questions about what becoming a jilbab wearer amounted to personally, what it felt like, as something lived through, undergone, “experienced.” Intensified self-awareness, the fear of death, the panoptic surveillance of God, a sense of rebirth, a regaining of self-mastery, all the familiar inflections of the pinch of destiny—who am I? what am I supposed to do? what is to become of me? where does finality lie?—appeared, as if on cue. “Each of the women. indicated that changing her clothing in this way” Brenner writes, “changed her feelings about herself and her actions.” 

For several women the decision had been precipitated by a profound anxiety; that anxiety had then given way to a feeling of relative calm and a sense of renewal after they had begun to wear jilbab. The immediate cause of the anxiety had been an overwhelming fear of dying and what death might mean for them if they had failed to fulfill the requirements of Islam. The new awareness of sin they had acquired had led them to a deep distress about how they might suffer in the afterlife as a consequence of their own sinning … They experienced deepconfusion, self-doubt, and a sense of being out of control. Donning jilbab …alleviated their anxieties about death and gave them a new feeling of control over their futures in this life and the next.

 And she quotes, from a popular magazine, the inspirational words of a young film actress, about to give birth: “I was terrified. I was really afraid I was going to die. Because if I were to die, what would be the price for all my sins?” Images of her past, of being drunk, of wandering about at night, of frequenting discotheques, of appearing nude on the screen, came before her eyes. It was, she said, “as if [she] heard ‘the whisper of heaven’ at that moment.” This may be more than a little formulaic, as indeed many, if not most, accounts of spiritual renewal are, for we are again dealing here not with experience simpliciter, whatever that might be, but with representations of it offered to the self and others, to tales about it.  And, as with William James’s accounts of spiritual renewal in America, the tales recur and recur:

 One day Naniek [one of Brenner’s informants who resisted pressures from friends to wear jilbab was suddenly overcome with the fear that she would die even though she was not ill. She realized that there were teachings of Islam that she had not yet observed, including the requirement to wear. She woke up in the night in terror, thinking, “What can I do? I don’t have any [Islamic] clothes.” She confides in her brother, who buys the material for her, and a few days later (she recalled the exact date) she began to wear jilbab. As soon as she accepted it, wearing Islamic clothing became easy for her, and “the clothes just came by themselves,” even though she had little money. Her fears of death subsided.’

 And, yet another commentator, writing in an Indonesian­ language mass market book called Muslim Women Toward The Year 2000, designed apparently to instruct such women in what to feel, invokes the rebirth imagery explicitly:

 The most important question for a woman who is aware in this day and age is “who am I?” With that question, she tries to understand with full awareness that she cannot remain the way she is now. She wants to be self-determining. She wants to develop herself. She always aims to be reborn. In that rebirth, she wants to be her own midwife.

 Brenner has other testimony of the emotional correlates of this change of clothing which is a change of the way of being in the world: worries about living up to the demands of the new dress, intensified concerns about minor transgressions, and the feeling of being constantly under exacting moral surveillance, not just by God and conscience but by everyone around, searching avidly for failings and lapses. But perhaps enough has been said to make the point: in what we are pleased to call the real world, “meaning,” “identity,” “power,” and “experience” are hopelessly entangled, mutually impli­cative, and “religion” can no more be founded upon or reduced to the last, that is, “experience,” than it can to any of the others. It is not in solitude that faith is made.

Walden, Henry Thoreau

 As for Clothing, to come at once to the practical part of the question, perhaps we are led oftener by the love of novelty and a regard for the opinions of men, in procuring it, than by a true utility. Let him who has work to do recollect that the object of clothing is, first, to retain the vital heat, and secondly, in this state of society, to cover nakedness, and he may judge how much of any necessary or important work may be accomplished without adding to his wardrobe. Kings and queens who wear a suit but once, though made by some tailor or dressmaker to their majesties, cannot know the comfort of wearing a suit that fits. They are no better than wooden horses to hang the clean clothes on. Every day our garments become more assimilated to ourselves, receiving the impress of the wearer's character, until we hesitate to lay them aside without such delay and medical appliances and some such solemnity even as our bodies. No man ever stood the lower in my estimation for having a patch in his clothes; yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety, commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched clothes, than to have a sound conscience. But even if the rent is not mended, perhaps the worst vice betrayed is improvidence. I sometimes try my acquaintances by such tests as this—Who could wear a patch, or two extra seams only, over the knee? Most behave as if they believed that their prospects for life would be ruined if they should do it. It would be easier for them to hobble to town with a broken leg than with a broken pantaloon. Often if an accident happens to a gentleman's legs, they can be mended; but if a similar accident happens to the legs of his pantaloons,[ close fitting trousers worn by men in the 19th century] there is no help for it; for he considers, not what is truly respectable, but what is respected. We know but few men, a great many coats and breeches. Dress a scarecrow in your last shift, you standing shiftless by, who would not soonest salute the scarecrow? Passing a cornfield the other day, close by a hat and coat on a stake, I recognized the owner of the farm. He was only a little more weather-beaten than when I saw him last. I have heard of a dog that barked at every stranger who approached his master's premises with clothes on, but was easily quieted by a naked thief. It is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes. Could you, in such a case, tell surely of any company of civilized men which belonged to the most respected class? When Madam Pfeiffer,[ Ida Pfeiffer (1797-1858) Austrian traveler and writer] in her adventurous travels round the world, from east to west, had got so near home as Asiatic Russia, she says that she felt the necessity of wearing other than a travelling dress, when she went to meet the authorities, for she "was now in a civilized country, where ... people are judged of by their clothes." Even in our democratic New England towns the accidental possession of wealth, and its manifestation in dress and equipage alone, obtain for the possessor almost universal respect. But they who yield such respect, numerous as they are, are so far heathen, and need to have a missionary sent to them. Beside, clothes introduced sewing, a kind of work which you may call endless; a woman's dress, at least, is never done.

     A man who has at length found something to do will not need to get a new suit to do it in; for him the old will do, that has lain dusty in the garret for an indeterminate period. Old shoes will serve a hero longer than they have served his valet—if a hero ever has a valet—bare feet are older than shoes, and he can make them do. Only they who go to soires and legislative balls must have new coats, coats to change as often as the man changes in them. But if my jacket and trousers, my hat and shoes, are fit to worship God in, they will do; will they not? Who ever saw his old clothes—his old coat, actually worn out, resolved into its primitive elements, so that it was not a deed of charity to bestow it on some poor boy, by him perchance to be bestowed on some poorer still, or shall we say richer, who could do with less? I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit? If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes. All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be. Perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we have so conducted, so enterprised or sailed in some way, that we feel like new men in the old, and that to retain it would be like keeping new wine in old bottles. Our moulting season, like that of the fowls, must be a crisis in our lives. The loon retires to solitary ponds to spend it. Thus also the snake casts its slough, and the caterpillar its wormy coat, by an internal industry and expansion; for clothes are but our outmost cuticle and mortal coil. Otherwise we shall be found sailing under false colors, and be inevitably cashiered at last by our own opinion, as well as that of mankind.  

    We don garment after garment, as if we grew like exogenous plants by addition without. Our outside and often thin and fanciful clothes are our epidermis, or false skin, which partakes not of our life, and may be stripped off here and there without fatal injury; our thicker garments, constantly worn, are our cellular integument, or cortex; but our shirts are our liber, or true bark, which cannot be removed without girdling and so destroying the man. I believe that all races at some seasons wear something equivalent to the shirt. It is desirable that a man be clad so simply that he can lay his hands on himself in the dark, and that he live in all respects so compactly and preparedly that, if an enemy take the town, he can, like the old philosopher, walk out the gate empty-handed without anxiety. While one thick garment is, for most purposes, as good as three thin ones, and cheap clothing can be obtained at prices really to suit customers; while a thick coat can be bought for five dollars, which will last as many years, thick pantaloons for two dollars, cowhide boots for a dollar and a half a pair, a summer hat for a quarter of a dollar, and a winter cap for sixty-two and a half cents, or a better be made at home at a nominal cost, where is he so poor that, clad in such a suit, of his own earning, there will not be found wise men to do him reverence?

 When I ask for a garment of a particular form, my tailoress tells me gravely, "They do not make them so now," not emphasizing the "They" at all, as if she quoted an authority as impersonal as the Fates, [in classical mythology, the three goddesses of destiny] and I find it difficult to get made what I want, simply because she cannot believe that I mean what I say, that I am so rash. When I hear this oracular sentence, I am for a moment absorbed in thought, emphasizing to myself each word separately that I may come at the meaning of it, that I may find out by what degree of consanguinity They are related to me, and what authority they may have in an affair which affects me so nearly; and, finally, I am inclined to answer her with equal mystery, and without any more emphasis of the "they"—"It is true, they did not make them so recently, but they do now." Of what use this measuring of me if she does not measure my character, but only the breadth of my shoulders, as it were a peg to bang the coat on? We worship not the Graces, [in classical mythology, the goddesses of beauty] nor the Parcæ, [Roman name for the Fates] but Fashion. She spins and weaves and cuts with full authority. The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveller's cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same. I sometimes despair of getting anything quite simple and honest done in this world by the help of men. They would have to be passed through a powerful press first, to squeeze their old notions out of them, so that they would not soon get upon their legs again; and then there would be some one in the company with a maggot in his head, hatched from an egg deposited there nobody knows when, for not even fire kills these things, and you would have lost your labor. Nevertheless, we will not forget that some Egyptian wheat is said to have been handed down to us by a mummy.

     On the whole, I think that it cannot be maintained that dressing has in this or any country risen to the dignity of an art. At present men make shift to wear what they can get. Like shipwrecked sailors, they put on what they can find on the beach, and at a little distance, whether of space or time, laugh at each other's masquerade. Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new. We are amused at beholding the costume of Henry VIII, or Queen Elizabeth, as much as if it was that of the King and Queen of the Cannibal Islands. All costume off a man is pitiful or grotesque. It is only the serious eye peering from and the sincere life passed within it which restrain laughter and consecrate the costume of any people. Let Harlequin [traditional Italian comic character] be taken with a fit of the colic and his trappings will have to serve that mood too. When the soldier is hit by a cannonball, rags are as becoming as purple.

     The childish and savage taste of men and women for new patterns keeps how many shaking and squinting through kaleidoscopes that they may discover the particular figure which this generation requires today. The manufacturers have learned that this taste is merely whimsical. Of two patterns which differ only by a few threads more or less of a particular color, the one will be sold readily, the other lie on the shelf, though it frequently happens that after the lapse of a season the latter becomes the most fashionable. Comparatively, tattooing is not the hideous custom which it is called. It is not barbarous merely because the printing is skin-deep and unalterable.

    I cannot believe that our factory system is the best mode by which men may get clothing. The condition of the operatives is becoming every day more like that of the English; and it cannot be wondered at, since, as far as I have heard or observed, the principal object is, not that mankind may be well and honestly clad, but, unquestionably, that corporations may be enriched. In the long run men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim at something high.