Like my friend W.F. Price, I’ve been seeing a series of articles on some supposed “return to masculinity” in the world of fashion. I agree with Mr. Price that many designers truly are queens who have very little interest in what everyday men want to look like. I’ve lived in New York City and spent a short time, many years ago, more involved in the fashion industry than I care to admit. So, it is from that perspective that I’d like to elaborate a bit on this “new” trend that folks are hot to impregnate with meaning.
I have no doubt that some Seventh Avenue queers do draw on their sexual fantasies for design inspiration – and even more likely, as with the half-closeted Calvin Klein, their ad campaigns. But there is another phenomenon at work when it comes to the most outrageous gender bending fashions. I’ve always liked the Van Morrison lyric, “all the girls walk by, dressed up for each other.” It’s a line that wraps up my understanding of women and high fashion. Beyond a certain threshold, the sartorial obsessions of women are no longer about looking attractive for men. Fashion is really about impressing other women. Fashion is, in its own way, a competitive endeavor. I know few men who give a damn whether their mates have the “right” handbag to go with those heels. But certain women will notice and smile – or sneer.
The same is true with queens in the fashion world. Most homosexual men are not particularly attracted to fussy, androgynous fashionistas. Those types live in a somewhat insular “meta” world of their own creation, and they are seeking the attention and esteem of the peers who share the same obsessions. Like the most extreme female examples, these dandies will spend the majority of their income creating and re-creating the disposable “it” look of moment. It’s all very Warholian.
This brings me to a point about the fashion industry, and why we should be wary of reading too much into it. The fashion industry is in the business of cultivating neophilia. It’s not about producing something of lasting value, or about making something practical, or about making something better. It’s about making something new and grabbing headlines. It’s about entertaining fickle, damaged people who are dead inside. They get bored with one look, and then they swing to another extreme, and then a couple of years later they “rediscover” how great that old look was. Like a lot of the art that comes out of New York City, you can read a lot into each swing of the pendulum, and that’s all part of the con game. Designers do have to pay attention to what people actually buy, but many make a lot of their money from staples like jeans and t-shirts, or basic suits, or colognes. The stuff that hits the runway and makes the news is about getting attention and getting the name out there. Average men today don’t really dress all that differently from the way their grandfathers did, once they get past the “peacock” teens and early-to-mid twenties.
Do fashion designers have any sincere interest in returning to a more traditional understanding of masculinity? Of course not. Or at least, not for more than one season. Fashion designers are the most postmodern of people. They exist in a world of images, not substance.
Masculinity is primarily about substance. It’s about what you do, not how you dress.
Fashion designers are recycling the trappings of traditional masculinity into a flimsy identity that people who care about fashion will toss in the garbage next year.
Fashion makes everything meaningless and stupid.
Any “return to masculinity” heralded by the fashion world can only be a return to a meaningless and stupid masculinity.
The recent piece on “Reimaging Masculinity” in Newsweek, flawed as it was, did contain one paragraph in which I could find no fault:
The truth is, it’s not how men style themselves that will make them whole again—it’s what they do with their days. The riggers, welders, and boilermakers of generations past weren’t wearing overalls to feel like men, as Susan Faludi, the author of books on both sexes, has pointed out. Instead, “their sense of their own manhood flowed out of their utility in a society, not the other way around,” she writes. “Conceiving of masculinity as something to be”—a part to play—“turns manliness into [something] ornamental, and about as ‘masculine’ as fake eyelashes are inherently ‘feminine.’?”
Faludi was right here.
And while the Newsweek authors’ suggestions were tone-deaf and unrealistic re-hashes of 1970s feminist fantasies, it is true that being a man means a lot more than dressing like one for a season or two. Masculinity is not an outfit, and it’s not a fashion statement. It’s not a la carte. It’s an experience, a role, a way of living, a state of being. Manhood can’t change with every season. Being a man is not a weekend retreat. Our manhood is a connection to our fathers and their fathers and the men who came before us. It’s our connection to a history that reveals something about who we still are. Men have always adapted to changing environments, and they will continue to do so. But a masculinity that can be buttoned up and buttoned down in response to a marketing trend isn’t masculinity at all.
