THE US FEDERAL JUDICIARY has frequently displayed a dismissive attitude toward ‘fashion,’ while simultaneously recognising the great economic importance of ‘clothing.’ As ‘fashion’ was, from the creation of the united States until, arguably, the late 1960s, associated primarily with the female sex, while judges during this time period were almost exclusively male, one naturally wonders whether the power dynamics of gender shaped the development of the law pertaining to fashion. There is good reason to believe that this has indeed been the case.

Fashion has been ‘a female thing’ for a very long time in the west; not since the eighteenth century has any significant number of western men dressed more elaborately than their female counterparts.¹ The current expectation that men – and, nowadays, women who wish to appear ‘serious’ – will trivialise and denigrate fashion is so entrenched in our collective consciousness² that we are hardly aware of the cultural relativism of it all. Indeed, even by the mid-nineteenth century (in a country that had never had a ‘court culture’ where fashion was de rigueur for both men and women), one US federal judge saw fit to instruct a jury deciding a patent case:

New inventions in regard to some trifling article of dress, such as hoops, or crinolines, or, in the language of Judge Story, ‘a new invention to poison people,’ are not patentable. The one is frivolous, the other mischievous.³

Yet during this same period, judges on the federal bench waxed poetic about the incredible technological advancements in the production of clothing, made possible by innovations like Eli Whitney’s cotton gin:

There are circumstances within the knowledge of all mankind, which prove the originality of this invention more satisfactorily to the mind than the direct testimony of a host of witnesses. […] The machine of which Mr. Whitney claims the invention, so facilitates the preparation of [cotton] for use, that the cultivation of it has suddenly become an object of infinitely greater importance than that of the other species ever can be. Is it then to be imagined that if this machine had been before discovered, the use of it would ever have been lost or could have been confined to any tract of country left unexplored by commercial enterprise?⁴

This contrast can be observed in other disputes. For example, in one 1861 decision, a federal judge lamented the time and money expended on litigation between two women over the alleged copyright infringement of a work entitled ‘The ladies’ chart for cutting dresses and basques for ladies, and coats, jackets, etc., for boys.’ The court wrote: ‘It is to be regretted that under the impulse of their heated passions and intemperate zeal, these excited females have put themselves to unnecessary trouble and expense in taking depositions […]’⁵

Yet in a different, more ‘manly’ dispute in 1851, another judge deemed it a worthwhile use of the judiciary’s and the parties’ resources to order second trial – an enormously burdensome undertaking – in a case where the lower-court judge had not clearly conveyed to the first jury that the defendants (who had allegedly misrepresented themselves as valets for a hotel in order to make a living transporting luggage) ‘must not dress themselves in colours, and adopt and wear symbols, which belong to others.’⁶ These decisions suggest that nineteenth century american judges saw fit to intervene in apparel-related disputes where the subject matter was sufficiently ‘utilitarian’ to fall within the realm of ‘men’s work.’ Where merely aesthetic – i.e. ‘female’ – aspects of fashion were at issue, courts’ reactions ranged from mere expressions of condescension⁷ to outright refusals to exercise their power to intervene. The use of fashion for less visibly utilitarian ends, like personal expression,⁸ was either imperceptible to, or ignored by, judges – and this has remained true well into the twentieth century.

In the 1918 case of International News Service v. Associated Press,⁹ the US Supreme Court bypassed the strictures of copyright law in order to enjoin one news organisation from free-riding on the information collection and dissemination efforts of another. Yet just one decade later, in Cheney Bros. v. Doris Silk Corp.,¹⁰ an appellate court refused to extend the Supreme Court’s reasoning to protect ‘a manufacturer of silks, which puts out each season many new patterns, designed to attract purchasers by their novelty and beauty’ in its suit against a competitor who had made a business out of knocking off the plaintiff’s popular designs. The plaintiff quite reasonably attempted to invoke the Supreme Court’s reasoning in INS v. AP, but the appellate court did not bite:

The plaintiff asks for protection only during the season, and needs no more, for the designs are all ephemeral. It seeks in this way to disguise the extent of the proposed innovation, and to persuade us that, if we interfere only a little, the solecism, if there be one, may be pardonable. [But that] is not the law. In the absence of some recognised right at common law, or under the statutes […] a man’s property is limited to the chattels which embody his invention. Others may imitate these at their pleasure.¹¹

The analogy from the news case to the fashion case was and continues to be obvious, yet the federal courts were willing to provide relief for the plaintiff only in the former. While alternative explanations for the divergent results are possible,¹² it is also possible that the men wielding the power of the federal judiciary simply saw the collection and distribution of news as a more valuable-cum-respectable- cum-manly endeavour than the design and manufacture of silk patterns for ‘ladies’ dresses. (The Cheney Bros. decision served as a catalyst for lobbying efforts directed at Congress to obtain copyright protection for fashion designs – an endeavour whose multi-decade failure raises its own questions about gender-power dynamics.)

Even after the Sexual Revolution in the US in the late 1960s, when the importance of apparel – and even fashion – went ‘mainstream,’ some judges continued to treat clothing-related cases as unworthy of their time. For example, in the 1974 case of Rappaport v. Katz, plaintiff Doreen Rappaport challenged on constitutional grounds guidelines of the New York City Clerk prescribing required dress for couples getting married.¹³ The plaintiff ‘wished to wear pants to her wedding but was told [by the City Clerk] to present herself in a skirt’, prompting her to bring suit because, in her words, ‘I find dressing in pants […] protects me from much of the sex-role stereotyping to which women continue to be subjected both professionally and socially.’¹⁴ The male judge assigned to the case would have nothing to do with it, writing that ‘federal judges have too much to do to become involved in this type of dispute’¹⁵  The court did not acknowledge the tension between this dismissive passage and other portions of the opinion, like the following paragraph:

The City Clerk draws attention to the word ‘solemnise’ repeated in the statute from which he infers a duty to conduct a solemn, not a frivolous occasion. […] He asserts that the City of New York has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in decorating and maintaining appropriately, separate chapels for such solemnisations in each of the five boroughs of the City, in keeping with the solemnity attached to the nature of the marriage obligations publicly assumed by every couple in said chapels. During the last six decades, he says, couples who sought the solemnisation service of the City Clerk invariably appeared in appropriate clothes for this single most important event in their lives.¹⁶

Put differently, while the attire to be worn at a wedding ceremony was indeed a ‘solemn’ matter, Ms. Rappaport’s desire to select her own attire for the occasion, although motivated by ideological and political concerns, was nevertheless ‘frivolous.’

More recently, an appellate court characterised the Rappaport case as posing the question, ‘Does a bride have a right founded in the constitutional notion of liberty to wear slacks to her city-hall marriage?’¹⁷ The court, comparing Rappaport to another case in which a plaintiff had sued for constitutional violations over a public employer’s broken promise ‘to give its employees fresh Danish pastry during their coffee breaks,’ described Rappaport as belonging to a class of cases ‘not [where] the harms […] are small but [where, even so,] there is no actionable wrong.’¹⁸ It is quite remarkable for a court to state that even where it perceives a wrong that should be redressed, it will not intervene – not because of procedural flaws or other legal obstacles, but just because.

Of course, in the new millennium, fashion can no longer be credibly characterised as a mere hobby for aristocratic women with little else to do; fashion is now a multi-billion-dollar industry with countless stakeholders. But even where the economic stakes in fashion-related cases are too great for a court to simply ‘opt out,’ as many of the above-mentioned judges did, federal judges presiding over such cases still make their distaste for the subject matter clear (even, and maybe especially, female judges). Consider Gucci America, Inc. v. Guess?, Inc.,¹⁹ a recent lawsuit over Guess’s alleged conspiracy to ‘gucci-fy’ its products in order to boost business by free-riding on the luxury brand’s consumer goodwill.²⁰ Judge Shira Sheindlin’s lengthy 2012 decision disposing of the case, partly in Gucci’s favour, concluded with this withering passage:

Over the past three years, the parties have put in countless hours and spent untold sums of money, all in the service of fashion – what Oscar Wilde aptly called ‘a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.’ With the instant disputes now resolved, and with Gucci’s entitlement to the relief noted above, it is my hope that this ugliness will be limited to the runway and shopping floor, rather than spilling over into the courts.²¹

The message, of course, was that fashion – whose immense economic and social importance no reasonable person could now ignore or dispute – continues to be somehow unworthy of the federal courts’ time. It is true that federal judges, who must manage a docket consisting of both criminal and civil cases, tend to give priority to the former, with only rare exceptions. Yet even limiting our examination to federal civil cases, one does not often see passages like Judge Scheindlin’s excoriation in decisions outside the realm of fashion, especially in disputes complex enough to warrant a one hundred plus-page opinion.

In short, it seems that fashion’s inferior status as ‘a female thing’ continues to haunt its treatment in litigation, with inevitable, if unquantifiable, effects on the outcome of disputes of great consequence for the parties – and, by extension, for the evolution of US law more generally. While conclusions must be guarded pending further study of this phenomenon, it is clear that the gender-power dynamics we often try to relegate to another era are alive and well, at least in the cases described. Litigants – and advocates of social equality – beware!

Charles Colman is a specialist in the emerging field of ‘fashion law’ and an Assistant Professor of Law at the William S. Richardson School of Law, University of Hawai’i-Mānoa.

This article was originally published in Vestoj: On Power.

1. See P McNeil and V Karaminas, (eds.), The Men’s Fashion Reader, Berg, Oxford 2009, pp.147-48. ‘In The Empire of Fashion, [Gilles] Lipovetsky writes that from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century, both sexes were equally extravagant in fashion and ornamentation. Even up until the seventeenth century men’s fashion was more playful than women’s; it was not until the “great renunciation” of the late eighteenth century that the masculine mode was eclipsed by the feminine.’ Citing G Lipovetsky, Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy, Princeton university Press, Princeton, 1994, pp.26-27. See also Ibid, p.148 ‘Simply put, it has been claimed that after the decline in court societies, men dressed for comfort and function rather than fashionability and style.’ Citing J Craik, The Face of Fashion: Cultural Studies in Fashion, Routledge, London, 1994. ↩

2. See A Hollander, Sex and Suits, Knopf, New York, p.48. ‘Public attention has [long] been riveted on the feminine scheme of varying the same idea in different ways through time. This has been what is meant by “Fashion” when it is despised as woman’s business.’ ↩

3. Page v. Ferry, 18 F. Cas. 979, 982. C.C.E.D. Mich. 1857. Wilkins, J. ↩

4. Motte v. Bennett, 17 F. Cas. 909, 916-17. C.C.D.S.C. 1849. This passage first appeared in an 1807 judicial opinion in the case of Whitney v. Fort, now lost, but verified (and expounded upon) by a judge in Whitney v. Carter, 29 F. Cas. 1070, 1071-72. C.C.D. ga. 1810. ↩

5. Drury v. Ewing, 7 F. Cas. 1113, 1117. C.C.S.D. Oh. 1862. ↩

6. Marsh v. Billings, 61 Mass. 322, 332 (1851). Note that this was actually a state-court case; it was not until decades later that trademark and ‘trade dress’ litigation could be brought in the federal courts. ↩

7. See, e.g., Good Form Mfg. Co. v. White, 160 F. 661, 662. 2d Cir. 1908. Patented device for keeping necktie in place with standing collar described by court as an ‘invention . . . of minor importance, having for its object the improvement in appearance and fit of an article of wearing apparel.’ ↩

8. P McNeil and V Karaminas, eds., The Men’s Fashion Reader, Berg, Oxford, 2009, p.9. ‘Feminist theory can be used to understand the meaning of style politics – using “rituals of consumption in dress, cosmetics, hairstyle and gesture to bend the norms ordained by the market and to flout family and other authority.”’ Quoting V de Grazia, ‘Introduction,’ in The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective, ed. V de Grazia and E Furlough, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1966, p.7.  ↩

9. 248 U.S. 215. 1918 ↩

10. 35 F.2d 279. 2d Cir. 1929 ↩

11. Ibid. pp.279-80 ↩

12. Several passages from the Second Circuit panel’s decision in Cheney Bros. suggest that it might have decided INS v. AP differently, if it had adjudicated the earlier case. Further, this time period is associated with the emerging recognition of the limitations of courts to create ‘federal common law’ – a notion formalised by the Supreme Court eight years later, in Erie Railroad Co. v. Tompkins, 304 U.S. 64. 1938 ↩

13. 380 F. Supp. 808. S.D.N.Y. 1974. ↩

14. Ibid. p.809 ↩

15. Ibid. p.812. It should be noted that the judge did attempt to bolster his ruling with federalism arguments. ↩

16. Ibid. pp.810-11 ↩

17. Hessel v. O’Hearn, 977 F.2d 299, 304. 7th Cir. 1992  ↩

18. Ibid. ↩

19. 9 Civ. 4373 (SAS), 2012 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 84232. S.D.N.Y. Jun. 18, 2012. J Scheindlin. ↩

20. See discussion in C Colman, ‘Handbags at Dawn,’ Intellectual Property Magazine, Jul. 13, 2012, http://lawoffashion.com/blog/story/07/13/2012/145. ↩

21. Gucci America, 2012. U.S. Dist. LEXIS 84232, p.117 ↩

IN A 1975 EPISODE of ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show,’ Mary advises her spendthrift (and – unpopular opinion, maybe – fabulous) friend Phyllis on keeping to a budget.¹ Mary shows Phyllis her own monthly expenses, an exchange that leads Phyllis to ask what Mary would do if she saw a gorgeous coat that cost more than twice her monthly clothing budget. Phyllis describes the coat in so much detail that one wonders if it’s a theoretical garment or one Phyllis has her eye on. (It’s camel, leather-trimmed, and fits perfectly.) Mary insists she just wouldn’t buy it until saving up, case closed. It’s only when Phyllis gets to the part about the coat’s original price being hundreds of dollars higher that sensible Mary admits that she would splurge.

Mary and Phyllis illustrate two enduring stereotypes of female consumption: the greedy woman who craves the latest trend, and her frugal counterpart, who carefully budgets. But a crucial thing is different in 2017: Clothing these days is cheaper than it used to be,² and consumers spend proportionally less on it.³ This on-the-surface neutral fact has had a huge, if complicated, impact on fashion. There are, of course, the labour and environmental concerns raised by the proverbial dress that costs the same as a latte. And there is a cultural shift: Now that having a varied, up-to-date wardrobe has ceased to be a luxury for the few, the wealthy have needed to find other ways to distinguish themselves through dress: minimalism.

Minimalist fashion has emerged in implicit response to a myth: that overconsumption has become increasingly widespread, available not just to ladies of leisure, and that women’s hunger for the next new thing is filling landfills. The expression ‘fast fashion’ implies something more than affordability. It suggests a consumer who can’t pile the novelty items into her cart, real or virtual, quickly enough. Because it would be overtly cruel and snobbish to fault women on budgets (which, with stagnant wages and precarious work, is a lot of us) for trying to look presentable, the financial necessity of cheap clothes gets left out of the cultural conversation about inexpensive tank tops.

What’s chic, as always, is to be rich. But wealth is now signalled by standing apart from the Black Friday hordes (remember to post to Facebook about how you’re instead going skiing that day), or the 9-to-5 plebs who seek bargains for sport. Relatability, however, is also in style, so we’ve landed on a narrative of sorts: A (young, rich, photogenic) woman who used to buy All The Stuff, but who has learned the error of her ways, and now invests in a few choice, trend-indifferent items from upscale, and therefore ethical, shops.

It’s called the ‘capsule wardrobe.’ Brands and lifestyle bloggers encourage the sort of woman who might go in for clean-eating ‘bowls,’ and who apologises for having had overly plucked eyebrows in the early 2000s, to embrace it. Women are urged to ‘curate’ our wardrobes, paring them down to a few select items. But maybe we don’t own the right ones? Capsule dressing requires ‘basics,’ which any given woman may or may not already own, and thus tends to come with a list of suggestions, often described, confusingly, as ‘essentials.’

In a piece called ‘You’re doing the “capsule wardrobe” wrong,’ Kelly Dougher traces capsule dressing from its Seventies origins (with Susie Faux, a London shop-owner⁴ ) to the present: ‘[T]he capsule wardrobe,’ argues Dougher, ‘has sneakily been repackaged as a new vessel for our society’s obsession with consumerism.’⁵ Tips on how to shop less are somehow, she observes, shopping lists of their own. What gives?

The new minimalism sends a paradoxical message to women, that we should both feel ashamed for buying so much stuff – or such cheap stuff, as though the two are the same – and that we need to solve our materialism by caring more about what we own, and spending more on each item. Minimalist fashion, in all its pricey asceticism, is about exploiting women’s discomfort with our enjoyment of stuff.

This is, to be fair, a response to an ambivalence some women genuinely express. Caroline Joy Rector, of the capsule-wardrobe lifestyle blog Un-Fancy, explained the impetus for her project as follows: ‘I’d noticed that I had a bad habit of going shopping when I needed to jolt myself out of a bad mood.’⁶ Meanwhile, art director Matilda Kahl told Ad Age that after switching to uniform dressing (that is, wearing the same thing every day, ‘I no longer spend time on choosing clothes nor do I get self-conscious in meetings, which would happen occasionally before.’⁷

Where women are concerned, then, minimalist clothing advice is aimed at tamping down on overabundant desire. Rather than taking your inspiration from that awesome scarf on the woman at the coffee shop this morning, you’re to restrict yourself to sensible basics. Are you A Woman? You require The Navy Blazer, The Pencil Skirt, and so forth, and be sure to pay full price for each. Which brings us to the capsule’s cousin: the Basic Essentials list. (Think Goop’s ‘Ten Investment Pieces You’ll Have Forever,’⁸ which, in fairness, suggests a camel coat not unlike Phyllis’s ideal.)

As Nikki Ogunnaike has pointed out in Elle, these must-own lists have scant relationship with what any individual woman actually wants or needs to wear: ‘But really, can you tell me why I should own ballet flats before I turn 30 this January?’⁹ Elle backtracked from Ogunnaike’s well-put but not especially commercially-friendly point, publishing a clothes-to-own-by-30 guide a couple months later, complete with ballet flats.

The big lie behind these checklists is that there are ‘timeless’ items in the first place. It’s not that every garment goes out of style, but that there’s no way to know which will or when. A quick way to see this is to glance at timeless-classics lists published a decade ago.¹⁰ While the text version doesn’t much change in that timespan – boots, white shirts – the photos tell another story. Jeans you were called to ‘invest’ $200 in circa 2005 – and this is assuming they still fit – will look anything but modern today.

As minimalism has caught on as a trend more generally,¹¹ post-2008, the term has come to connote both the number of items and a particular aesthetic: the kind of gray-scale uniform that looks fabulous when displayed with blond wood floors and white walls, but that seems, once you’re wearing it (at least in my personal experience of, well, wearing it) like you’re in the same grey T-shirts that did nothing special for you as a sixteen-year-old.¹²

It’s good and well to make the case that you can keep wearing clothes that have gone out of style. Plenty of us do! But that’s not a case conducive to selling thousand-dollar trench coats. And it’s absolutely worthwhile to care about labour conditions in garment factories and the environmental impact of discarded clothes, concerns that sometimes weave their way into minimalist rhetoric. But is that what’s really going on when women are instructed to ‘invest’ in beige belted jackets that seem far more practical than they are?

Consider Ralph Lauren’s ‘Forever Pieces’ collection.¹³ (What could be more timeless than eternity?) Among the ‘five smart staples’: ‘the white pant,’ e-commerce-speak for white pants. The notion that this, the world’s most stainable garment would last ‘forever’ requires tremendous suspension of disbelief.

Minimalism’s critics regularly point out that stop-shopping tips all too often amount to advice to buy more than you would otherwise.¹⁴ The go-to example of this is of course Marie Kondo’s reminder to chuck what doesn’t ‘spark joy,’ a strategy all but guaranteed to end with having to buy all new T-shirts. Like diet advice, minimalist clothing tips have a way of encouraging a vulnerable audience to fall deeper into the hole from which they seek to escape. Some sort of French paradox is meant to ensue, where by spending thousands on a handbag, you wind up saving money and turning into an overall less materialistic person.

We see this most clearly with how capsule wardrobes are marketed differently at men than at women. Cladwell sends different messages in its ‘capsules for women’ and ‘roadmap for men’ sections. Men get this message: ‘Tell us what you’re like. We’ll tell you what to like.’ Women: ‘Have too many clothes and nothing to wear?’ Women will get help ‘reduc[ing] the clutter in your closet.’ Men: ‘A personal style guide that takes the guesswork out of clothing.’

The implied male recipient of minimalist clothing advice is a bumbling bachelor who for whatever reason doesn’t have a woman in his life available to make sure he goes out of the house looking like a reasonable adult. He finds shopping tedious, and so needs a checklist. For women, the problem being addressed is excessive enjoyment of shopping, and, secondarily, time sunk into in choosing what to wear each day.

A vocalised dislike of stuff is a way for a man to assert that he’s an adventurous sort who won’t be tied down. The stuff-averse man¹⁵ – think Mark Zuckerberg, proudly sticking with those grey T-shirts,¹⁶  but also everyday dudes who make a point in shuddering when the word “mall” is uttered – is setting himself apart from femininity (as manifested in men or women) and bourgeois responsibility. It doesn’t matter if he devotes his leisure time to rock-climbing or world-saving (and note that the protests that got the world revved up involved women wearing new pink hats). It’s enough for a man to announce a preference for ‘experiences,’ and his female interlocutor will find herself squirming, wondering if maybe the fact that she finds shopping non-torturous makes her a terrible person.

Perhaps because it’s so dead-set on selling us clothes, the new minimalism conveniently sets aside why women might be disproportionately inclined to go clothes-shopping, addressing the shopping, rather than the underlying (supposed) pathology. Is it really a callous, frivolous female indifference to labour conditions and landfills? Women need to look put-together to look professional, whereas certain men, in some settings, can be taken more seriously if they look a bit scruffy.¹⁷ (The flipside here is that men who enjoy clothes and shopping are often stigmatised for this gender-non-conforming behaviour.) Faced with fewer outlets for self-expression or status attainment, we turn a bit more than the dudes do to our own physical self-presentation. And because it would be rather grim not to, we often find ourselves enjoying the process.

If buying (or just browsing) clothes makes you happy, it doesn’t follow that you’re shopping yourself into debt, or are unable to leave your home, so packed has it become with leopard-print rompers. Liking stuff doesn’t necessarily mean purchasing tons of it, or that what you purchase is, on the whole, purchased new. As with all appetites, the desire for stuff exists at a whole range of intensities, and is only a problem if it’s a problem. Practice saying, “I like stuff,” if you do, and doing so with the confidence of someone who knows that the ostentatiously stuff-averse are consuming just as much as you are.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy’s first book, The Perils of ‘Privilege,’ comes out March 2017.

Image courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art (www.moma.org).

1. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0642878/ ↩

2. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/29/fashion/29PRICE.html ↩

3. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/04/how-america-spends-money-100-years-in-the-life-of-the-family-budget/255475/ ↩

4. http://confidencetricks.susiefaux.com/?page_id=17 ↩

5. http://fashionmagazine.com/fashion/youre-doing-the-capsule-wardrobe-wrong/ ↩

6. http://www.un-fancy.com/capsule-experiment/ ↩

7. http://adage.com/article/agency-news/creative-explains-wears-uniform-work/297975/ ↩

8. http://goop.com/10-investment-pieces-youll-have-forever/ ↩

9. http://www.elle.com/fashion/personal-style/a31913/clothes-for-your-30s-lists/ ↩

10. See: http://www.popsugar.com/fashion/10-Fashion-Essentials-According-Tim-Gunn-763661 and http://www.popsugar.com/fashion/Top-10-Essentials-According-Nina-Garcia-769532 and http://www.wardrobeoxygen.com/2005/06/the-staples-for-every-womans-wardrobe.html ↩

11. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/31/magazine/the-oppressive-gospel-of-minimalism.html ↩

12. See: http://theblissfulmind.com/2015/08/17/capsule-wardrobe-basics/ and http://theeverygirl.com/how-to-create-a-capsule-wardrobe and http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/my-capsule-wardrobe-experiment-part-one-why-i-decided-to-pare-down-227039 ↩

13. http://www.ralphlauren.com/shop/index.jsp?categoryId=118121096 ↩

14. See my previous article: https://newrepublic.com/article/123561/dont-buy-this-jacket ↩

15. https://newrepublic.com/article/134651/bros-homes ↩

16. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/11217273/Facebooks-Mark-Zuckerberg-Why-I-wear-the-same-T-shirt-every-day.html ↩

17. http://thenewinquiry.com/blogs/the-beheld/too-brilliant-to-bathe ↩

The seventh issue of Vestoj, ‘On Masculinities,’ will be in stores this month. In introduction, Vestoj Online is publishing a series of articles on the theme.

IN COUNTRIES CIVILISED ACCORDING to the current industrial commercial idea of civilisation, while women flaunt their sexual attractiveness on all occasions, men do exactly the opposite. Sex in civilised man is signified solely by a certain kind of clothes, and he does his best to suppress all appearance of his maleness of body. Men’s clothes are simply a more or less convenient covering, convenient for the job of being a clerk in an office, a covering to obscure all his animal nature – there is no use for such in the city. But sex in civilised women is not signified simply by clothes of a conventional kind. We do not say: Look, there goes a woman; you can tell by her skirt. We know her for a woman by the shape of her legs, the roundness of her croup and by the protuberance of her bosom. A woman dressed in men’s clothes has no such opportunities for exposition, and a man in his own clothes is as much sexless as possible. He shaves his face so that, if he be young & fair, you’d not know but that he might be a girl, and any protuberance by which his sex might be known is carefully and shamefully suppressed. It is an organ of drainage and not of sex. It is tucked away and all sideway dishonoured, neglected, ridiculed and ridiculous – no longer the virile member and man’s most precious ornament, but the comic member, a thing for girls to giggle about – comic and, to nursemaids, dirty. ‘You dirty little boy, put it away.’

This matter is not only to be seen with eyes fixed on England; it has world-wide importance. In England we are told that, in spite of the fact that more boys are born than girls, there are a million or so more women than men of marriageable age; and doubtless, whether they are aware of it or not, this fact, this condition, has something to do with the present exhibitionism of women of all classes. A million or more of them cannot possibly marry – as marriage is understood in our erstwhile Christian and still largely Christianesque society. They must do something about it. The wiles, the not very wiley wiles, of the professional prostitute must be used – scents, paint, closely clothed hips and croups, a swaying walk, immense care of the face and hair, short skirts in the street, diaphanous clinging drapes in the evening, bare backs and chests, such tricks all help to influence the suppressed and inflammable male, but it is probable that, were the numbers of the sexes reversed, we should see a notable change. If men were in the majority – assuming for the moment that they were not only in the majority but also physically exuberant and economically sure of themselves and not, as they now are, mere worms crawling for the crumbs which fall from the industrial table – then we should probably see women return to modesty. They would in practice be forced to do so, in self-defence. They would become dear instead of cheap. They would be better able to choose a mate, and would hide their charms from all but the chosen, if only to avoid being pestered by the importunities of the million unsatisfied males.

Doubtless the proportions to one another of the numbers of men and women have a considerable if unconsidered influence on clothes. But the matter goes much deeper than that. It is not merely that there are more females than males and that therefore women are cheap and must advertise. It is that the spirit and nature of industrial commercial civilisations effects a profound change in the quality of sex itself. It turns men into women. It does not physically emasculate them but it causes in them a feminine cast of mind. It does not, on the other hand, turn women into men. It has no need of men at all, and it has a progressively lessening need of women themselves – women as mothers, woman as breeders, woman as woman. The hard business woman of Paris, of the French peasantry, of the small shop, is the ideal type of the commercial industrial male, She can drive as hard a bargain as any man and protect her ‘little pile’ against all comers.

And the artist type of man is, for the same reasons, most detestable and reprobate. For the artist, fool as he has become and lap-dog, represents the normal man, the normal workman, the workman who is responsible for what he makes; the craftsman, if you prefer to call him that, the person who designs what he makes and makes what he designs, for his own personal customers, whose work is his life. What possible harmony can there be between such a one and a factory-owner or a store-keeper or a stockbroker or a banker? And the artist man is not only typical of the unindustrialised worker, he is also the type of the male creature. The inventive creative mind is the male mind. Hence the sympathy between poets and soldiers – the old kind of soldiers, those who fought with sword and spears, and not the new kind who fight with bombs and poisons. For to create carries with it the implication of defence, & Nietzsche’s saying: ‘Let your work be a fight, your peace a victory’ was the saying of one who was as much a poet as a philosopher. Poet, fighter – they are much the same, if by fighting you mean fighting and not merely throwing poisons about. Poets, fighters, whether with sword or pen, such are the types of maleness, virility – actual physical maleness and not a metaphorical taradiddle. And what have such activities to do with industrialism but to destroy it? What possible friendship can there be between poetry and ‘big business’ and what alliance between soldiering and the fatuous business of buying stocks and shares for ‘a rise’?

Hence it is that in a world devoted to commerce, trading, shop-keeping, money-making, the male creature is under eclipse. He is not wanted, and a premium is put upon the rabbit type, the kind that sees nothing wrong in travelling in a tube to and from the city where, cooped up in burrows, they scuffle and scoop and nibble and grab for little profits and ‘quick returns’, where the highest ambition is to make lots of money, by means proper to tricksters & card sharpers (always remembering that ‘honesty is the best policy’ and that the only sin is being found out), and thus gain the extraordinarily not-worth-having power of being able to buy large quantities of things, food, clothing, houses, cars & amusements provided by people who regard such things as the rabbit man himself does, simply as so many means of making money to be spent in similar ways – all men more or less cheating and scrounging and wangling and grabbing and grasping as performed by others – the baker baking inferior commercial bread in order to make money to buy the inferior bread of other commercial bakers. No wonder they dress him in trousers and tie up his maleness all crushed and sideways and tell him it’s dirty. The world of men of business is a world of men become female – getting and spending, a housekeeping business, a business of making food go round & jealousy of neighbours. And instead of the more or less holy motive of providing necessities for your own husband and children, your own flesh and blood, it becomes an unholy scramble of impersonal production, merely ‘goods’ in account books, and as the ‘balance sheets’ in the final arbiter of success, so the financier, moneylender, banker is the ultimate ruler. And the banker, however much morally he may resemble a robber, and enjoy the title of baron – baron this, lord the other – is not like the old kind of ‘robber baron.’ He is no fighting man. He hides behind the police and the soldiers & pays them to fight for him. He is no tyranny to be overthrown by force. He rules in the mind. His kingdom is the souls of men, men who worship money and profits, and getting and spending, and insurance and ‘capital appreciation.’

But there are limits to profitable individualism. ‘The weak in courage is strong in cunning.’ Hence the development of trusts and combines and mergers and cartels. And then the war of greed and grab continues on a larger scale. Where formerly there were merely local rivalries between local shop keepers & attempts to corner local markets, now there are international rivalries and the scuffle and scoop and nibble and grab is transferred on to the high-sounding plane of foreign politics, and behind the chairs of those we call statesmen are the sinister figures of the agents of world-wide commercial corporations. And wars, which in earlier times were dynastic or racial or religious, and essentially male in character, are now only camouflaged by false propaganda and advertisement made out to be such, for religion and race, ‘king and country’ are still the only war motives with any ‘glory’ attached to them, and glory is still the only real incentive to the undertaking of a thing which of its nature involves sufferings & devastations so horrible. But commercially inspired wars are not only inglorious, they are also both feminine and inhuman in character – feminine because they are in essence wars between rival boarding-house keepers, inhuman because they are no longer fights between men, hand to hand, muscle to muscle, will to will, sword to sword, and wars conducted according to that most male of all human contrivances, the rule of honour; ‘playing the game’ and the laws of civilised warfare. Honour has now become absurd, and so war has become as obscene and non-moral and as inhuman as a fight between rival ant-heaps. And we employ the same technique, burrowing and worming in the ground, and poisons and gases. And so modern war takes on the full character of modern life, the commercially inspired life of the modern world, the industrial world, the machine, mass production world, the world of the factory. The factory! The factory filled with young women and girls, because the things made in factories are made by the machines, and minding machines is not only a job women can do, & cheaper than men, but a job they do better because they like doing it. And they like factory life, the routine and the chatter and the escape from the home in the slum, the home no longer honoured, the home in which children are a disaster & men are ridiculous, sheep, rabbits, worms, and clothing to match, with the appetites of he-goats and their women find them almost as nasty. What’s the sense of a lusty young man in a slum or in a model dwelling or in a ‘working-class flat’? What’s the good of a handle to your belly in Burnley or Preston or Limehouse or Leeds? – no more good than hands on your arms or brains in your skull. There is no real use for such things in a world turned female – food, clothing and shelter and finery and frivolity, what else is there need for?

And as a clear indication of the connection between all these things and clothes, between this economics and politics, these machines and these factories, and the outward appearance of men and women, it is significant that all those countries which have accepted what are called Western ideas and Western civilisation have also Western dress. There are no exceptions. The things go inseparably together. Whether or no we fabricate any theories about this, the facts are sufficiently striking – the mere obvious, visible facts. What does industrialisation mean for men’s work? It means the destruction of the small independent craftsman, the man depending upon his own initiative, invention, courage and responsibility. The craftsman becomes intellectually irresponsible, his imagination withers, he loses pride in himself. His work no longer demands either bodily or intellectual vigour. He takes to cheap ready-made coats and collars and ties. He puts on a billy-cock hat – in some countries (Persia for example) he is compelled to do so by law and police. He wears trousers. In a word, he throws away his robes, the robes of his ancestors and puts on machine-made, ready-made upholstery. He is pleased to do so. He now feels civilised. He has joined the great army of money makers, the factory gadgets and sanitary conveniences are now his own. He wears the uniform that goes with them. And the women! In the case of the women even more striking results are to be seen. The modesty and decorum proper to people who know their importance and the importance and fragility of their precious and desirable bodies is gone – gone like a house of cards, like a smashed bubble, no memory left. Gone is the ancient dignity of shawls and veils; and instead, in Constantinople, in Cairo, in Jerusalem, to in Tokio, in Peking, in India – wherever the Western world is worshipped and its industrialism imitated – we have the whole cheap paraphernalia and frippery of Manchester, London, Paris and Monte Carlo, the semi-nudity, the cheap silk, the lipstick and paint, the beach pyjama, the whole caboodle of female exhibitionism. The sexes are reversed. The male becomes the modest sex, the female the immodest. And why not? The man is now ashamed – though not yet always consciously and statedly so. He is no longer the fighter, whether with sword or hammer. At the best he is ‘in work’ and can pay the rent and the grocer; an employee, a wage slave. And as to his sex, perhaps the most common and frequent exercise of it is in the dark with contraceptives – masturbation a deux, whether married or single. The man is ashamed; there is nothing left for him to be proud of. He is a worm and no man.

But for the woman it is different. She is now emancipated.’ She has thrown off the shackles. She has become a worker.’ And this has become possible, not because women have gained the imagination & responsibility & initiative of the men of old time, not because they can now do the work men formerly did, but because the work men formerly did has been done away. It is no longer wanted. The whole world of work has been reduced to the level of female accomplishment. Women make good wage slaves. They are quite conscientious about it. They feel that they have come into their own. Getting and spending is their business and now the world is nothing else but getting and spending and men have indeed laid waste their powers. Hence the immense enthusiasm among the women of Russia. The Communist state, if such it can be called, is the matriarchy by right. It is the essentially female thing. The dregs of maleness which so sadly mar the capitalist world have been abolished in it – the captain of industry with his almost warlike pride in his avarice – ‘butter kings’ (kings, mark you!), ‘iron kings,’ ‘princes of commerce,’ the strike, the lockout – these things have no place in the well-run female world of machine production – the machine production of the necessary things, that is to say the things for which and about which and in which men formerly fought.

But the fighting decayed, it was corrupted by commerce, degraded by the world of the merchants and financiers which had destroyed that of the kings and princes. That’s where they got their jargon from! Who would have thought of calling the biggest purveyor of butter a ‘butter king’ if there had not formerly been kings of men? And how could there have been tariff ‘wars’ if there had not formerly been wars of flesh and blood? But now there are only groceries to squabble about and naturally enough such wars are waged with gas bombs and poisons. The idea of poison is familiar to those who for the sake of gain do not scruple to adulterate food. Hence indeed the matriarchal state – Communist or Fascist, totalitarian or corporative. It is all a matter of more or less efficient housekeeping. The capitalist world is rotten and it is the rot of men. It will be superseded by a world run by women. That is its proper culmination. Women do not object to industrialism, but only to the waste and want which are inseparable from the mad competition of capitalists. They do not object to the machine industry but only to its use as an instrument of money-making. Theirs is a purely quantitative world. Let there be a world of plenty even if it be plenty of second-rate groceries – cheap houses, cheap food, cheap clothes and cheap finery. And let the men, if any remain unemasculate (man, as a popular author puts it, ‘half god, half mischievous prattling child’), let them carry on with their childish games in their leisure hours. Culture and sport will keep them out of mischief – ‘Go on talking, darling.’

The ‘civilised’ man and woman may think, from what I have written, that I am not merely an anti-feminist but a misogynist of a peculiarly vituperative kind. I shall not try to disabuse them – so little good would be done by the attempt. I wish only to record that when I belittle the business man, financier or merchant, stockbroker or clerk, and the wage-slave, factory hand or shop assistant, by calling them emasculate, and when I curse Communist or Fascist states as matriarchies (for the Fascist’s militaristic bombast is only an extension of the business of butter kings, and Fascism and corporativism are no less industrialist and commercial than Communism – they are a grocer’s shop improvement made by the masters instead of by the ‘hands), and when I say industrialism is man turned female, I do not therefore despise either the female or the feminine. But surely this is obvious.

The emasculate man is despicable, but not because he is like a woman. He is not; he is simply a worm. And the industrialised woman is not despicable because she is like a man. She is despicable because she is barren.

***

It may be observed that in the foregoing pages I have written of industrialism and the workers as though masters and managers, directors and share-holders, hardly existed, and the industrial world were inhabited entirely by ‘hands’. I have written of men’s clothes and women’s as though such things as trousers were only worn by wage slaves and lipstick only used by mill girls and drapers’ assistants. In this, doubt-less, I show my obsession. For me, I admit, the world of men is first of all the world of the poor. Think of all the phrases that confirm me! Man, ‘the Son of Man,’ the Poor Man, ‘Masters and men,’ ‘officers and men’ (one loves one’s men’ as the subaltern says – it’s probably in ‘Infantry Training,’ and I dare say they really do; there’s no earthly reason why they shouldn’t; why shouldn’t they?). The army is the men, not the officers. The officers are only men chosen to lead (but the war was won in the trenches, not at G. H.Q. – unless you confirm that it was won on Wall Street – and that’s true too), The Church is the laity, not the clergy. The hierarchy is ordained to lead, to teach, to preach, to sacrifice, but, no less than the laity, it must go to confession. You don’t become more of a soldier by becoming an officer and you don’t become more a Christian by becoming a priest or a preacher. And so, in the everyday world of work, it is the men that matter. The work of the world is the work of the ‘men’ – but the masters, by overthrowing the principles of social justice and making private property an absolute instead of a relative and social right, and the good of the individual more important than the common good, by these doings and other blasphemies the masters have turned the world of men into a likeness of the inhuman world of ants and bees.

How doth the little busy bee
Make profits for his Master
By minding mechanisms which
Go faster still and faster.

Who minds what the masters wear? Let them wear court dress with swords. By so doing they provide at least a laugh. Let them wear the best tailorings of Savile Row and draw dividends from the sale of 50s suits at the same time. Who cares? By all means let wear trousers. Nothing could be more seemly and appropriate. And who minds what fine ladies wear? The fine wives of financiers! Dukes and duchesses are only a name and the trappings of ghosts are like the bridal veils of divorcees.

Perhaps it should also be added. to avoid misunderstanding, that when I said, in the early pages of this essay, that the modern dress of man was such as to suppress his maleness shamefully, I did not intend to imply that it would be a good thing in my opinion if men were to be shamelessly exhibitionist as women are. I do not merely wish to reverse the present situation. I was merely describing the situation with regard to clothes as it actually is. In fact my wish would be, if I had any say in the matter, that both men and women should dress in what are commonly called robes, although the word is a little pompous. Take for example the traditional dress of the Arabs, which they still wear, and compare that way of dressing with that of our medieval ancestors, and note how, even today, European medieval dress still lingers for use on formal occasions – the judge in his court, the priest at the altar, the king on his throne. These clothes which we now regard as being purely conventional and ceremonial are in fact the remains of what were originally the common dress of people in their ordinary lives.

So I am not arguing that women should hide their bodies and men expose them. Rather I am arguing that both men and women should regain their human dignity and dress accordingly. Today, it would seem that we only think of ourselves as a kind of superior animal. We say how convenient such and such clothes are, or how inconvenient, how comfortable or how uncomfortable, healthy or unhealthy. We never say how appropriate or inappropriate, suitable or unsuitable; at any rate such considerations are very much in the background and the chief thing in the minds of those who would reform modern dress are hygiene and functional convenience. The idea that man is a being having intrinsic dignity (child of God, ‘and if child, heir also’) is forgotten. We dress either as fashion demands or imposes (which is largely a matter of salesmanship and advertisement exploiting human vanity) or we dress simply for convenience; as when we wear shorts for cycling, slips for swimming and, strange as it may seem, ‘plus fours’ for golfing. And if I have been at considerable pains to throw contumely upon man’s modern dress and to sneer at its sexlessness, it is not because I wish men to flaunt their maleness as women flaunt their femaleness, but because I consider such clothes unworthy of human beings and derogatory to their male & female natures. The highlander in his kilt (beneath which he is normally naked) is not exposing his sex, but, on the other hand, neither is he dishonouring it.

***

And there is another point upon which it may be well to avoid misunderstanding. I have insisted upon the honour and dignity of maleness and femaleness as such, both physical and psychological. Perhaps I have made it appear that I am urging a clearer and more visible differentiation of the sexes – the man to be on all occasions visibly male and the woman female. There are two things to be considered here. In the first place, inasmuch as all men in commercial industrial countries today wear the coat and trousers, collar and tie of the man of business – kings & shop-walkers, clerks and mechanics all dress in the same uniform except when, on ceremonial occasions, they put on medieval robes – and all women wear some kind of skirt, except when they are engaged in some special occupation for which it is supposed that trousers or breeches are more convenient – aviation, cycling, horse-riding and, on the beach, pyjamas (but this is a sort of swank and indicates not so much a desire to exhibit their emancipation from the femininity of the Victorian fashions) – therefore there can be no possible need to demand any greater visible differentiation between the sexes than we now have. On the contrary, indeed, as I have argued elsewhere, the need today for a much closer approximation in dress as there is, for instance, among the Arabs. However different, sexually speaking, the function from the male is from that of the female – as different as giving and receiving, fertilising and being fertilised – yet, as human beings, there is no such monstrous difference between men and women as modern industrial uniforms suggest. Apart from their organs of sex, men and women are remarkably alike in physiological disposition, & however widely apart they may be psychologically (& there is indeed an impassable gulf between them) there is no justification for dressing the male sex universally in tailor-made trousers, as though man alone had legs and he alone were bound by hard and fast convention, and all women in skirts and ornaments as though woman did not bifurcate and she alone had any need to be pleasing to the eye. In fact the difference between the clothes of men and women in commercial-industrial co unifies is a monstrous absurdity and abnormality. In the second place it is to be remembered that in actual physiology the sexes are not distinct. The virile member itself has its active counterpart in the female clitoris, and these members have at least one function in common. The male breast does not normally give milk, but its nipples are not entirely insensitive. And inasmuch as man is more or less female physically and woman more or less male, so the two sexes are not absolutely differentiated psychologically. The male has no absolute monopoly of sexual initiative – he is not the only one to possess an erectile and therefore provocative member. And so also the female has no absolute monopoly of sexual receptivity. There is fair give and take, and the giving is not entirely on one side and the taking all on the other.

What I have written therefore is not at all a plea for a return (if it would be a return) to primitive or barbaric sexual absolutism. The ideal of the pure male, the ‘he man,’ the man who is all activity, initiative, muscular force and ratiocinativeness is an absurdity. He has never existed and even approximations to him are monstrosities. The ideal of the pure female is likewise ridiculous. The ‘womanly’ woman, the creature who, underneath a man-imposed veneer of romantic modesty and spirituality, is purely instinctive & predatory, has never existed and never will. It is only by way of a joke that the human female is likened to the female spider, and it is only in periods of economic depression or religious eccentricity that the human male is regarded as having no virtues but those of the shire horse, and is therefore thought of as being better kept in stall. This essay is neither a plea for sexual exhibitionism nor sexual absolutism. It is not a plea for anything except a frank recognition of the relation between clothes and civilisation and, above all, a recognition of the fact that our clothes & our commercial-industrialism exactly go together. ‘The soul,’ says the theological philosopher, ‘is the form of the body,’ that is to say the soul is the principle which determines a thing in its species. The soul of the man of business has determined him as a species of machine-trousered animal and the soul of his mate has determined her as an aniline-dyed dancing partner.

What I have written therefore is not at all a plea for a return (if it would be a return) to primitive or barbaric sexual absolutism. The ideal of the pure male, the ‘he man,’ the man who is all activity, initiative, muscular force and ratiocinativeness is an absurdity. He has never existed and even approximations to him are monstrosities. The ideal of the pure female is likewise ridiculous. The ‘womanly’ woman, the creature who, underneath a man-imposed veneer of romantic modesty and spirituality, is purely instinctive & predatory, has never existed and never will. It is only by way of a joke that the human female is likened to the female spider, and it is only in periods of economic depression or religious eccentricity that the human male is regarded as having no virtues but those of the shire horse, and is therefore thought of as being better kept in stall. This essay is neither a plea for sexual exhibitionism nor sexual absolutism. It is not a plea for anything except a frank recognition of the relation between clothes and civilisation and, above all, a recognition of the fact that our clothes & our commercial-industrialism exactly go together. ‘The soul,’ says the theological philosopher, ‘is the form of the body,’ that is to say the soul is the principle which determines a thing in its species. The soul of the man of business has determined him as a species of machine-trousered animal and the soul of his mate has determined her as an aniline-dyed dancing partner.

Eric Gill, born in 1882, was an English artist and craftsman known for his sculpture, engravings and typography (the Gill Sans typeface takes his name). Today, he is a controversial figure, revered for his designs and reviled for the deviant sexual practises which came to light after his death. During his lifetime, Gill was a prolific writer on diverse topics including Christianity, modernity and art. The above essay, originally published in 1937 by Faber & Faber, articulates Gill’s views on the role of clothing in society.

***

Further Reading:

But no matter how similar the clothes of men and women may appear, or how different, the arrangements of each are always being made with respect to the other. Male and female clothing, taken together, illustrates what people wish the relation between mend and women to be, beside indicating the separate peace each sex is making with fashion or custom at any given time. Without looking at what men are wearing, it’s impossible to understand women’s clothes, and vice versa. The history of dress, including its current history, so far has to be perceived as a duet for men and women performing on the same stage. There may come a time when sexuality is not visualized in clothing as rightly divided into two main categories; but so far it still is.

Anne Hollander, Sex and Suits, 1994.

The line of demarcation between the dress of women, priests and servants, on the one hand, and of men, on the other hand, is not always consistently observed in practice, but it will scarcely be disputed that it is always present in a more or less definite way in the popular habits of thought. There are of course free men, and not a few of them, who, in their blind zeal for faultless reputable attire, transgress the theoretical line between man’s and woman’s dress, to the extent of arraying themselves in apparel that is obviously designed to vex the moral frame; but everyone recognises without hesitation that such apparel for men is a departure from the normal. We are in the habit of saying that such dress if ‘effeminate’; and one sometimes hears the remark that such or such an exquisitely attired gentleman is as well dressed as a footman.

Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, 1899.

“Anytime I do a men’s show, I’m thinking this would be fantastic for women—or at least for me. And more and more, it feels instinctively right to translate the same idea for both genders.”

Miuccia Prada on her spring/summer 2015 menswear collection.