Seersucker jacket by Ibiza bought at Sierra Trading Post. Neckerchief by New & Lingwood. Shirt by Richard Anderson. (Summer wear for adults includes cotton and linen, in light and pastel colors. Think relaxed, playful and colorful). For more on why I care about how I dress and why I believe it is important for everyone to dress with style and passion, go here.
In my last post, a reader took issue with my characterization of some people’s dress as “childish.” If sneakers are your go-to casual shoes and shorts your go-to casual wear, then you’re dressing like a child. Shorts and sneakers are for boys and girls, except if you’re exercising or playing a sport.
Michelle and Barack don’t wear shorts in public as casual dress, and you shouldn’t either. Why?
To quote Jesse Thorn from Put This On, wrote:
I can’t make you dress like a grown-up. If you don’t want to, don’t. Just remember that if you don’t command respect, you won’t be respected.
The Summer Suitings: If You Don’t Command Respect, You Won’t be Respected by Jay Sennett, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.
{ 4 comments }
i definitely appreciate good fashion, and for a long time clothing concerns have been a huge part of me dealing with trans stuff and queer stuff and plain ol’ gay stuff. i did the teenage proto-trans-fag thing of spending hours in the library each month obsessing over each new issue of ‘GQ,’ and now as an adult male i put considerable time and effort into finding ways to afford interesting and attractive clothing, and putting outfits together, and wearing them. i do feel disappointed and saddened that so many men, particularly heterosexual men, seem to feel so alienated from sartorial creativity and innovation and pleasure.
but – it seems really very distasteful to me to normalize the association between certain, so-called ‘adult’ types of fashionableness and the deserving of respect. who can afford to dress in this way? who has the time? on to whose body do such clothes fit? i love fashion, but i know full well that there’s a lot of complicated race and class and ability things going on in that love, and i really wish that such things were talked about more. as you said, the president and his family are often excellent fashion icons, so it’s not like it’s reducible to saying ‘this is a white way of dressing so it’s racist and bad!’ – but they’re also about as far as one can get from working class or poor, and about as close as one can get to the resources needed to dress in accordance with a particular definition of ‘dressing well’ or ‘dressing like an adult’. so – yeah. dressing ‘like an adult’, and the valuing of that way of dressing, is not neutral, nor is it accessible to everyone in the same ways or to the same extent, and i think that’s important to this discussion.
Hi,
Thanks for your comments.
“o-called ‘adult’ types of fashionableness and the deserving of respect. who can afford to dress in this way? who has the time? on to whose body do such clothes fit?”
If a person can “afford” to buy a seventy dollar pair of sneakers and a forty dollar pair of shorts, they can just as easily afford to buy a pair of loafers or dress shoes and a pair of slacks – heck even nice jeans!
I think you have confused “childish” with “low-class.” The people I have in mind when I think of individuals wearing shorts and sneakers and dressing like children are many of my co-workers, including highly paid IT specialists and full professors at an internationally renowned university. In fact, it has been my observation that some of the wealthiest people I know in my small town are some of the shittiest dressers I have ever met.
I also believe that it is the wealthier classes – and in this case mostly white – who dress poorly. They can, since their dress will not reflect badly on their race or their class standing.
One’s class or race standing may affect how much one can pay for clothing, but anyone can dress like an adult.
I saw a woman of color on the bus today who had one an absolutely lovely blouse with a beautiful design in black, white and pink, with black trousers and simple flat shoes. She was a woman of size and looked fantastic. She knows what fits her and looks good on her body in terms of color and design.
There is a white man on the bus that rides at the same time I do. Here wears a uniform of sorts: a blue long sleeve shirt, white undershirt, blue chinos and a black shoes. Everything is ironed and fits his very trim figure. He looks fantastic, too, because he, like the woman noted above, knows what colors and styles fit him.
Successful dress is always, always, always about fit and execution. Fatshionista gives great advice to an emerging femme who feels uncomfortable in skirts and high heels because of her size. “Embrace the elephant in drag” is her advice.
Your thinking suffers from the all-too-common believe that dressing well is about significant access to cash.
Money and style have little to do with one another. George Clooney, regularly held up as a fashion icon, almost always wears ill-fitting suits that I presume are “off the rack.” The collar creeps around his neck and his shirt sags under the coat. Now, he has access to gobs of cash, but still looks worse, in my opinion, than the woman and man I mentioned above. There are dozens of other hollywood stars and wealthy people who like shit.
They could take a lesson from the man and woman on the bus this morning.
Wearing clothes that fit -whatever your body shape- in colors that flatter your skin tones, are timeless, stylishish and fashionable. These clothes are the clothes of adults. The sneaker/shorts phenomenon is recent. Seventy years ago people of all races and classes wore adult clothing in public. Some may have only had one suit and one nice shirt and tie or one nice dress; but they wore that clothing when circumstances called for them to do so, which, in the more formal times of the past, was just about every occasion except work, unless they worked at white collar jobs. Hell, I’ve even seen photographs of blue collar men wearing ties and welding masks.
Dressing like an adult is accessible to most people. Both the woman and man on the bus are people I would be happy to work with. They care about their personal appearance and understanding that what they wear communicates who they are.
hey,
thanks for your reply.
—–If a person can “afford” to buy a seventy dollar pair of sneakers and a forty dollar pair of shorts, they can just as easily afford to buy a pair of loafers or dress shoes and a pair of slacks – heck even nice jeans!—–
many people can’t afford either, and are no less deserving of respect.
—–The people I have in mind when I think of individuals wearing shorts and sneakers and dressing like children are many of my co-workers, including highly paid IT specialists and full professors at an internationally renowned university.—–
if you mean you’re frustrated with middle and upper-class people who don’t live up to your expectations of middle and upper-class social norms in academia, it would probably be useful to specify that instead of making claims about what ‘most people’ can or should do.
—–I also believe that it is the wealthier classes – and in this case mostly white – who dress poorly. They can, since their dress will not reflect badly on their race or their class standing.—–
i do think there’s something to this – i do know a lot of non-white people and working-class people who put a lot more conscious effort into negotiating their fashion choices than the average middle class white dude (though not necessarily the average middle-class white woman – this stuff is obviously very gendered, among other things). but the thing about that is, these folks in particular do that *because of* racism and classism and sexism. they utilize fashionability as a way of managing those things, and while this may create certain useful and important spaces for creativity and flourishing, it also forecloses on a lot of fashion choices, especially if those fashion choices might make them look “too” ethnic/weird/uppity.
so, it’s a strategy that is useful – and pleasureable! – for some racially and economically and physically marginalized people, but even the people with the monetary and physical means to do so (and my experience tells me that the percentage of people making up this group is significantly smaller than you seem to think it is) risk losing a lot of potential spaces of resistance and innovation. to commend only those non-white and non-wealthy people who are able to and who chose to engage in these types of negotiations is to normalize the racist and classist (etc) standards those folks are negotiating. it is *a* strategy, and a legitimate one, but it is not at all the *only* one or always the *best* one.
it’s like the way women tend to be a lot more fashion conscious than men; surely a lot of that stems from shitty sexist norms which put women’s physical appearance under a microscope in a different and often more intense way than men’s bodies. surely we can affirm the choice of some women to put a lot of effort and resources into looking feminine as a way of dealing with sexism without saying that women who can’t or don’t want to do this deserve to be the targets of misogyny?
—–Your thinking suffers from the all-too-common believe that dressing well is about significant access to cash.—–
not really. mostly it stems from being a very fashion conscious person who’s also transit-dependent in a city with really mediocre public transit, who’s working one or two low-paying jobs at a time, and who’s going to school full time. it comes from having non-wealthy and non-white family and friends who resent being judged trashy because they don’t have the time or the energy or the money or the resources to dress all the time in a way that will make them look ‘respectable’. it comes from being friends with really fucking smart and strong people who accept or enjoy looking trashy because they don’t have the desire or the ability to invest time and energy into convincing white and middle-class people to like them via their clothes, and because they see that as borrowed and contingent respect at best.
it’s also about being a very short dude of normative weight and two years on testosterone with a past of being a very fat, very short dude pre- and early-hrt. clothes did not fit me well back then. they really didn’t. i was not big and tall, and the clothes made for big and tall men just looked too big on me when i could get into them, and the more form-fitting something was the more likely it was to make me dysphoric. my physical ability to access fashionable clothing and have it fit in a flattering and gender-affirming way grew twenty-fold after losing eighty-plus pounds and getting a more normatively male body shape.
—–Dressing like an adult is accessible to most people. Both the woman and man on the bus are people I would be happy to work with. They care about their personal appearance and understanding that what they wear communicates who they are.—–
i don’t know those people and what they care about. it’s really uncomfortable that you as a middle class white dude decide you know just what’s going on with two random people on the bus and their fashion situations, and that you would apparently be unhappy working with them if they didn’t meet your standards of dress.
Thanks for responding.
“in these types of negotiations is to normalize the racist and classist (etc) standards those folks are negotiating.” So by rejecting sneakers and shorts as acceptable adult casual wear, you assume that I expect everyone to dress according to some norm, or so it seems.
I believe it is possible to call for adults to wear adult clothing and supporting people’s right to wear religiously and ethnically appropriate clothing (I’m not a big fan of white people wearing ethnic clothing that is not theirs to wear).
The way you are constructing your arguments it seems that you are implying that it is all or nothing. Is that right? (Setting aside your discomfort with me determining what is appropriate clothing for the entire world’s population).
Also, I do not believe in disrespecting anyone based on what they wear. But if they complain to me that people do not take them seriously, well, then, what do they expect?
I can see that people dress in ways that run counter to their expressed desires without engaging in the same behavior that makes them uncomfortable. By your words you seem to imply that I am not capable of such things and you seem to imply that you know what’s going on with me: “i don’t know those people and what they care about. it’s really uncomfortable that you as a middle class white dude decide you know just what’s going on with two random people on the bus and their fashion situations, and that you would apparently be unhappy working with them if they didn’t meet your standards of dress.”
But both the man and the woman on the bus are making powerful statements of self-identity. Both statements say “I am to be respected.” There are absolutely other ways to gain respect, and we ought to follow those ways without fail. If they dressed like shit, I may still be happy to work with them. I do like people who make personal statements with their clothing. (I appreciate bikers and cowboys for this very reason.) They both could, however, turn out to be nazis. Then I probably wouldn’t like them. But I would argue that their dress still signals respect.
I think we are both arguing that the language of clothing is complex. I therefore understand that another person could see those same two people and say that the woman of color is a kind of ethnic Uncle Tom and the white guy is some kind militaristic weirdo. I guess I prefer to assume positive things about people until proven otherwise.
I understand that certain types of adult dress will invite disrespect, particularly racist and sexist remarks and actions, even though the dress is very mature. I also wonder about the current men’s fashion trends of working class clothing and the nostalgia for a kind of masculinity that romanticizes working-class life and valorizes a time when segregation still existed legally, women were unable to obtain legal abortions and gays and lesbians were routinely fired if they attempted to come out.
Lastly, I also have a very complex relationship with my body and clothes. I prefer my body when it is thinner but still lament that my hips look womanish.
Hope this clarifies some things. Thanks again for commenting.
P.S.
“it comes from being friends with really fucking smart and strong people who accept or enjoy looking trashy because they don’t have the desire or the ability to invest time and energy into convincing white and middle-class people to like them via their clothes, and because they see that as borrowed and contingent respect at best.” I don’t think trashy and childish are the same thing at all. Trashy can command respect and respect is not at all about like……
P.P.S.
Thanks again for the dialoguing. Your words are helping me formulate on the complexities of respect as reflecting, expressed through clothing.
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