A friend sent me an article, accompanied by several photographs, from the July 5 Daily Mail about the celebration of the playwright Tom Stoppard’s 80th birthday. The photographs, chiefly of English actors whom I’ve watched with much admiration on PBS and in the movies over the years, confirmed my view that we are living in one of the unhappiest periods for human dress in memory, the age of shabby chic.
But for the occasion of Tom Stoppard’s birthday, this afternoon party might as easily have been billed as a Worst-Dressed Man and Woman contest. Assuming it was such a contest, allow me to announce the winners. The envelopes, please.
Worst Shoes worn by a middle-age performer: Iain Glen of Game of Thrones for his leather flip-flops.
Most Overly Denimed, Jacket and Jeans: Ralph Fiennes.
Greatest Wife-Beater Undershirt Exposure: Jude Law.
Least Makeup Worn to Less Than Good Effect: Dame Maggie Smith.
Most Makeup Worn to Sadly Overdone Effect: Joanna Lumley.
In the Ugliest Shirt Untucked in Trousers category: Damien Lewis.
General Rumpledness: Michael Kitchen.
Most Impressive Pot Belly Hanging over Jeans: Sir Tim Rice.
Least Ironed Chambray Workshirt: the birthday guy himself, T. Stoppard.
The coveted Gabby Hayes General Fuzziness Award: Michael Gambon.
What, one might ask, is going on here? Why are these moderately but genuinely famous people all so badly got up? At the bottom of invitations in an earlier day, a note sometimes appeared, Dress: Casual, which meant not formal. Might the invitations to Tom Stoppard’s party have read, Dress: Slovenly, which in this case seems to have meant out of the dirty-laundry bag? In the days of the Hollywood studios no actor or actress would be permitted in public in other than elegant or glamorous attire. Presumably no one wishes the return of the tyrannical reign of the studios. Yet need the pendulum have swung so far to the other side?
The general populace once followed, or at least attempted to follow, the movie stars of the day in the matter of dress. No man could bring off the sartorial suavity of Cary Grant or Fred Astaire, or woman the refined elegance of wardrobe of Deborah Kerr or Audrey Hepburn, but these and other actors did provide models of sorts. Now, if the crowd at Tom Stoppard’s party is any example, actors are imitating the population in its general schlepperosity.
When did this schlepperosity set in? Some people blame it on California, the home of the open-collared shirt for men, Betty Grable shorts for women. Others lay the blame on the tumultuous years of the 1960s, when student protest brought on the militantly unkempt look. (When I began teaching at a university in the early 1970s, I had the choice of doing so in tie and jacket or T-shirt and jeans; I went for the former, in the hope of convincing my students that should my teaching not work out, I might be able to get a job selling shoes.) In the business world, casual Friday became casual everyday, and successful CEOs took to being photographed for the business pages of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal—just regular guys, earning serious seven-figure salaries—tieless. Today men and women in their 50s, 60s, 70s walk about in crowded urban areas in outfits most of our parents wouldn’t have worn to take out the garbage.
The baseball cap, the cargo shorts, the gym shoes, the inevitable jeans—such, for men, is the uniform of the day. Many women wear it, too, should the mood strike them. Along with being close to androgynous, this outfit is certainly ageless. Achieving agelessness is one of the leading desiderata of the day. Sitting in a favorite restaurant recently, at an interval of 10 or so minutes, I saw two men with gray ponytails go by on walkers. Tom Wolfe, I believe it was, said that contemporary Americans seem to be going from juvenility directly to senility, with no stops in between; their wardrobes are helping to get them there.
Capitalism, never caught napping, has long been producing expensive shabby-chic wear. One can acquire Prada pre-washed jeans for a mere $365 (pre-torn jeans may cost more), an Yves Saint Laurent workshirt for $900, fatigue jackets for upwards of $1,000.
Clothes once expressed personality; they could be cosmopolitan, garish, serious, puritanical, witty even. The effect of shabby chic, with its eschewing of style and letting-down of adult standards that it brings with it, is to divest the world of the pleasures of clothes. Under shabby chic, they are covering merely. Clothes make the man and woman, haberdashers and designers once held, which of course clothes don’t. But they do make, or at least once did, life richer, more charming. The reign of shabby chic is soon enough likely to put an end to that.
