Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History by Richard Thompson Ford (2021)
Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History by Richard Thompson Ford (2021)
Part Three: Power Dressing
Chapter Ten: Slaves to Fashion?
SOUTH CAROLINA’S NEGRO ACT OF 1740 provided that
whereas, many of the slaves in this Province wear clothes much above the condition of slaves… no owner or proprietor… shall permit or suffer [any] Negro slave, or other slave… to have or wear any sort of garment or apparel whatsoever, finer, other or of greater value than Negro cloth, duffels, coarse kerseys, osnabrigs, blue linen, check linen, or coarse garlix, or calicoes, checked cottons or Scottish plaids.… [A]nd all and every constable and other persons are hereby authorized, empowered, and required… to seize and take away the same, to his or their own use, benefit and behoof; any law, usage or custom to the contrary notwithstanding.
Echoing earlier sumptuary laws, the Negro Acts justified their proscriptions in practical terms, lamenting the large number of Negroes wearing “clothes much above the condition of slaves, for the procuring of which they use sinister and evil methods.” But the true purpose of the laws was clear enough: the Negro Acts were comprehensive regulations designed to ensure that the subordinate status of Black slaves was always visible (157).
Such sumptuary legislation was thought necessary because refined clothing was a potent sign of status, suggesting both social position and social virtue. American elites studied English etiquette guides or “courtesy books” and followed their instructions on elegance in comportment and dress...
In a similar vein, historian Jonathan Prude notes that eighteenth-century America was “a culture… of sumptuary regulations… sensitive to plebian overdressing.… [S]laves who dressed in ‘excessive and costly’ apparel… struck many whites as arrogant.”
Blacks who dressed “above their condition” seemed, to status-conscious whites, to threaten or even mock the sartorial social order. The Negro Acts punished Blacks for their perceived challenge (158).
In short, African Americans defied racist dress codes and expectations, using attire to express identity, affinity, and self-respect. Free Blacks as well as many slaves avoided the rough, plain garments assigned to slaves by the Negro Acts: Prude notes that “blacks who were not slaves seemingly sought to underscore their nonchattel status by insistently avoiding the color (white) that was most intensively used in slave work garments.” Many slaves valued refined clothing and often defied the efforts of whites-including their masters-to limit their choices. They used clothing to oppose the laws and social mores of white supremacy and insist on their dignity by appropriating the status symbols of whites, by subverting and mocking elite sartorial etiquette or by combining European and African styles to create distinctively African American fashions (164).
Just as women wore masculine clothing as a way of claiming the social privileges of men, elegantly dressed African Americans made a sartorial statement that they deserved and would insist on the esteem and respect that their attire symbolized. At the same time, personal investment in refined attire went beyond a social protest: being well-dressed brought a sense of personal satisfaction and psychological comfort (167).
Chapter Eleven: From Rags to Resistance
The real offense of the zoot suit was symbolic: it was an assertion of self-determination and personal pride at a time when America’s racial hierarchy was experiencing its first signs of vulnerability.
According to a New York Times story of June 11, 1943, the first bespoke zoot suit was bespoken by one Clyde Duncan, a young African American from Gainesville, Georgia, in 1940. He astounded his tailor by requesting a suit with a thirty-seven-inch-long coat, and trousers twenty-six inches at the knees and fourteen inches at the ankles. The tailor sent a photograph of the suit to a trade publication, the Men’s Apparel Reporter, which published an article about the curiosity in 1941. From there, the suit went viral, catching on in Mississippi, New Orleans, Alabama, and Harlem. The Times speculated that the zoot suit was inspired by Rhett Butler’s clothing in Gone with the Wind, which had opened in theaters in 1939-a somewhat improbable account given the racial politics of that film. The African American press had a more plausible theory: the zoot suit’s inspiration was that paragon of sartorial daring, the Duke of Windsor. Prince Edward VIII was notorious for his sartorial innovations and transgressions, which included drape-cut suits with folds of fabric in the chest and shoulder blades, and “Oxford Bags”-a voluminous cut of trousers popular with college students in the 1930s (170).
Ralph Ellison’s protagonist in Invisible Man begins his journey away from ideological dogma and toward self-knowledge after observing and pondering a group of seemingly apolitical zoot suiters; he later dons a zoot suit himself and finds that: “by dressing and walking in a certain way I had enlisted in a fraternity in which I was recognized at a glance-not by features, but by clothes.…”
That sartorial fraternity was not racially exclusive: one observer noted that “youths of Scotch-Irish Protestant, Jewish or Italian, Russian or Negro backgrounds” wore zoot suits. It was a brotherhood of common alienation from the American mainstream, a defiant new mode of self-assertion and a countercultural sensibility that would come to define subsequent generations of beatniks, hipsters, and hippies. It was also a sisterhood: young women who wore a feminine zoot suit ensemble were labeled pachucas, “Zoot suit gangsterettes,” and “zooterinas.” The zoot suit was unconventional, demonstrating an indifference-if not a disdain-for American standards of good taste. It was attention grabbing, a bold provocation from people who American society expected to be meek and unobtrusive. It was ostentatiously expensive, its voluminous draping requiring skilled custom tailoring and yards of fabric. The zoot suit was an almost belligerent repudiation of the American sartorial ethos set by the understated, modest, black and gray ready-made suits of Brooks Brothers in the nineteenth century. It was made all the more threatening because the black- and brown-skinned people who made it popular had every reason to question the bourgeois ethos of sober, restrained masculine virtue and the false promise of equality that the standard suit symbolized. As the poet Octavio Paz wrote of the pachuco, “They are instinctive rebels.… [T]he pachucos do not attempt to vindicate their race or the nationality of their forebears. Their attitude reveals an obstinate, almost fanatical will-to-be, but this will affirms nothing specific except their determination… not to be like those around them” (170-1).
The pachuco was the prototype for the beatnik and hippie movements of the 1950s and 1960s, and of the mod, punk, New Wave, New Romantic, and goth subcultures of more recent decades.
The zoot suit was as enigmatic as the politics of the pachuco, but as the struggle for racial justice developed its own dress codes, the political meaning of attire came to be a subject of explicit ideological debate. Was the desire to be well-dressed a dignified challenge to the status quo, or a pathetic capitulation to bourgeois norms of respectability (174)?
For Frazier, the social rituals of the Black elite were a pathetic imitation of the grander rituals of white society-rituals from which Blacks were, of course, excluded. Indeed, for Frazier, almost every aspect of the culture of the Black bourgeoisie was motivated by their deep feelings of inferiority to whites and their desperate, unrealized desires to separate themselves from poor Black people:
Since the black bourgeoisie live largely in a world of make-believe, the masks which they wear to play their sorry roles conceal the feelings of inferiority and of insecurity and the frustrations that haunt their inner lives. Despite their attempt to escape from the real identification with the masses of Negroes, they cannot escape the mark of oppression any more than their less favored kinsmen.… [T]hey have developed a self-hatred… revealed in their pathological struggle for status… and craving for recognition in the white world. Their… sham “society” leaves them with a feeling of emptiness and futility which causes them to constantly seek an escape in new delusions (174-5).
For Frazier, the Black debutante ball was the apotheosis of Veblen’s conspicuous consumption: frenzied acquisition and anxious status-seeking driven by an insatiable thirst for affirmation. Worst of all, the whole gaudy circus was underwritten by a noxious mix of snobbery and self-hatred: Frazier’s Black bourgeoisie used conspicuous consumption to separate themselves from the unrefined, uncouth, struggling masses of Black people because, ultimately, they yearned to separate themselves from their own blackness (176).
The influence of Black Bourgeoisie has been long-lived. Just as Marx transformed the term “bourgeoisie”-originally the title of propertied urbanites in pre-Revolutionary France-into the title of an economic class responsible for capitalist exploitation, Frazier turned the term “bourgeoisie” (which in recent decades has morphed into the slang epithet “bougie”) into a sociological caste defined by its political apathy, social ambition, and bland consumerism (176).
As one contemporaneous article put it, natural hairstyles “are part of the debrainwashing of… our people.” In a 1965 speech, Malcolm X said, “When you teach a man to hate the lips that God gave him, the shape of the nose that God gave him, the texture of the hair that God gave him, the color of the skin that God gave him, you’ve committed the worst crime that a race of people can commit.” Given the magnitude of the injuries African Americans had suffered-injuries Malcolm X had been extraordinarily forceful in recounting-this is a dramatic claim, attesting to the importance Malcolm X and the Black Power movement attributed to grooming and pride in personal appearance (183).
Chapter Twelve: Sagging and Subordination
Today, many activists use “the politics of respectability” as a term of derision, synonymous with snobbery and contempt for the less fortunate-the twenty-first-century’s version of what Frazier criticized in the Black bourgeoisie of the mid-twentieth century. But that is not how the author who coined the phrase understands it. Harvard historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham first used the idea of respectability politics in her 1994 book, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920, to describe a fierce, uncompromising, and dignified political activism that compelled the respect of those who witnessed it. Higginbotham wrote of civil rights activists who commanded respect by behaving-and dressing-respectably. In an interview, she corrected widespread misinterpretations of the politics of respectability:
Imagine yourself back in the 1950s… you have to go through the back door. There’s lynching. There’s everything from the outside society that’s telling you you are inferior and you are not worthy of respect.… Think of the Civil Rights marchers.… when they are walking in there you see them in their Sunday clothes but they’re defying the laws aren’t they?… When you see all these white thugs are coming and they’re throwing coffee on them and cursing at them, the world looks at that and sees who is respectable.… They wanted to look clean cut because they wanted people to see them and say, “These are the respectable people.… Their cause is something that we can identify with.”.… [This was not about snobbery or a bid to be part of high society.] Do you think Fannie Lou Hamer had fancy clothes? They believed in the respectability of their lives.
The activist and philosopher Cornel West, who, unlike most of his peers in activist circles and academia, typically wears a three-piece suit and tie, made a similar point about the connection between attire and self-respect:
The Victorian three-piece suit-with a clock and chain at the vest-worn by W. E. B. Du Bois… dignified his sense of intellectual vocation.… [By contrast] the shabby clothing worn by most black intellectuals these days may be seen as symbolizing their utter marginality behind the walls of academe and their sense of impotence in the wider world of American culture and politics (211-2).
Part Four: Politics And Personality
Chapter Twelve: Sagging and Subordination
Fashion is the armor to survive the reality of everyday life.
-BILL CUNNINGHAM
In order to be irreplaceable one must always be different.
-COCO CHANEL
Chapter Thirteen: How to Dress Like a Woman
In the 1967 book How to Dress for Success, Hollywood columnist Joe Hyams and legendary film costume designer Edith Head-the creative mind behind the style of women such as Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly, Ginger Rogers, and Elizabeth Taylor-described both the employment market and the marriage market as fields of battle in a war between the sexes, where the right clothing was a woman’s armor and secret weapon (223).
How to Dress for Success advised women on how to select clothing that flattered their figures, harmonized with the tastes of their mates or potential mates, exuded confidence while not upstaging their superiors, and matched their complexion and hair color. It warned against fads and flamboyance, whether at work or in social life (223).
The overarching lesson of How to Dress For Success echoed the sentiment of cosmetics magnate Helena Rubinstein who once said, “There are no ugly women, only lazy ones”-a convenient motto for someone who made a fortune on women who worked diligently on their looks. According to How to Dress For Success, there were also no ugly men-only lazy wives (224).
Heeled shoes became a sign of both status and virility, so naturally they were emphasized and exaggerated: the aristocracy adopted higher and higher heels to outpace members of the lower classes. Moreover, the very impracticality of high heels made them a status symbol: cumbersome garments are a form of what Thorstein Veblen called conspicuous waste, a clear indication that one does not need to work-or, in extreme cases, even walk. King Louis XIV of France, only 5 feet, 4 inches tall, wore shoes with four-inch high heels. He emphasized his shoes by having their soles and heels tinted with red dye, which at the time was expensive and thus itself a sign of wealth. A status symbol was born. Imitators soon followed: England’s Charles II is pictured in conspicuous red heels in his 1661 coronation portrait, and by the 1670s the shoes were so popular that their high status was at risk: the Sun King declared that only members of his royal court would be allowed to wear shoes with red heels.
Daring women first adopted the masculine style as a provocation: high heels, like menswear generally, suggested a liberated woman who claimed masculine license for herself. The feminization of high heels began as women turned this masculine status symbol into an element in a feminine ensemble. The feminine high heel might have remained an aberration but for another, larger change in the cultural codes of dress: the Great Masculine Renunciation. With aristocracy under attack and new ideals of equality and industriousness in ascendancy, the symbols of the ancien régimes, such as showy, impractical fashions, became anachronistic. By the early eighteenth century, men in heels were considered risible (236).
The “trophy wife,” then as now, was evidence of her husband’s wealth. High heels became a status symbol through which a man showed off his wealth through a woman he supported. Also, high heels were sexy: they flattered by lengthening the visual line of the leg-as they had always done for men and women alike-and, because they required small careful steps and impeded forceful movements, they also suggested vulnerability, adding an erotic charge (236-7).
Part Five: Retailored Expectations
You can have anything you want in life if you dress for it.
-EDITH HEAD
I don’t design clothes. I design dreams.
-RALPH LAUREN
Chapter Sixteen: Merit Badges
Conventional sartorial terminology distinguishes the blazer and the sport coat. The latter traces its origins to jackets worn for sports such as hunting, rowing, and tennis-hence the name-and retains traces of its activewear ancestors: tweed fabrics, earthy plaids, and readily accessible hacking pockets derived from hunting; bold patterns and colors from crew and racquet sports. The navy-blue blazer is descended from the dress uniform of naval officers, which explains why it is traditionally worn with brass buttons and why it is the only “odd” jacket-a jacket without matching pants-that traditional sartorial mores allow to be double breasted. A long-lived account has it that the blazer got its name from a warship, the HMS Blazer, the captain of which outfitted his men in blue jackets adorned with brass buttons in order to impress the fashionable young Queen Victoria. Menswear authority G. Bruce Boyer playfully insists that “[t]he story has been told so many times, it almost deserves to be true.” Alas, the name blazer more likely first referred to red jackets worn by rowing clubs at Cambridge, Oxford, and other English colleges and universities.
Nomenclature aside, the first blue blazers were the uniforms of eighteenth-century British naval officers. They were spare and functional: their wide lapels could be buttoned against cold sea air; their color was sober and unassuming. Law and custom restricted the blazer-an officer’s uniform-to an elite, and as a consequence it became a status symbol. Then fashion took over. It became chic for officers to wear their jackets off-duty, and soon civilians embraced the garment too. Later, fashion houses produced myriad variations: some emphasized the blazer’s nautical past with brass buttons, others its clubiness with emblazoned crests; still others simply reproduced its spare elegance in exquisite tailoring and sumptuous fabrics.
Traditionalists debate the appropriate type and placement of buttons. Brass buttons are traditional but can look clichéd. Horn is more subdued but undermines the blazer’s nautical pedigree. Insignia buttons offer cachet, but only if the shield or crest in question belongs to one’s own alma mater, private club, or family (304).
Then there is the question of placement. For single-breasted blazers, two-button closures are standard but uninspired. Three-button closures are anathema-unless they are a three-roll-two closure, in which the top button is never used and the lapel is cut to roll open to the second button. Those are the height of relaxed elegance. In the case of double-breasted blazers, subtleties of button position separate the classic blazer from vulgar bastardizations. As menswear authority “Nicholas Antongiavanni” (the nom de plume, reportedly, of former Republican party speechwriter Michael Anton) explains, the six-two closure “forms… a double legged martini glass, which buttons in the middle row” and is rakish, having been worn by stylish men such as Fred Astaire, Humphrey Bogart, and 60 Minutes news anchor Ed Bradley. It has the added advantage of versatility, as it can also be buttoned on the bottom row, “which effects a casual, relaxed look.” Indeed, the unstudied chic of fastening only the bottom-row button on a six-two closure was celebrated in menswear journal The Rake, which devoted an entire article to the virtues of doppiopetto trasformabile blazer, pioneered by the Caraceni tailors of Rome: a “style of jacket… that… can be fastened at the middle button or closed using the bottom button.” But take care! The option to button the bottom row on a convertible six-two blazer is quite different from the necessity of doing so on the déclassé six-one closure. The six-one “forms a keystone [rather than the double legged martini glass] that buttons only at the bottom row” and, according to Antongiavanni, is the ill-advised choice of the “Garment District huckster”... Even here, however, there is a notable exception: the renowned Parisian house of Cifonelli is famous for its six-one double-breasted jackets, which menswear authority Simon Crompton of the influential newsletter Permanent Style considers to be “absolutely exquisite” (305).
The Preppy Handbook chronicled a closed culture, barely legible to outsiders, yet one that could be understood and mimicked with sufficient attention to the rules-and exceptions. “Preppies dress alike because their wardrobes are formed according to fundamental principles that they absorb from their parents and peers. And although the Preppy Look can be imitated, non-Preps are sometimes exposed by their misunderstanding or ignorance of these unspoken rules,” wrote Birnbach. Forty-five illustrated pages followed, detailing the importance of Madras cloth; mandatory and unacceptable types of tailoring, fabrics, and jewelry; the imperative to wear certain types of footwear without socks; and more. Reading the Preppy Handbook left one with something more than a list of dos and don’ts; one began to appreciate an inner logic, which would guide one through unforeseen challenges. The Handbook counsels an intricate combination of compulsive correctness (watchbands must match belts and shoes; hair must be neat; faces, clean-shaven) and very specific transgressions (clashing bright colors should be worn together, trousers must be one size too big). Garish color combinations and slouchy tailoring abound, each unflattering garment compensating for its aesthetic inadequacies with the enviable caché of association with a costly sport or exclusive school. There was a preppy aesthetic-or anti-aesthetic-of sorts, which underlaid the rules. At the heart of this aesthetic was something extremely familiar to someone raised in the Calvinist tradition: an abiding suspicion of pleasure and beauty, in tragic conflict with the universal human lust for the same (311).
The prestigious understatement of past eras informed Baldassare Castiglione’s notion of sprezzatura: nonchalant excellence which conceals the effort required to achieve it. This ideal only grew in importance with the Masculine Renunciation. Today’s sprezzatura typically involves pricey bespoke tailoring and luxurious fabrics, treated with aristocratic disdain. Unsurprisingly, stylish Italians epitomize it. Menswear blogs and magazines pore over the seemingly accidental details of sprezzatura in a futile attempt to reduce effortless elegance to a formula that anyone can follow. The Italian viscount’s necktie is tied with a careless asymmetry. The knot may be dimpled, but the dimple is never centered in the knot. The narrow blade of the tie might be too long, peeking out from behind the wider front blade, as if he couldn’t be bothered to retie it. Inevitably, despite these apparent flaws, the tie still manages to look well-balanced and graceful. The collar of a button-down collar shirt might be left unbuttoned; a wristwatch might be worn over a shirt cuff, as the Fiat motors scion Gianni Agnelli wore his; the sleeves of a sport coat might be unbuttoned and rolled or pushed up (demonstrating nonchalance and the presence of custom-tailored working cuff buttonholes at the same time). The common thread is the ability to convey a casual familiarity with fine clothing (313).
Sprezzatura-the ancient art of seemingly effortless style-is both a status symbol and a way of turning a uniform into a mode of personal expression. It involves a fine balance of care and carelessness; respect and irreverence for older dress codes. There are rules, but rules are made to be broken-as long as they are broken in the right way, demonstrating mastery and casual disregard as opposed to either ignorance or belligerent defiance (314).
The power of reverse snobbery is so widespread that researchers have coined a name for it: the red sneakers effect. Professors Silvia Bellezza, Francesca Gino, and Anat Keinan found that university professors wearing garish red sneakers or a scruffy beard and a T-shirt were perceived by students as having higher status than those with a clean shave, polished shoes, and a tie. The red sneakers effect extends far beyond the ivied walls of academe: sales clerks at luxury boutiques thought a shopper wearing gym clothes was more likely to be a celebrity or VIP than a shopper in a dress and fur coat. “Wealthy people sometimes dress very badly to demonstrate superiority,” one clerk noted. “If you dare enter these boutiques so underdressed, you are definitely going to buy something.” An indifference to fashion is high status because it suggests the kind of seriousness of thought that is unconcerned with appearances generally and also because it suggests an indifference to the opinions of others (315).
In March of 2019, the Wall Street Journal reported that sales of men’s suits had plummeted by 8 percent in the preceding four years.
Perhaps the suit is no longer the default masculine professional attire because over time it has become a sort of costume, as obvious a status symbol as the opulent, aristocratic attire it displaced in the waning years of the eighteenth century. Moreover, its symbolic meaning is out of date. Today’s high-finance world no longer values the prudence and sober judgment that the suit represents. Instead it prizes innovation and daring; not a fair and modest return on investment but the aggressive pursuit of a windfall. Accordingly, a new generation of money men (they remain overwhelmingly men) have abandoned the suit. What began in the 1960s as “Aloha Fridays” and spread nationwide in 1980s in the form of Casual Fridays has become a casual workweek dress code, punctuated only by rare “client-facing” occasions when a suit is still worn, like courtly dress at an affair of state. Business casual is the new norm (317).
Because [the suit] was retailored to send mixed and multiple messages and to fit almost everyone, the suit became unsuitable as a status symbol. In its place, the casual Midtown Uniform and tech dress code, which suggest indifference to attire while also ascribing moral importance to it, have become the twenty-first century’s expression of the ethos that inspired the Great Masculine Renunciation. But this mandatory asceticism does not reflect intellectual depth or practicality, far less free-spiritedness. Rather it is a form of reverse snobbery and a symbol of a severe work ethic, stripped of its spiritual pretensions and embraced as a new secular morality (327).
Chapter Seventeen: Artifice and Appropriation
In 1993 a Jean Paul Gaultier collection was inspired by the clothing of Hassidic Jews and in 1997 Hussein Chalayan offered a collection featuring the full-body chador worn by some Muslim women...
It’s an ill-defined term, but “cultural appropriation” at its worst involves much more unambiguous transgressions (334).
[A]lthough the preppy look involves a fair amount of reverse snobbery, it can also be refined and elegant. But what many today admire in it is often mistakenly believed to be the exclusive creation of the moneyed elite of the northeastern United States. In fact, it reflects the relatively recent contributions of a group of talented photographers, discerning men and women of taste, and, of course, fashion designers who-while capitalizing on the mystique that comes along with old money-curated, edited, and retailored the attire of the New England blueblood into something genuinely rakish and chic. They include African Americans, such as Miles Davis, who made the sack suit and oxford cloth button-down collar shirt an icon of cool; Japanese, such as photographer Teruyoshi Hayashida and editors Shosuke Ishizu, Toshiyuki Kurosu, and Hajime Hasegawa, who applied their homeland’s exquisite aesthetic sense to curate the selection of American sportswear shown in their book Take Ivy; and Jews, such as Preppy Handbook author Lisa Birnbach and, of course, Ralph Lauren... (341).
La Société des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Élégantes, or La SAPE, is a league of extraordinary gentlemen dedicated to an exacting standard of personal style. The Sapeurs follow a strict dress code-the “Code of Sapologie,” which dictates such details as the height of socks, the style of a haircut, the telltale unfastening of a single button on a suit jacket cuff. According to historian Ch. Didier Gondola, Sapeurs carry ivory-or silver-handled walking sticks and wear finely tailored suits, designer colognes, horn-rimmed glasses, silk pocket squares, “J.M. Weston lizardskin loafers… Cartier watches.…” One Sapeur claims to own over thirty suits from the best European tailors, to be sure he never has to wear the same ensemble twice. Some Sapeurs dress in the subdued tones of a middle-aged CEO while others prefer designer fashions in bold colors worthy of a fauvist painter. The Sapeurs, dressed in their finest, congregate and promenade through the city streets, living examples of vestimentary refinement and self-esteem, dandies in the mode of Beau Brummel and the Comte D’Orsay.
The Sapeurs... hail from Brazzaville, capital of the Republic of Congo, and neighboring Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), two of the poorest and most troubled nations in the world: the DRC had a per capita Gross Domestic Product of only $445 U.S. dollars in 2016, according to the World Bank. Conspicuous elegance in the mode of nineteenth-century Europe has a distinctive meaning in twenty-first-century Sub-Saharan Africa. The Sapeurs have adopted-one might say appropriated-European sartorial traditions, not in sycophantic emulation of former colonists, but as an indigenous response to local conditions. In their hands, fine tailoring is a ceremonial costume; high-fashion trademarks become signs of civic ideals and what appears to be a destructive struggle for status is in fact a choreographed dance, symbolizing a peaceful competition for social esteem and expressing a critique of a society plagued by endemic violence and poisoned by oppression and corruption.
According to Gondola, the Sape was born when the Congo was controlled by French and Belgian colonists. Much like white slave owners in the American South, some white colonists took pride in the sophistication of their servants and encouraged them to dress in European fashions. Fashionable attire became a status symbol for Black Africans, who adopted-and adapted-European fashions (348-9).
What might be a harmless indulgence in better circumstances can seem like reckless escapism amid the violence and poverty of the Congo: arguably, there is an element of desperation and even self-destructiveness in the Sape... Yet there is also a powerful dignity-even a moral conviction. Ultimately, the Sape is a response to the social and political conditions of the Congo rather than an escape from them. The Code of Sapologie is both a demanding dress code and a demanding ethical code: according to Spanish photographer Héctor Mediavilla, who has studied and photographed the Sapeurs since 2003, “a sapeur is, by definition a non-violent person, despite the three civil wars that have taken place since… independence. They stand for an exquisite morality… as they say, ‘there can only be Sape when there is peace.’ Their motto became ‘Let’s drop the weapons, let us work and dress elegantly.’” The Sapeurs deliberately refigure the physical violence that has scarred their nation for generations into a sartorial contestation: they stage “fights” in which “rival sapeurs will do battle with each other, flashing label after label, trying to best their opponents, stripping down, if necessary, to their underwear” (351).
Conclusion: Decoding Dress Codes
Fashion is only the attempt to realize art in living forms and social intercourse.
-SIR FRANCIS BACON
FASHION IS A WEARABLE LANGUAGE... More than this, it is a tangible experience: the way our attire affects our movements and physical presence is as important as what it communicates. Because clothing covers, caresses, abrades, and constricts our bodies, it affects how we feel about ourselves and our relationship to the world (355).
The United States Environmental Protection Agency reports that since 1960-precisely when large parts of American society began to abandon explicit common norms of dress-the volume of discarded clothing has increased by 750 percent, a reflection, perhaps, of millions of frantic and ultimately failed searches for an appropriate outfit in a world free of rules but full of judgment (363).
Part Three: Power Dressing
Chapter Ten: Slaves to Fashion?
SOUTH CAROLINA’S NEGRO ACT OF 1740 provided that
whereas, many of the slaves in this Province wear clothes much above the condition of slaves… no owner or proprietor… shall permit or suffer [any] Negro slave, or other slave… to have or wear any sort of garment or apparel whatsoever, finer, other or of greater value than Negro cloth, duffels, coarse kerseys, osnabrigs, blue linen, check linen, or coarse garlix, or calicoes, checked cottons or Scottish plaids.… [A]nd all and every constable and other persons are hereby authorized, empowered, and required… to seize and take away the same, to his or their own use, benefit and behoof; any law, usage or custom to the contrary notwithstanding.
Echoing earlier sumptuary laws, the Negro Acts justified their proscriptions in practical terms, lamenting the large number of Negroes wearing “clothes much above the condition of slaves, for the procuring of which they use sinister and evil methods.” But the true purpose of the laws was clear enough: the Negro Acts were comprehensive regulations designed to ensure that the subordinate status of Black slaves was always visible (157).
Such sumptuary legislation was thought necessary because refined clothing was a potent sign of status, suggesting both social position and social virtue. American elites studied English etiquette guides or “courtesy books” and followed their instructions on elegance in comportment and dress...
In a similar vein, historian Jonathan Prude notes that eighteenth-century America was “a culture… of sumptuary regulations… sensitive to plebian overdressing.… [S]laves who dressed in ‘excessive and costly’ apparel… struck many whites as arrogant.”
Blacks who dressed “above their condition” seemed, to status-conscious whites, to threaten or even mock the sartorial social order. The Negro Acts punished Blacks for their perceived challenge (158).
In short, African Americans defied racist dress codes and expectations, using attire to express identity, affinity, and self-respect. Free Blacks as well as many slaves avoided the rough, plain garments assigned to slaves by the Negro Acts: Prude notes that “blacks who were not slaves seemingly sought to underscore their nonchattel status by insistently avoiding the color (white) that was most intensively used in slave work garments.” Many slaves valued refined clothing and often defied the efforts of whites-including their masters-to limit their choices. They used clothing to oppose the laws and social mores of white supremacy and insist on their dignity by appropriating the status symbols of whites, by subverting and mocking elite sartorial etiquette or by combining European and African styles to create distinctively African American fashions (164).
Just as women wore masculine clothing as a way of claiming the social privileges of men, elegantly dressed African Americans made a sartorial statement that they deserved and would insist on the esteem and respect that their attire symbolized. At the same time, personal investment in refined attire went beyond a social protest: being well-dressed brought a sense of personal satisfaction and psychological comfort (167).
Chapter Eleven: From Rags to Resistance
The real offense of the zoot suit was symbolic: it was an assertion of self-determination and personal pride at a time when America’s racial hierarchy was experiencing its first signs of vulnerability.
According to a New York Times story of June 11, 1943, the first bespoke zoot suit was bespoken by one Clyde Duncan, a young African American from Gainesville, Georgia, in 1940. He astounded his tailor by requesting a suit with a thirty-seven-inch-long coat, and trousers twenty-six inches at the knees and fourteen inches at the ankles. The tailor sent a photograph of the suit to a trade publication, the Men’s Apparel Reporter, which published an article about the curiosity in 1941. From there, the suit went viral, catching on in Mississippi, New Orleans, Alabama, and Harlem. The Times speculated that the zoot suit was inspired by Rhett Butler’s clothing in Gone with the Wind, which had opened in theaters in 1939-a somewhat improbable account given the racial politics of that film. The African American press had a more plausible theory: the zoot suit’s inspiration was that paragon of sartorial daring, the Duke of Windsor. Prince Edward VIII was notorious for his sartorial innovations and transgressions, which included drape-cut suits with folds of fabric in the chest and shoulder blades, and “Oxford Bags”-a voluminous cut of trousers popular with college students in the 1930s (170).
Ralph Ellison’s protagonist in Invisible Man begins his journey away from ideological dogma and toward self-knowledge after observing and pondering a group of seemingly apolitical zoot suiters; he later dons a zoot suit himself and finds that: “by dressing and walking in a certain way I had enlisted in a fraternity in which I was recognized at a glance-not by features, but by clothes.…”
That sartorial fraternity was not racially exclusive: one observer noted that “youths of Scotch-Irish Protestant, Jewish or Italian, Russian or Negro backgrounds” wore zoot suits. It was a brotherhood of common alienation from the American mainstream, a defiant new mode of self-assertion and a countercultural sensibility that would come to define subsequent generations of beatniks, hipsters, and hippies. It was also a sisterhood: young women who wore a feminine zoot suit ensemble were labeled pachucas, “Zoot suit gangsterettes,” and “zooterinas.” The zoot suit was unconventional, demonstrating an indifference-if not a disdain-for American standards of good taste. It was attention grabbing, a bold provocation from people who American society expected to be meek and unobtrusive. It was ostentatiously expensive, its voluminous draping requiring skilled custom tailoring and yards of fabric. The zoot suit was an almost belligerent repudiation of the American sartorial ethos set by the understated, modest, black and gray ready-made suits of Brooks Brothers in the nineteenth century. It was made all the more threatening because the black- and brown-skinned people who made it popular had every reason to question the bourgeois ethos of sober, restrained masculine virtue and the false promise of equality that the standard suit symbolized. As the poet Octavio Paz wrote of the pachuco, “They are instinctive rebels.… [T]he pachucos do not attempt to vindicate their race or the nationality of their forebears. Their attitude reveals an obstinate, almost fanatical will-to-be, but this will affirms nothing specific except their determination… not to be like those around them” (170-1).
The pachuco was the prototype for the beatnik and hippie movements of the 1950s and 1960s, and of the mod, punk, New Wave, New Romantic, and goth subcultures of more recent decades.
The zoot suit was as enigmatic as the politics of the pachuco, but as the struggle for racial justice developed its own dress codes, the political meaning of attire came to be a subject of explicit ideological debate. Was the desire to be well-dressed a dignified challenge to the status quo, or a pathetic capitulation to bourgeois norms of respectability (174)?
For Frazier, the social rituals of the Black elite were a pathetic imitation of the grander rituals of white society-rituals from which Blacks were, of course, excluded. Indeed, for Frazier, almost every aspect of the culture of the Black bourgeoisie was motivated by their deep feelings of inferiority to whites and their desperate, unrealized desires to separate themselves from poor Black people:
Since the black bourgeoisie live largely in a world of make-believe, the masks which they wear to play their sorry roles conceal the feelings of inferiority and of insecurity and the frustrations that haunt their inner lives. Despite their attempt to escape from the real identification with the masses of Negroes, they cannot escape the mark of oppression any more than their less favored kinsmen.… [T]hey have developed a self-hatred… revealed in their pathological struggle for status… and craving for recognition in the white world. Their… sham “society” leaves them with a feeling of emptiness and futility which causes them to constantly seek an escape in new delusions (174-5).
For Frazier, the Black debutante ball was the apotheosis of Veblen’s conspicuous consumption: frenzied acquisition and anxious status-seeking driven by an insatiable thirst for affirmation. Worst of all, the whole gaudy circus was underwritten by a noxious mix of snobbery and self-hatred: Frazier’s Black bourgeoisie used conspicuous consumption to separate themselves from the unrefined, uncouth, struggling masses of Black people because, ultimately, they yearned to separate themselves from their own blackness (176).
The influence of Black Bourgeoisie has been long-lived. Just as Marx transformed the term “bourgeoisie”-originally the title of propertied urbanites in pre-Revolutionary France-into the title of an economic class responsible for capitalist exploitation, Frazier turned the term “bourgeoisie” (which in recent decades has morphed into the slang epithet “bougie”) into a sociological caste defined by its political apathy, social ambition, and bland consumerism (176).
As one contemporaneous article put it, natural hairstyles “are part of the debrainwashing of… our people.” In a 1965 speech, Malcolm X said, “When you teach a man to hate the lips that God gave him, the shape of the nose that God gave him, the texture of the hair that God gave him, the color of the skin that God gave him, you’ve committed the worst crime that a race of people can commit.” Given the magnitude of the injuries African Americans had suffered-injuries Malcolm X had been extraordinarily forceful in recounting-this is a dramatic claim, attesting to the importance Malcolm X and the Black Power movement attributed to grooming and pride in personal appearance (183).
Chapter Twelve: Sagging and Subordination
Today, many activists use “the politics of respectability” as a term of derision, synonymous with snobbery and contempt for the less fortunate-the twenty-first-century’s version of what Frazier criticized in the Black bourgeoisie of the mid-twentieth century. But that is not how the author who coined the phrase understands it. Harvard historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham first used the idea of respectability politics in her 1994 book, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920, to describe a fierce, uncompromising, and dignified political activism that compelled the respect of those who witnessed it. Higginbotham wrote of civil rights activists who commanded respect by behaving-and dressing-respectably. In an interview, she corrected widespread misinterpretations of the politics of respectability:
Imagine yourself back in the 1950s… you have to go through the back door. There’s lynching. There’s everything from the outside society that’s telling you you are inferior and you are not worthy of respect.… Think of the Civil Rights marchers.… when they are walking in there you see them in their Sunday clothes but they’re defying the laws aren’t they?… When you see all these white thugs are coming and they’re throwing coffee on them and cursing at them, the world looks at that and sees who is respectable.… They wanted to look clean cut because they wanted people to see them and say, “These are the respectable people.… Their cause is something that we can identify with.”.… [This was not about snobbery or a bid to be part of high society.] Do you think Fannie Lou Hamer had fancy clothes? They believed in the respectability of their lives.
The activist and philosopher Cornel West, who, unlike most of his peers in activist circles and academia, typically wears a three-piece suit and tie, made a similar point about the connection between attire and self-respect:
The Victorian three-piece suit-with a clock and chain at the vest-worn by W. E. B. Du Bois… dignified his sense of intellectual vocation.… [By contrast] the shabby clothing worn by most black intellectuals these days may be seen as symbolizing their utter marginality behind the walls of academe and their sense of impotence in the wider world of American culture and politics (211-2).
Part Four: Politics And Personality
Chapter Twelve: Sagging and Subordination
Fashion is the armor to survive the reality of everyday life.
-BILL CUNNINGHAM
In order to be irreplaceable one must always be different.
-COCO CHANEL
Chapter Thirteen: How to Dress Like a Woman
In the 1967 book How to Dress for Success, Hollywood columnist Joe Hyams and legendary film costume designer Edith Head-the creative mind behind the style of women such as Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly, Ginger Rogers, and Elizabeth Taylor-described both the employment market and the marriage market as fields of battle in a war between the sexes, where the right clothing was a woman’s armor and secret weapon (223).
How to Dress for Success advised women on how to select clothing that flattered their figures, harmonized with the tastes of their mates or potential mates, exuded confidence while not upstaging their superiors, and matched their complexion and hair color. It warned against fads and flamboyance, whether at work or in social life (223).
The overarching lesson of How to Dress For Success echoed the sentiment of cosmetics magnate Helena Rubinstein who once said, “There are no ugly women, only lazy ones”-a convenient motto for someone who made a fortune on women who worked diligently on their looks. According to How to Dress For Success, there were also no ugly men-only lazy wives (224).
Heeled shoes became a sign of both status and virility, so naturally they were emphasized and exaggerated: the aristocracy adopted higher and higher heels to outpace members of the lower classes. Moreover, the very impracticality of high heels made them a status symbol: cumbersome garments are a form of what Thorstein Veblen called conspicuous waste, a clear indication that one does not need to work-or, in extreme cases, even walk. King Louis XIV of France, only 5 feet, 4 inches tall, wore shoes with four-inch high heels. He emphasized his shoes by having their soles and heels tinted with red dye, which at the time was expensive and thus itself a sign of wealth. A status symbol was born. Imitators soon followed: England’s Charles II is pictured in conspicuous red heels in his 1661 coronation portrait, and by the 1670s the shoes were so popular that their high status was at risk: the Sun King declared that only members of his royal court would be allowed to wear shoes with red heels.
Daring women first adopted the masculine style as a provocation: high heels, like menswear generally, suggested a liberated woman who claimed masculine license for herself. The feminization of high heels began as women turned this masculine status symbol into an element in a feminine ensemble. The feminine high heel might have remained an aberration but for another, larger change in the cultural codes of dress: the Great Masculine Renunciation. With aristocracy under attack and new ideals of equality and industriousness in ascendancy, the symbols of the ancien régimes, such as showy, impractical fashions, became anachronistic. By the early eighteenth century, men in heels were considered risible (236).
The “trophy wife,” then as now, was evidence of her husband’s wealth. High heels became a status symbol through which a man showed off his wealth through a woman he supported. Also, high heels were sexy: they flattered by lengthening the visual line of the leg-as they had always done for men and women alike-and, because they required small careful steps and impeded forceful movements, they also suggested vulnerability, adding an erotic charge (236-7).
Part Five: Retailored Expectations
You can have anything you want in life if you dress for it.
-EDITH HEAD
I don’t design clothes. I design dreams.
-RALPH LAUREN
Chapter Sixteen: Merit Badges
Conventional sartorial terminology distinguishes the blazer and the sport coat. The latter traces its origins to jackets worn for sports such as hunting, rowing, and tennis-hence the name-and retains traces of its activewear ancestors: tweed fabrics, earthy plaids, and readily accessible hacking pockets derived from hunting; bold patterns and colors from crew and racquet sports. The navy-blue blazer is descended from the dress uniform of naval officers, which explains why it is traditionally worn with brass buttons and why it is the only “odd” jacket-a jacket without matching pants-that traditional sartorial mores allow to be double breasted. A long-lived account has it that the blazer got its name from a warship, the HMS Blazer, the captain of which outfitted his men in blue jackets adorned with brass buttons in order to impress the fashionable young Queen Victoria. Menswear authority G. Bruce Boyer playfully insists that “[t]he story has been told so many times, it almost deserves to be true.” Alas, the name blazer more likely first referred to red jackets worn by rowing clubs at Cambridge, Oxford, and other English colleges and universities.
Nomenclature aside, the first blue blazers were the uniforms of eighteenth-century British naval officers. They were spare and functional: their wide lapels could be buttoned against cold sea air; their color was sober and unassuming. Law and custom restricted the blazer-an officer’s uniform-to an elite, and as a consequence it became a status symbol. Then fashion took over. It became chic for officers to wear their jackets off-duty, and soon civilians embraced the garment too. Later, fashion houses produced myriad variations: some emphasized the blazer’s nautical past with brass buttons, others its clubiness with emblazoned crests; still others simply reproduced its spare elegance in exquisite tailoring and sumptuous fabrics.
Traditionalists debate the appropriate type and placement of buttons. Brass buttons are traditional but can look clichéd. Horn is more subdued but undermines the blazer’s nautical pedigree. Insignia buttons offer cachet, but only if the shield or crest in question belongs to one’s own alma mater, private club, or family (304).
Then there is the question of placement. For single-breasted blazers, two-button closures are standard but uninspired. Three-button closures are anathema-unless they are a three-roll-two closure, in which the top button is never used and the lapel is cut to roll open to the second button. Those are the height of relaxed elegance. In the case of double-breasted blazers, subtleties of button position separate the classic blazer from vulgar bastardizations. As menswear authority “Nicholas Antongiavanni” (the nom de plume, reportedly, of former Republican party speechwriter Michael Anton) explains, the six-two closure “forms… a double legged martini glass, which buttons in the middle row” and is rakish, having been worn by stylish men such as Fred Astaire, Humphrey Bogart, and 60 Minutes news anchor Ed Bradley. It has the added advantage of versatility, as it can also be buttoned on the bottom row, “which effects a casual, relaxed look.” Indeed, the unstudied chic of fastening only the bottom-row button on a six-two closure was celebrated in menswear journal The Rake, which devoted an entire article to the virtues of doppiopetto trasformabile blazer, pioneered by the Caraceni tailors of Rome: a “style of jacket… that… can be fastened at the middle button or closed using the bottom button.” But take care! The option to button the bottom row on a convertible six-two blazer is quite different from the necessity of doing so on the déclassé six-one closure. The six-one “forms a keystone [rather than the double legged martini glass] that buttons only at the bottom row” and, according to Antongiavanni, is the ill-advised choice of the “Garment District huckster”... Even here, however, there is a notable exception: the renowned Parisian house of Cifonelli is famous for its six-one double-breasted jackets, which menswear authority Simon Crompton of the influential newsletter Permanent Style considers to be “absolutely exquisite” (305).
The Preppy Handbook chronicled a closed culture, barely legible to outsiders, yet one that could be understood and mimicked with sufficient attention to the rules-and exceptions. “Preppies dress alike because their wardrobes are formed according to fundamental principles that they absorb from their parents and peers. And although the Preppy Look can be imitated, non-Preps are sometimes exposed by their misunderstanding or ignorance of these unspoken rules,” wrote Birnbach. Forty-five illustrated pages followed, detailing the importance of Madras cloth; mandatory and unacceptable types of tailoring, fabrics, and jewelry; the imperative to wear certain types of footwear without socks; and more. Reading the Preppy Handbook left one with something more than a list of dos and don’ts; one began to appreciate an inner logic, which would guide one through unforeseen challenges. The Handbook counsels an intricate combination of compulsive correctness (watchbands must match belts and shoes; hair must be neat; faces, clean-shaven) and very specific transgressions (clashing bright colors should be worn together, trousers must be one size too big). Garish color combinations and slouchy tailoring abound, each unflattering garment compensating for its aesthetic inadequacies with the enviable caché of association with a costly sport or exclusive school. There was a preppy aesthetic-or anti-aesthetic-of sorts, which underlaid the rules. At the heart of this aesthetic was something extremely familiar to someone raised in the Calvinist tradition: an abiding suspicion of pleasure and beauty, in tragic conflict with the universal human lust for the same (311).
The prestigious understatement of past eras informed Baldassare Castiglione’s notion of sprezzatura: nonchalant excellence which conceals the effort required to achieve it. This ideal only grew in importance with the Masculine Renunciation. Today’s sprezzatura typically involves pricey bespoke tailoring and luxurious fabrics, treated with aristocratic disdain. Unsurprisingly, stylish Italians epitomize it. Menswear blogs and magazines pore over the seemingly accidental details of sprezzatura in a futile attempt to reduce effortless elegance to a formula that anyone can follow. The Italian viscount’s necktie is tied with a careless asymmetry. The knot may be dimpled, but the dimple is never centered in the knot. The narrow blade of the tie might be too long, peeking out from behind the wider front blade, as if he couldn’t be bothered to retie it. Inevitably, despite these apparent flaws, the tie still manages to look well-balanced and graceful. The collar of a button-down collar shirt might be left unbuttoned; a wristwatch might be worn over a shirt cuff, as the Fiat motors scion Gianni Agnelli wore his; the sleeves of a sport coat might be unbuttoned and rolled or pushed up (demonstrating nonchalance and the presence of custom-tailored working cuff buttonholes at the same time). The common thread is the ability to convey a casual familiarity with fine clothing (313).
Sprezzatura-the ancient art of seemingly effortless style-is both a status symbol and a way of turning a uniform into a mode of personal expression. It involves a fine balance of care and carelessness; respect and irreverence for older dress codes. There are rules, but rules are made to be broken-as long as they are broken in the right way, demonstrating mastery and casual disregard as opposed to either ignorance or belligerent defiance (314).
The power of reverse snobbery is so widespread that researchers have coined a name for it: the red sneakers effect. Professors Silvia Bellezza, Francesca Gino, and Anat Keinan found that university professors wearing garish red sneakers or a scruffy beard and a T-shirt were perceived by students as having higher status than those with a clean shave, polished shoes, and a tie. The red sneakers effect extends far beyond the ivied walls of academe: sales clerks at luxury boutiques thought a shopper wearing gym clothes was more likely to be a celebrity or VIP than a shopper in a dress and fur coat. “Wealthy people sometimes dress very badly to demonstrate superiority,” one clerk noted. “If you dare enter these boutiques so underdressed, you are definitely going to buy something.” An indifference to fashion is high status because it suggests the kind of seriousness of thought that is unconcerned with appearances generally and also because it suggests an indifference to the opinions of others (315).
In March of 2019, the Wall Street Journal reported that sales of men’s suits had plummeted by 8 percent in the preceding four years.
Perhaps the suit is no longer the default masculine professional attire because over time it has become a sort of costume, as obvious a status symbol as the opulent, aristocratic attire it displaced in the waning years of the eighteenth century. Moreover, its symbolic meaning is out of date. Today’s high-finance world no longer values the prudence and sober judgment that the suit represents. Instead it prizes innovation and daring; not a fair and modest return on investment but the aggressive pursuit of a windfall. Accordingly, a new generation of money men (they remain overwhelmingly men) have abandoned the suit. What began in the 1960s as “Aloha Fridays” and spread nationwide in 1980s in the form of Casual Fridays has become a casual workweek dress code, punctuated only by rare “client-facing” occasions when a suit is still worn, like courtly dress at an affair of state. Business casual is the new norm (317).
Because [the suit] was retailored to send mixed and multiple messages and to fit almost everyone, the suit became unsuitable as a status symbol. In its place, the casual Midtown Uniform and tech dress code, which suggest indifference to attire while also ascribing moral importance to it, have become the twenty-first century’s expression of the ethos that inspired the Great Masculine Renunciation. But this mandatory asceticism does not reflect intellectual depth or practicality, far less free-spiritedness. Rather it is a form of reverse snobbery and a symbol of a severe work ethic, stripped of its spiritual pretensions and embraced as a new secular morality (327).
Chapter Seventeen: Artifice and Appropriation
In 1993 a Jean Paul Gaultier collection was inspired by the clothing of Hassidic Jews and in 1997 Hussein Chalayan offered a collection featuring the full-body chador worn by some Muslim women...
It’s an ill-defined term, but “cultural appropriation” at its worst involves much more unambiguous transgressions (334).
[A]lthough the preppy look involves a fair amount of reverse snobbery, it can also be refined and elegant. But what many today admire in it is often mistakenly believed to be the exclusive creation of the moneyed elite of the northeastern United States. In fact, it reflects the relatively recent contributions of a group of talented photographers, discerning men and women of taste, and, of course, fashion designers who-while capitalizing on the mystique that comes along with old money-curated, edited, and retailored the attire of the New England blueblood into something genuinely rakish and chic. They include African Americans, such as Miles Davis, who made the sack suit and oxford cloth button-down collar shirt an icon of cool; Japanese, such as photographer Teruyoshi Hayashida and editors Shosuke Ishizu, Toshiyuki Kurosu, and Hajime Hasegawa, who applied their homeland’s exquisite aesthetic sense to curate the selection of American sportswear shown in their book Take Ivy; and Jews, such as Preppy Handbook author Lisa Birnbach and, of course, Ralph Lauren... (341).
La Société des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Élégantes, or La SAPE, is a league of extraordinary gentlemen dedicated to an exacting standard of personal style. The Sapeurs follow a strict dress code-the “Code of Sapologie,” which dictates such details as the height of socks, the style of a haircut, the telltale unfastening of a single button on a suit jacket cuff. According to historian Ch. Didier Gondola, Sapeurs carry ivory-or silver-handled walking sticks and wear finely tailored suits, designer colognes, horn-rimmed glasses, silk pocket squares, “J.M. Weston lizardskin loafers… Cartier watches.…” One Sapeur claims to own over thirty suits from the best European tailors, to be sure he never has to wear the same ensemble twice. Some Sapeurs dress in the subdued tones of a middle-aged CEO while others prefer designer fashions in bold colors worthy of a fauvist painter. The Sapeurs, dressed in their finest, congregate and promenade through the city streets, living examples of vestimentary refinement and self-esteem, dandies in the mode of Beau Brummel and the Comte D’Orsay.
The Sapeurs... hail from Brazzaville, capital of the Republic of Congo, and neighboring Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), two of the poorest and most troubled nations in the world: the DRC had a per capita Gross Domestic Product of only $445 U.S. dollars in 2016, according to the World Bank. Conspicuous elegance in the mode of nineteenth-century Europe has a distinctive meaning in twenty-first-century Sub-Saharan Africa. The Sapeurs have adopted-one might say appropriated-European sartorial traditions, not in sycophantic emulation of former colonists, but as an indigenous response to local conditions. In their hands, fine tailoring is a ceremonial costume; high-fashion trademarks become signs of civic ideals and what appears to be a destructive struggle for status is in fact a choreographed dance, symbolizing a peaceful competition for social esteem and expressing a critique of a society plagued by endemic violence and poisoned by oppression and corruption.
According to Gondola, the Sape was born when the Congo was controlled by French and Belgian colonists. Much like white slave owners in the American South, some white colonists took pride in the sophistication of their servants and encouraged them to dress in European fashions. Fashionable attire became a status symbol for Black Africans, who adopted-and adapted-European fashions (348-9).
What might be a harmless indulgence in better circumstances can seem like reckless escapism amid the violence and poverty of the Congo: arguably, there is an element of desperation and even self-destructiveness in the Sape... Yet there is also a powerful dignity-even a moral conviction. Ultimately, the Sape is a response to the social and political conditions of the Congo rather than an escape from them. The Code of Sapologie is both a demanding dress code and a demanding ethical code: according to Spanish photographer Héctor Mediavilla, who has studied and photographed the Sapeurs since 2003, “a sapeur is, by definition a non-violent person, despite the three civil wars that have taken place since… independence. They stand for an exquisite morality… as they say, ‘there can only be Sape when there is peace.’ Their motto became ‘Let’s drop the weapons, let us work and dress elegantly.’” The Sapeurs deliberately refigure the physical violence that has scarred their nation for generations into a sartorial contestation: they stage “fights” in which “rival sapeurs will do battle with each other, flashing label after label, trying to best their opponents, stripping down, if necessary, to their underwear” (351).
Conclusion: Decoding Dress Codes
Fashion is only the attempt to realize art in living forms and social intercourse.
-SIR FRANCIS BACON
FASHION IS A WEARABLE LANGUAGE... More than this, it is a tangible experience: the way our attire affects our movements and physical presence is as important as what it communicates. Because clothing covers, caresses, abrades, and constricts our bodies, it affects how we feel about ourselves and our relationship to the world (355).
The United States Environmental Protection Agency reports that since 1960-precisely when large parts of American society began to abandon explicit common norms of dress-the volume of discarded clothing has increased by 750 percent, a reflection, perhaps, of millions of frantic and ultimately failed searches for an appropriate outfit in a world free of rules but full of judgment (363).