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Dog day
The death of a beloved friend makes plain the beauty of this world.
By Anne Lamott
[06/24/99]

Kickin' it
Mia Hamm's soccer prowess has finally launched women's sports into the mainstream. But is she ready for icon status?
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[06/23/99]

Wild Thing
Oracles of history
At the turn of the millennium, Kathleen Krull's "They Saw the Future" gives kids a look at futures past.
By Polly Shulman
[06/22/99]

Emotional insurance
Pictures of polliwogs, first baths and birthdays preserve my children in time, but I am always standing just out of the frame.
By Allison Hoover Bartlett
[06/21/99]

A dad called Mama
Showing his children the wonder of Florida's shaded lakes and curious insects, my father taught me the nature of unconditional love.
By Lu Vickers
[06/18/99]

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In his recent essay on loyalty, Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote that our virtues have no face anymore, but that doesn't mean we don't still yearn for that face, some visible assurance that we still stand for something. The considerable burden of maintaining a personal image falls to clothes -- understandably, since they have always borne that burden to some degree. The irony is that as our belief in image has declined, fashion has amiably followed suit, to the point that clothing today has no more moral import than a politician's campaign promises.

As lines of difference blur and everybody says everything, so everybody wears everything. Red patent leather shoes were once strictly for little girls and worldly women; now kids wear rollerblades that color. Lycra, after moving out of dance studios and into the street, was almost exclusively for disco queens and other diva-fied spirits who dared to bare themselves in shrink-wrap relief; now Lycra is the very soul of conformity, as ubiquitous among corpulent housewives as it is among the super-fit. As moral entropy reaches further and further into public space, we become less able to know where, or how to look anymore. Clothes reflect that myopia. They have lost their clear ability to shock, to affirm, to demarcate; it is increasingly difficult to determine from glancing at an outfit if the wearer is rich or poor, young or middle-aged, hip or hopelessly out of step. (Is she a Melrose hawk or did she merely refuse to take those bell-bottoms off 20 years ago?)

So the search for the right ensemble is not simply the search for the right thing to say -- the '60s and '70s took care of that nicely, with blue-jean patches and T-shirt slogans like "Hang ten," and "Have a nice day." It's also a search for the right thing to be. And it used to be that what you said was what you were: Surfer boys "hung ten," humanists suggested that you have a nice day. But these are meaner times, and the compulsion to share a personal philosophy with the world by wearing it on your sleeve -- or your car bumper -- is dead (unless you assume that the people wearing the "Shut up bitch" T-shirts down on the Venice Beach boardwalk are actually advertising a philosophy, and I'd rather not).

The '80s gave fashion a whole new cynical spin: Instead of clothing advertising people, people started advertising clothing. The point of dressing was no longer to convey message or style, but to act as style's messenger: Guess? Members Only, Calvin Klein, Chanel, Polo, Louis Vuitton. If the label didn't show, neither did you. The conspicuous consumption trend eventually died out, but not its grounding notion of exclusivity; Gap and Banana Republic may have proliferated in the '90s with their just-folks ad campaigns, but they proliferated most in the cologne-scented pages of Vanity Fair and W magazine. Sharon Stone wears a Gap shirt with a ball gown to an Academy Awards show and we laud her for her insouciance. In our hearts we don't really believe that we can get away with the same thing because we, after all, are not movie stars. Sharon Stone is being clever, subversive; you are merely tacky. The enduring truth of fashion is that it can only be democratized to a point: The other half of clothes is always who's wearing them.

Which leads me back to the original question: Who, as far as the world is concerned, am I? I should have started out by saying that even as I deliberate every morning, I know that famous people are not supposed to matter. I am supposed to be my own best role model. The latest, neo-leftist clothing ad campaigns insist that it is enough to be oneself, be an individual, break color lines, recognize it's a free country, think different -- certainly they all implicitly warn against herd-mentality activities, like reading billboards. Forget it. When self-actualization becomes the stuff of Madison Avenue campaigns, conformity starts looking awfully attractive. I hear Madonna's look has gone Eastern this year -- gauzy midriff tops, sari-like wraps, vacant stare. Contempo Casuals already has it all on the cheap. With about $50 and regular advice from my 13-year-old niece, I should, at least for a moment, be able to get into the groove.
salon.com | June 25, 1999

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