The Future of Dressing Well

[Also from a few months ago, posted at Style Forum; still pertinent.]

I am concerned about many aspects of the future -- who isn't? -- and one of them, of minor import perhaps but still interesting, is the future of men dressing well. I am not concerned for the usual reasons put forward -- that younger men are not interested in sartorial matters (actually, some of them are) or that "business casual" has destroyed the culture of dressing well for work. Rather, I am concerned that we are not producing enough of the sort of men that will take to dressing well as professional statement, self-expression, and pleasurable hobby. It seems to me that the inclination to be a sartorialist depends on two main underpinnings besides sheer taste: Confidence, and money. Those in turn rest largely on the opportunity to make a good career for oneself, and that is where I think the problem lies. Certainly we are in an economic contraction now, and just as certainly we will "come out of it" eventually; but we may be emerging into a vastly different, just-in-time world where the possibility of a stable professional career is a mere dream for most. If there is no job to dress for, no job to feel pride in, and no job to provide the disposable cash for buying, the sartorial bent loses its relevance to many potential adherents.

My unscientific guess based on reading the menswear boards is that the sartorial habit is strongest among lawyers, bankers, and business executives, with a smaller but still significant appeal to certain academics, journalists, politicians, public officials, medical professionals, and "creative types." Unfortunately, there is a contraction of career opportunities going on in many of those fields; for example, the difficulties that current law school graduates are having in finding decent legal employment have been widely reported (and yet, such is the nature of human hopefulness, the number of law school applicants and attendees continues to go steadily up, further crowding the field for future job-seekers).

The economic prospects for university graduates -- not just in America, but around the world, such as in Korea where I am now living -- are, to put it as mildly as possible, not what they once were. The sartorial inclination does not absolutely require a sizable income, as many wily buyers who post here at Style Forum can attest -- but without doubt, sizable incomes are a great boon to the hobby and help it to thrive. If fewer men have access to that type of income, that undoubtedly has its effect on the way they dress. And if employment and incomes are not steady, but contingent and intermittent, that goes a long way toward destroying the confidence that dressing well expresses. If you feel like crap about your life, the panache of your tie knot doesn't matter much.

My personal experience is perhaps slightly instructive. Although I have three degrees from excellent universities, I never aimed for the big money, and I never made it. However, I definitely had stretches of time when I was quite comfortable, and therefore an enthusiastic consumer. In the past ten years, though, a series of changes in fortune variously attributable to mergers, business closings, shrinking commissions, governmental financial crises, etc., have economically marginalized me to the extent that I am now out of North America altogether, teaching ESL to adults at a private academy in Korea. My career prospects are much better in the world-at-large than at home, and I expect to be teaching at a Korean university after my current contract ends; going abroad seems to have been a smart move, and I am encouraged by that. Still, I am at the point right now when a hundred dollars is a lot of money to me, and that is just not a circumstance that encourages sartorialism.

However, at least I do have a job and some forward prospects. I suspect that there is a reasonably big group of los desaparecidos from the menswear boards who simply stop posting because the economy has taken them away. A lot of highly educated and experienced people that I know have taken a lot of whacks. The loss of confidence that I see in them is quite distressing. And an unconfident society is unlikely to be a sartorially distinguished one.

POSTSCRIPT: The responses at Style Forum were largely uninteresting. Readers today seem largely unable to engage with whole arguments; they seize on particles of arguments. This is partly because of mental incapacity, but also because, in the time of the Web, they do not read word for word. Skimming is perilous, and when most reading is skimming -- watch out!