Do Clothes Reveal the Man? : A look at what we wear, why and what it does for us : SEX AND SUITS: The Evolution of Modern Dress, <i> By Anne Hollander (Alfred A. Knopf: $25; 202 pp.)</i>
Aug. 11 was a day of rush-hour disaster in the San Francisco Bay Area. Just at 5 p.m. a head-on collision closed the Golden Gate Bridge in both directions, while on the south side of the city someone committed suicide by stepping into the path of a train. Southbound commuters charged through the Caltrans station in San Francisco onto the waiting railroad cars, only then to learn that this inconvenient act of desperation would delay departure indefinitely.
Bound for a dinner party on the Peninsula, I had boarded an express that stopped only at the best towns: Hillsborough, Atherton, Menlo Park, Palo Alto. The regulars were already ensconced when I chose an aisle seat facing a tailored young businesswoman who scowled abstractly and put her shoes back on as I settled in; beside her, in the window seat, slouched a young legal type in a chalk-stripe suit who had filled the seat across from him with an Oleg Cassini briefcase on which he rested stocking feet.
But lucky me: I had brought the bound galleys of Anne Hollander’s “Sex and Suits.” As an hour passed, the idle train crowded with well-dressed, subtly restless passengers became a lab for the testing of Hollander’s claims about the clothes that make the man.
“Sex and Suits” begins with the observation that male tailoring, “the standard masculine civil costume all over the world,” has stayed the same for two centuries. Sales dip with the economy, but the suit goes on. How come?
The answer has to be that suits are sexy. “Nature ordains that human beings be completed by clothing, not left bare in their own sufficient skins,” Hollander notes; a suit is a man’s pelt. At the same time, it is a work of art--of modern art, Hollander proposes. The core of her clever argument is an insight into the man’s suit as an abstract visual form that expresses a thoroughly modern concept of authority and forcefulness, including erotic confidence.
Hollander tracks the evolution of the suit as “visual form” through several distinctive stages, beginning with medieval armor: “Male clothing lost the unfitted character it had had since antiquity and began to suggest interesting new lines for the torso, and to consider the whole shape of legs and arms.” She comments on the changing notions of authority codified in the wrinkling sheaths of silk covering the idealized pear-shape of the male torso through the late 17th-Century, ages of complex sartorial display in which gaudy male clothing reinforced social acceptance of rank and privilege, including male dominance.
But the ground of Hollander’s perspective is the exciting present, with its confusing abundance of mixed codes. Extensive professional study of the meaning of clothes--this is her third book on the subject--permits Hollander the prestige of a unified field theory: Men’s fashion changed definitively on the threshold of the 19th Century, she notes, when “the simple visual motifs in Classical design were suggesting the force and clarity of Greek democracy and Roman technology”--and when both democracy and technology “became erotically as well as politically appealing.” New tailoring techniques and the development of the wool trade made possible a revolution in the design of men’s clothes that idealized the “natural man.”
A turning point was the discovery of possibilities in the unfitted coat worn by country laborers. “With the help of nearly imperceptible padding, curved seams, discreet darts and steam pressing, the rough coat of dull cloth was gradually refined into an exquisitely balanced garment that fitted smoothly without wrinkles and buttoned without strain, to clothe what appeared to be the torso of a Greek athlete.”
A male athlete, of course. As usual, women shared this revolution chiefly by assisting the men to feel manly. Women’s clothing remained essentially more conservative “ than men’s, retaining the privileges and discomforts of “variegated display” once common to both sexes. The authority of simplified and coherent design stayed resolutely masculine until this century, when women gained a measure of political--hence sexual--independence. “When contemporary women wish to be simple and timeless and outside fashion,” Hollander writes, “the clothes they usually choose are traditionally masculine in origin, the pants and shirts and jackets and sweaters of modern classic male dress.”
Or when they wish to appear businesslike: There was the woman knee to knee with me, her attention fixed on a thick book about ecological practices at Yosemite. Her dark suit coat of windowpane check could have been worn without embarrassment by any male in the air-conditioned office where she had presumably spent the day. (Though it would have buttoned on the “wrong” side.) Her apricot silk blouse, cut like a T-shirt, had also a unisex neutrality.
It was only the pants that invited silent interrogation: cuffed, lightweight wool shorts, repeatedly annoying the wearer by slipping up her outer thigh over her slick pantyhose. “Ever since the first medieval move toward decolletage,” Hollander points out, “selective exposure of skin was to be a female theme.” Every shift of position produced a futile tug of adjustment; this woman must work with her knees under a desk. Why was this social situation making her so uncomfortable? What were these “business” shorts supposed to be about, anyway?
Hollander’s book proposes an answer. The shorts were an adaptation of the man’s suit to the miniskirt, an ironic variation of the theme of “clever decolletage” cited by Hollander as “a truly serious and thoroughly female contribution to fashion”:
“Eventually the final modernization in this vein was the irreversible shortening of the skirt itself in this century, an act performed in several stages, just like the earlier ones exposing the upper body.”
Clothes are messages addressed partly to the unconscious, then, “some huge collective fantasy” about women and men as essentially different. At the point of purchase, this woman had possibly been executing a business plan--to look professional (a team player in uniform) without completely sacrificing her femininity.
But in the store’s anxiety-provoking mirrors she must have checked out only half the equation. Now that she was seated in a train that had become a lounge, the disruptive power of this femininity had come into play from her waist down, sending powerful signals that overrode the managerial codes emitted by her unisex jacket. Hollander notes, wisely:
“The best dressed are those with the greatest self-knowledge. . . . You must know how your own clothed figure really behaves and appears, not how it looks in the mirror only from the front, while you stand still and pose for its effect on yourself.” Maybe this hour on the lab bench was advancing my female companion’s education.
Meanwhile, the expansive fellow in the next seat was behaving like exhibit A, the dominant male whose attire sets the paradigm. He had removed his jacket and loosened his silk tie, bringing the total look more and more into keeping with the artful (moussed?) tousle of his dark hair. The more he slumped, the more wonderful his clothes looked on him. Hollander claims that “the naked male body, coherent and articulated, must still be the ghostly visual image and the underlying formal suggestion made by any male Western costume, however closely the surface is covered, just as it was made by the suit of plate armor or the first Neoclassic suit. The modern suit survives partly because among all the more showily revealing varieties of current male dress, it has kept its ability to make that nude suggestion.”
When the expansive fellow tossed aside a computer magazine and reached into the Cassini brief case I hoped to find out whether he was in fact a lawyer. But out came an English/Italian word list. One of the design trades? Advertising? His attractive carelessness conveyed a certain self-consciousness about the image he projected. Here too Hollander’s book had explanatory power, for she has built her professional career on the study of the way clothes represent ideas about the body, no matter how greatly at odds these may be with the biological facts they conceal. “I always wish to consider dress as art, rather than as a sign of something else,” Hollander writes. “The volatile, nervy thrusts and parries of fashion created a true aesthetic advance, a cultural leap analogous to other forward moves in the history of Western art, commerce and thought--polyphony and perspective, double-entry bookkeeping and the scientific method, to name some--that have sustained the life and breath of the West.” And in our own time, “The manufacture of visual truth is big business. . . . We live in a world of visible projections, and we are all visible projections in it. Like it or not, we all have looks, and we are responsible for them.”
But for all her pronouncements and her provocative deployment of extensive learning, Hollander is neither writing history nor proving a thesis. She is pursuing a set of related insights into fashion as a domain of modern art, and wherever her eye falls she finds a surplus of highly diverting messages: that publicity photos of Marlon Brando show that the tee-shirt is male underwear; that workout clothes suggest “the rompers and playsuits once worn by infants of both sexes”--and much more.
Hollander rides her theories like a surfer; and her wittiest prose retains the note of generosity that gives human curiosity its moral weight. At the Atherton station I descended from the train feeling I owed my unknowing human subjects a note of thanks.
