by LEWIS H. LAPHAM
Zulu man standing outside his beehive hut, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. PHOTO/© Stephanie Colasanti/The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY.
Fashion lives only in a perpetual round of giddy innovation and restless vanity…it is haughty, trifling, affected, servile, despotic, mean and ambitious, precise and fantastical, all in a breath.
—William Hazlitt
Hazlitt’s tailoring of the word fashionwas fitted in early nineteenth-century London to the reactionary taste of the gentry occupying the novels of Jane Austen. With the passing of time and an upper-deck crossing of the Atlantic, the disdain for giddy innovation and restless vanity was adopted by America’s mid-twentieth-century literary intelligentsia as the fashionable mark of a superior sensibility indifferent to the bourgeois comforts of money.
During my term as a student at Yale College in the 1950s the attitude was rated aesthetically and morally correct by an undergraduate bohemian avant-garde at a loss for a wardrobe of ready-to-wear alienation. J. Press on York Street, long-established supplier of yachting blazers and straw hats to the Whiffenpoofs gathered at the tables down at Mory’s, didn’t carry the look favored by William Burroughs and Jean Genet, didn’t stock torn fabric in liberating colors. The 1960s sexual revolution and antiwar protests were nowhere listed on the Yale social calendar, nor was the opening of admission to women; freedom now was the free beer at the Fence Club before, during, and after the Harvard game.
Not knowing where to shop for an appearance that wasn’t trifling or despotic, the undergraduate embodiments of superior sensibility wore their hair long and uncrewed, their white shoes scuffed, cashmere sweaters holed—not singed—by carelessly smoked French cigarettes. On the lawn fronting the Sterling Library they came and went talking of Bergman and Kurosawa, of the fifty degrees of blond separation between the girls at Vassar and the girls at Smith. The daring to eat not only a peach but also a pear was accessorized with the belief that in the void existential, art was salvation, truth was somewhere out there on the road with Jack Kerouac, up the creek with Holden Caulfield, in prison with Ezra Pound. Anywhere but here in Connecticut with the striped ties (haughty and precise) and the gray flannel suits (servile and ambitious) preparing to board the commuter trains come to carry them home to the shibboleths of their fathers on Wall Street.
Lapham’s Quarterly for more
via 3 Quarks Daily