Anti-fashion
<p>Manolo the Shoeblogger writes in <a href='http://www.shoeblogs.com/wordpress/2005/10/25/the-paradox-of-not-caring/'>The<br />
Paradox of Not Caring</a>: &#8220;claiming to not care about the clothes, to<br />
not be concerned about what one wears, it the paradox, for the clothes<br />
worn by one who claims not to care make as much the statement as those<br />
worn by one who dresses with the purpose.&#8221;  He&#8217;s got a point. And yet,<br />
there is a difference between fashionistas like most of his fans and<br />
anti-fashionistas like me, and it&#8217;s an important one.</p>
<p><span id="more-229"></span></p>
<p>Here&#8217;s what I wear.  Rockports or hiking boots, good-quality black<br />
jeans (usually Land&#8217;s End), chammy shirts a la L.L. Bean in the winter<br />
and polos or four-pocket bush shirts in the summer.  Unlike most<br />
geeks, I don&#8217;t wear T-shirts very often. My color tastes run to solid<br />
high-saturation &#8220;jewel tones&#8221; and outdoorsy plaids.</p>
<p>I have an A-2, a classic brown-leather flight jacket, that I wear<br />
pretty much whenever it isn&#8217;t so hot I&#8217;d stifle, and I bought a<br />
polar-fleece vest specifically so I can keep wearing the A-2 in deep winter<br />
weather. Occasionally I wear Aussie-style bush fedoras.</p>
<p>The last clothing fad I actually liked was the vogue for safari<br />
gear in the mid-1980s; I&#8217;d still wear that stuff, but I wore almost<br />
all of mine out.</p>
<p>I tend to buy somewhat better-quality and more expensive clothing<br />
than my peers, but in styles that are designed for durability and ease<br />
of maintainance rather than flash (nothing I normally wear requires<br />
ironing or dry-cleaning). I favor simple designs in good materials, and<br />
I don&#8217;t buy anything I don&#8217;t expect to be wearing for at least five<br />
years (except that my shoes unavoidably wear out faster than that).</p>
<p>To use terms that Manolo wouldn&#8217;t, my clothing choices have both<br />
a functional level and a semiotic one.  Manolo&#8217;s point is that the<br />
semiotic level will be there whether it&#8217;s intended or not.  The<br />
functional level is obvious, I wear clothes that minimize the amount<br />
of time I have to spend worrying about clothes.</p>
<p>But I know what the semiotics of my clothes are, too. What I wear<br />
is a modern spin on classic no-nonsense men&#8217;s clothing, with an<br />
outdoorsy masculine emphasis &mdash; the sources for its design<br />
elements are explorers, soldiers, aviators, and engineers.  There&#8217;s<br />
an implied contrast with high-maintainance indoor clothing designed<br />
primarily to express the wearer&#8217;s position in a social hierarchy;<br />
the implication is that I don&#8217;t care to play that game, and<br />
don&#8217;t have to.</p>
<p>(But there&#8217;s another level to that. When you consider durability<br />
and how often one has to buy new clothes, the L.L. Bean/Lands&#8217; End<br />
version of outdoorsy clothing I wear is almost certainly less<br />
expensive over the long haul than most of the ostensibly cheaper stuff<br />
at your local mall. Nevertheless, it requires larger lumps of<br />
investment, so it is in its own way a form of wealth display.)</p>
<p>My choices also intentionally suggest that I have no use for<br />
fashion trends &mdash; that I&#8217;m self-assured enough to wear what<br />
<em>I</em> like, not what&#8217;s hip this season.  And that&#8217;s why, at least</p>
<p>for me, Manolo&#8217;s Paradox of Not Caring is more apparent than real.<br />
Fashionistas are concerned with what everybody else thinks is cool, and<br />
that changes randomly and rapidly; anti-fashionistas, like me, seek a<br />
personal style to settle into that expresses what <em>doesn&#8217;t</em><br />
change about them.</p>
<p>For me, that&#8217;s adventurers&#8217; clothing, sort of Indiana Jones lite<br />
&mdash; except I liked that look before the movies.  I can make it<br />
work because I&#8217;m a muscular guy with a strong physical presence;<br />
people look at the way I dress and carry myself and then aren&#8217;t very<br />
surprised to learn that I&#8217;ve lived on three continents, visited over<br />
fifteen countries, been fluent in three languages besides English, and<br />
that I&#8217;m a serious martial artist who can fight hand-to-hand in any of<br />
three styles or with sword or pistol.  They aren&#8217;t supposed to be<br />
surprised; semiotically, conveying toughness and competence and<br />
resourcefulness is exactly what my clothes are for.</p>
<p>There&#8217;s a subtler message in there as well.  I&#8217;m an intellectual,<br />
a thinker, a geek.  I could dress to emphasize that, but why bother?<br />
It&#8217;s going to be obvious whenever I open my mouth.  It&#8217;s much more fun<br />
to play off the fact that people don&#8217;t expect intellectuals to look<br />
natural in adventurers&#8217; clothing, or people who look natural in<br />
adventurers&#8217; clothing to be intellectuals.  Yeah.  I want to <em>bust</em><br />
those categories!  I want to make it clear that I don&#8217;t fit neatly in<br />
either box, or for that matter in any box at all.</p>
<p>So, even if I weren&#8217;t attracted to flight jackets and safari gear<br />
and the adventurer look, I would make something of a point of not<br />
usually dressing like a generic computer geek.</p>
<p>But getting back to Manolo&#8217;s point&#8230;the high-level message of<br />
fashion is &#8220;I am a herd animal, a follower, concerned primarily with<br />
the opinion of others&#8221;.  When people claim not to care what they wear,<br />
than can be sloppiness or it can be an individualist impulse trying to<br />
break the herd-animal pattern.  OK, so he&#8217;s got it right that we<br />
cannot avoid sending messages with our clothes &mdash; but at least<br />
some of us try to look like ourselves, rather than like everybody else.</p>
