From Essays After Montaigne
Whatsoever I aime at, I must needs force some of customes contradictions, so carefully hath she barred all our entrances. I was devising in this chil-cold season whether the fashion of these late discovered nations to go naked, be a custome forced by the hot temperature of the ayre, as we say of the Indians and Moores, or whether it be an original manner of mankind. Men of understanding, forasmuch as whatsoever is contained under heaven (as saith the Holy Writ) is subject to the same lawes, are wont in such like considerations, where naturall lawes are to be distinguished from those invented by man, to have recourse to the generall policie of the world, where nothing that is counterfet can be admitted. Now, all things being exactly furnished else-whence with all necessaries to maintaine this being, it is not to be imagined that we alone should be produced in a defective and indigent estate, yea, and in such a one as cannot be maintained without forrain helpe.
Writing in the mode of high romantic primitivism in the 1799 version of The Prelude, Wordsworth told of his four-year-old, naked self cavorting in rural England as a noble savage:
Beloved Derwent, fairest of all streams,
Was it for this that I, a four years' child,
A naked boy, among thy silent pools
Made one long bathing of a summer's day,
Basked in the sun, or plunged into thy streams,
Alernate, all a summer's day, or coursed
Over the sandy fields, and dashed the flowers
Of yellow groundsel - or, when crag and hill,
The woods, and distant Skiddaw's lofty height,
Were bronzed with deep radiance, stood alone
A naked savage in the thunder-shower?
As children in the 1960s and 1970s, my brother and I were subject to that era's corrupted resurgence of the aspiration to noble savagery. We lived in rural northeastern Connecticut until I was five, and, like Wordsworth, my brother and I tended not to wear clothes except where conditions required it. In the summer before I turned two, for instance, I attended an outdoor wedding in only a diaper and a necklace of flowers. We never seemed to wear bathing suits when swimming. And even after we moved into Hartford, I remember being made fun of for not wearing shoes outdoors.
Given this background, I've never been entirely comfortable with clothing. I don't know what to wear or how to wear it. When I was younger and in better shape, I could have (I've since learned) worn clothes well, but I didn't know it then. Now, slouching into the dissolution of middle age, I find it far more difficult to wear anything well. And I hate the feel of clothing around my waist, neck, and wrists. (Thank God I've found a career that doesn't require a tie or unrolled sleeves.) In short, I've inherited my mother's family's uneasiness with clothing--a condition made more pronounced by my wife's family's fascination with clothing. But at the same time, I'm no longer as comfortable without clothing as I once was. I've reached a tentative compromise whereby I try to wear stylish clothes that are also simple, neutral, and comfortable.
I would guess that the notion of style began when we decided to consider the form of clothing independent of its function (perhaps when a prehistoric man chose don a particular type or style of fur to indicate his status). A millenia-long, globe-spanning conversation about fashion has been evolving ever since. This conversation has included those who make fashion and those who follow it--no matter where you stand on the idea of fashion, you're part of that conversation. Those who seek to express their dogmatic disdain for fashion by dressing in a certain way fail to escape it, as do those who dress themselves out of indifference.
But one aspect of this conversation that I find especially strange is nicely illustrated by this exchange from a conversation with R. Crumb in this week's New York Times Magazine:
R.C.: My rant on fashion? You know, I like big women with full figures. And the female figure as it appears in all the great works of art throughout history is not in the fashion world. All the magazines show those bony, anorexic women. They're bulimic. They vomit up their food. They all feel bad about their bodies.
L.E.: Well, a lot of designers feel their clothes look better on a thinner frame.
I understand and accept fashion as a means of enhancing our appearance (shaping our clothing to flatter ourselves), but I'm a bit dismayed by the idea of our appearance as a means of enhancing fashion (shaping ourselves to flatter our clothing).
2:30:24 PM 
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