#stevegottschling

[nomanwalksalone]

A DEFINITIVE FIX FOR GOLF’S DRESS CODES

by Steve Gottschling

2020 is the year golf courses will gradually roll out the World Handicap System, which merges six measurements into one convenient way to determine exactly how terrible you are at golf.

This grasp at standardization is so sweeping that it makes especially clear how anarchic golf can be when it comes to something also quite important to the experience of the game– the dress code. Far from standardized, dressing for golf is like tiptoeing across a hostile feudal land where every fiefdom has its own vision for how players should cover their bodies.

Last February, the Professional Golfers’ Association let players for the first time in its history leave their trousers behind and walk onto practice rounds and semi-pro games wearing knee-length shorts. While this sounds like some sort of Bare Calf Revolution, the length requirement makes the PGA slightly conservative; clubs like Saint Andrews in New York have long allowed players to flash onlookers with four inches of skin above their knees. The course staffers scurrying around with measuring tape are a small price to pay for the privilege.

Saint Andrews, meanwhile, requires all shirts to be tucked in. This might seem like a standard rule unless you have suddenly teleported from The Heritage at Marion Country Club in Kentucky, where shirts can stay untucked provided they come with pressed collars and, possibly, pineapples.

The National Club Golfer is particularly fed up. In 2019 alone they published four articles calling for the relaxation or complete end of golf’s dress codes. But while pumping out editorials might convince a stray reader here and there, it’s clear nothing drastic has changed. I have a better idea.

Between 1998 and 2006, interest in golf seemed to soar, so developers, understanding the basic business law that when demand rises, it never ever stops rising, sprinkled the land with courses.

What a great time for that popularity to decline. By the end of the 2010s, courses had shed almost six million players, and as the supply of holes rapidly outpaced the number of people willing to smack balls in their general direction, the excess courses set about languishing unused.

Now here’s the plan: while those abandoned courses spend upwards of a year in limbo, waiting as the city hunts for developers and settles lawsuits, everyone who was once sent home for wearing black socks should turn these courses into Casual Communes.

It starts with a meeting place. All the bedraggled souls will gather near the course at the home of a family sympathetic to the cause. At dawn, after porridge, they will creep onto the course wearing porridge-covered t-shirts and inappropriate shoes, their drivers and putters glinting as the sun rises. And afterward, they will drop their clubs at the clubhouse and play wordless games of cards until night comes and they skulk back to their hideout.

Of course this plan has challenges. To stay silent, commune members will have to mow the green using manual reel mowers or, for a dash of mysticism, scythes. I hear there are bikers and meth cooks lurking about, but once they learn about the cause, they’ll surely see golfing in cargo shorts is more important than petty territorial disputes.

After all, there are other benefits too. The pace of the game will improve, and although no one will say how that happened, there will be rumors of sluggish golfers’ shoes poking out from beneath the sand traps. And the clubhouse can play host to things it never could before, like denim jeans and burning trash. The new handicap system, however, will stay in place. You can’t mess with international law.

[nomanwalksalone]

THE DAILY PAPER

by Steve Gottschling

Throughout the country, local journalism wages an increasingly grim war against oblivion and, to better its chances of winning, is turning toward rather odd sources for help. Two county newspapers have launched GoFundMes as their newsrooms shrink and neighboring publications fold. Other papers plan to accept a total of $300 million’s worth of pledged initiatives from Google and Facebook, the two companies that bear most of the responsibility for siphoning ad revenue from those papers in the first place.

Local journalism, however, might be the only endangered species no one has any interest in photographing. Judging by the artwork that accompanies stories about newsrooms’ struggles, I have rarely seen what any of their reporters actually look like. A typical article features things like newspapers whirring through a printing press, the Gannett headquarters, Mark Zuckerberg’s crystalline face as he tries to commandeer a tractor, and newspapers. So many newspapers. It’s as if they expect to capture our imaginations based solely on the perk of averting corruption.

This is disappointing, especially considering another workforce, also frequently described as endangered, has managed to cling to survival thanks almost entirely to its look.

Compared to local newsrooms, the floor traders of the New York Stock Exchange face the opposite situation: photos suggest more of them exist than actually do. The picture that ran alongside an August 17 Washington Post article follows a well-hewn tradition of cramming traders as tightly into the frame as possible, this time between a row of flat screens and another trader’s back. Squeezing out almost all empty space like a Zip-Loc bag makes it easy to forget that, thanks to the industry’s overwhelming shift toward automating trading, the number of firms on the NYSE floor has shrunk from the hundreds in the 1990s to something closer to 35.

Nonetheless, it turns out our culture is so endeared by the thought of a marble room teeming with unstructured mesh-backed trading jackets that the New York Stock Exchange sees its floor traders as valuable branding tools. Even though the human touch’s actual advantage over automatic trading is disputable, the NYSE is convinced that investors feel more comfortable when a cast of familiar faces shares the same room as the stock ticker. Cable networks can slather their finance shows with a sense of legitimacy knowing Peter Tuchman lurks somewhere behind the news anchors.

The lesson is clear-- local newspaper reporters need a look. Just like pandas attract more conservation dollars than, say, the Western Long-Beaked Echidna, local journalists might be able to turn to something other than questionably intentioned tech giants if they doubled the number of hearts they could capture. And we need not mimic the frightening standards and chin implants of television reporters, nor should we expect most reporters to have the budget to pull off a Tom Wolfe.

An obvious choice is the Rollable Paper Hat. First, it resembles most people’s idea of an old-timey reporter costume, lacking only the cardboard Press insert. With its casual shape and fabric, editors could dole them out one day in a t-shirt cannon, and the journalists could plop them on their heads without worrying about disrupting their outfit.

Second, since it’s rollable, journalists can keep them stored next to their laptops until the politician they’re trying to interview lets his guard down, and then oh no! What’s that on their head? They’re a newspaper reporter. What a ruse.

Thankfully, our bar is low. All this look has to accomplish is to out-compete pictures of stacked newspapers to be the most interesting possible image to use next to a story about local journalism. Then, the only challenge remaining for reporters is to lower the brim over their faces to protect their eyes from the oncoming torrent of dollar bills.

[nomanwalksalone]

IF PLANTS ARE DISAPPEARING, WHY ARE THERE SO MANY OF THEM ON MY SHIRT?

by Steve Gottschling

The academic journal Nature Ecology and Evolution published in mid-June an alarming report on the accelerating rate of plant extinction, but if we’re being honest, they would do better to chuck that report aside and find relief in the current state of menswear.

The report, which was published without consulting the fashion industry, found that every year for the past 250 years, an average of two plant species have gone extinct, while plants discovered since 1900 have disappeared even faster. When questioned about the study, plant researcher Dr. Maria Vorontsova said, “we suffer from plant blindness. Animals are cute, important and diverse, but I am absolutely shocked how a similar level of awareness and interest is missing for plants. We take them for granted, and I don’t think we should.”

If we are to take those scientists at their word, things seem dire indeed. The Wall Street Journal reported last year that widespread disinterest in plants leaves government agencies scrambling for employees who can handle policy related to plant extinction and invasive species.

But these scientists are wrong. Plants are reappearing, in the form of floral fabrics that decorate the bodies of fashion conscious men. As every men’s magazine has by now observed, we are in the midst of a floral shirt revival. More pineapples roam the streets than ever in recent memory. To embrace a man in 2019 is to hug dozens of little trees at once. If wearing a sports jersey is to flaunt your fandom for all to see, then we are bigger fans of plants than we have been in years.

This wasn’t always the case. In 1999, floral shirts’ cachet was less certain, so it made sense for James Wandersee and Elisabeth Schussler to coin the phrase “plant blindness” to describe our habit of shafting plants to the background while cooing over the adorable animals that stomp over them. But if those researchers overcame their own blindness, they would see how legions of men walking out their front doors with seed packets printed across their torsos show that things couldn’t possibly be as bad as they say.

If plant researchers looked up once in a while from their field studies and data, they would see that ecological health has always corresponded with the number of floral shirts existing at a given moment.

In 1957, the government was too busy passing the Federal Plant Pest Act to see the only real plant pest was Frank Sinatra, who with his Aloha shirt had for years been starting fights for no reason with other men in Aloha shirts in From Here to Eternity.

Instead of building the Mauna Loa observatory in 1958 to keep track of atmospheric carbon dioxide, government officials could have gathered around the peeling Fauxna Loa at their nearest tiki bar and, judging by the beautiful bouquet of off-hour office workers doing their best to look relaxed, noticed that nature was well accounted for.

In 1961, scientists were so busy raising the alarm over the invasive miconia tree’s rapid land-grab in Oahu that they failed to observe Hawaii was also being invaded by Elvis and his swarm of gawkers in Blue Hawaii, surely replenishing any lost flora with its rayon equivalent.

And, as the Endangered Species Act evolved throughout the 70s to protect an expanding roster of plants, none of the officials behind it realized how futile their efforts were, as plant life far more colorful and numerous was being promoted in the same period by the evolving career of Jimmy Buffet.

Next year, when the season’s first crop of shirts arrive with little glaciers all over them, we can rest easy knowing the dangers of climate change are also behind us.

[nomanwalksalone]

THE SHOCK OF SUDDEN FLATNESS

by Steve Gottschling

With so many publications declaring the suit on life support, it should comfort the tailored clothing faithful to see how tightly Andy Warhol clings to the popular imagination. Burger King’s ad agency pitched what would become the chain’s 2019 Superbowl ad knowing Warhol had four times the Instagram mentions of Sarah Jessica Parker, Melissa McCarthy, Charlie Sheen, Jason Bateman, and Steve Carell combined. And when Warhol’s burger-filled face aired in February, more people than you or I will ever meet saw a man who somehow made navy blazers look cool.

It's too bad only one Pop Art icon found that sort of staying power. If Andy Warhol flatters our coat and tie sensibilities, there is another artist from the same era who challenges them. Working a few miles from the Warhol Factory in her Tribeca studio was Marisol, the first-name-only contemporary of Warhol whose work revels in the sort of shapes menswear enthusiasts try their hardest to avoid. Flitting freely between sculpture and painting, Marisol’s art is a celebration of flatness.

In tailoring, where elegance is synonymous with graceful curves, flatness feels more like a curse than just another aesthetic possibility. Internet forums are littered with similar stories: a man has entrusted his suit to a dry cleaner, only to find the cleaner has flattened the lapels against the chest. A landscape of sloping fabric now halts at a crease, and the wearer’s claim to elegance and taste, once assured, now wobbles on its perch. And so, a menswear enthusiast walking to his dry cleaner carries the same recessive fear as a New Yorker whose path takes him right beneath a row of second-story air conditioning units.

In Marisol’s world, sudden flatness is the point. Her portraits frequently look as if a genie turned a magazine illustration into a real person and gave up as the transformation began. And that battle between two and three dimensions is where the work draws its power.

A Hugh Hefner portrait in Marisol’s hands morphs into a lopsided monstrosity. Hefner’s face, painted on a hulking block of wood carved like a hammerhead, reaches so far beyond the shallow slab on which his body is painted that he looks as if he wants both to tip over and challenge the viewer to a duel.

Change the shape of the slab, and the whole meaning shifts. MoMa’s placard for Marisol’s sculpture of Lyndon B Johnson notes its “coffinlike shape,” which might recall both Kennedy’s assassination and the staggering death toll of The Vietnam War. The portrait’s shoulders, far more square than any amount of padding can hope to achieve, suggests the artist saw in Johnson a sort of exaggerated, even bloated, self regard.

Marisol’s portraits aren’t all mocking exaggerations. Her rendition of Andy Warhol is comparatively unassuming, a ghostly outline of the artist holding his arms tight against his chest as if to hide inside the chair-shaped confines Marisol gives him. If there’s evidence of her close relationship with Warhol– they partied together after all– it’s her decision to paint him three times, each panel getting its own angle in what looks like a spell of loving fixation.

If surrounding ourselves with expressively flat sculptures does little to muffle the shock of a smooshed lapel, maybe our spring wardrobes will help. This, after all, is Flatness Season. Half of us have switched to camp collar rayon shirts to dazzle the checkout line with our sense of whimsy. Pre-flattened collars have spread to outerwear too, like this Stephan Schneider jacket whose look would not change much if a building’s air conditioning units toppled onto it at once. At best, we can hope that once we reach again for our serious suits, we’ll have forgotten how afraid of creases we used to be.

[nomanwalksalone]

BERNSTEIN’S FOLLY

by Steve Gottschling

For Leonard Bernstein, the conductor and music director of the New York Philharmonic from 1958 to 1969, every Thursday of the 1958-59 season felt like a sort of purgatory. Too polished to be called a rehearsal, these performances still lacked for Bernstein the sparkly finish of a Friday or Saturday night.

And so, stopping short of making his orchestra haul their tailcoats to such a strange unplaceable event, Bernstein devised a new uniform. A few shades lighter than pure black and with a blazer that buttoned all the way up to a band collar, this outfit was Bernstein’s way of nodding to a lineage of music directors like Arturo Toscanini and Otto Klemperer who also preferred to hug their necks with tightly woven wool.

But introducing a band collar jacket to a room full of Americans is a gamble. The band collar in the US is like a Thursday concert in 1958. A hummingbird without direction, it hovers between meanings, unsure of which one to slurp up next.

On October 8, 1958, New York Times reporter Harold Schonberg captured the orchestra’s reactions as they tried on their uniforms:

“You look like a bellhop at the Astor.”

“Like a bandmaster.”

“Like a field marshal.”

“Like Father O’Malley.”

“Like a space cadet.”

“Like Chiang Kai-shek.”

The confusion spread beyond the orchestra. Guest conductors Herbert von Karajan and John Barbirolli refused to wear the uniform. And out of all the feedback that made its way back to Bernstein, the conductor told the New York Times the following January, only half was positive.

Continuing the long tradition of men standing their ground in the face of overwhelming criticism, Bernstein dropped the whole idea. The uniform, Bernstein announced before January’s final Thursday concert began, would go down in history as “Bernstein’s Folly.”

But as the country’s clothing tastes would later suggest, Bernstein’s real mistake was introducing the uniform a decade early.

Americans in the 60s endured a decade-long session of band collar exposure therapy. Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s meetings with John F. Kennedy beamed the prime minister’s band collar jacket across American television screens until the jacket was no longer separable from his name. In 1962’s “Dr. No,” the jacket appeared on both James Bond and the titular villain. And in 1965, the Beatles in their Nehru jackets performed at Shea Stadium in front of 55,600 fans.

And whereas for Bernstein the jacket functioned as a paper cup phone to the past, in the 60s it absorbed the opposite meaning, satisfying the futurist yearnings of an increasingly fashion conscious crowd. The same jacket whose Indian and Chinese roots gave men with Orientalist appetites a whiff of spirituality was sleek enough to speak to their Space Age techno-optimism.

In 1968, the Nehru jacket’s popularity reached a boiling point. The Washington Post declared on February 10 that “1968 may be the year of the stand-up collar.” And indeed, as mall stores raced to stock the jacket, wearable utopia was one trip to Macy’s away.

Now, long after the trend’s collapse at the end of the 60s, the band collar once again hovers between meanings. When Jack Dorsey wore a shirt with a towering version to his congressional hearing last June, the internet transformed into the digital equivalent of Bernstein’s incredulous orchestra. Quartz compared him to a priest, Esquire to an evil space wizard.

A man from 1968 would be horrified. His favorite collar and visions of a techno utopia, all reduced to the same pile of ashes.  

[nomanwalksalone]

THE DORKS OF SUMMER

by Steve Gottschling

During times of upheaval, those vying for power might be too busy seizing territory to pause amid the wreckage and think about how cool they look. And since last spring, when companies like Bird and Lime scattered rentable electric scooters throughout major US cities without so much as a warning, the journalists assigned to make sense of the situation arrived at the same conclusions. The scooters came out of nowhere. They have clear benefits. And they’re not cool.

Stepping onto one, The Atlantic’s Robinson Meyer found he could easily transverse sections of DC that rested in dead zones not serviced by public transport, but doing so felt like walking outside for the first time after being kidnapped and forcefully outfitted in cargo shorts.

“There are several trees on my commute home with whom I feel a deep and wordless bond,” he writes. “When I must ride a scooter past them, I avert my eyes.”

And for Wired Magazine, David Pearce can’t praise the scooter’s environment-saving potential without weaving in some comments about its dorkiness. “But they're not cool, he writes. They've never been cool.”

Seeing so many wrinkled noses takes me back to a time when new transportation technologies could drop into a city that not just accepted but romanticized them. You might think I’m referring to the Vespa, which rolled out of Piaggio’s factory into an Italy ravaged by World War II and in need of a way to zoom literally out of economic malaise. And still, Vespa from the start bathed itself in the sort of glamour that may rest forever out of reach for the likes of Bird and Lime.

But I’m talking about the scooter. In the year 2000. While dismissing electric scooters as dorky is practically part of newspapers’ style guides in 2018, you can almost imagine John Leland wiping drool from his keyboard as he writes about the Razor for the New York Times:

“As a mode of transportation, sadly, the scooter proved the stiletto heel of the two-wheeled set: great to look at, lousy for carrying laundry to the dry cleaner. Do not be seduced, as I was, by images of dapper men and women in graceful glide, cool breezes slicing through the hot city.”

Already among the glowing reviews, however, was a budding wariness toward the machinations of Silicon Valley. An LA times article written two months before the collapse of Pets.com describes startup workers barrelling atop their scooters to meetings, “liability be damned.”

If liability was an afterthought then, it’s a myth now. By dropping their scooters into cities unannounced, Bird and Lime contributed to a culture already steeped in data scandals and regulation-shirking ruthlessness. Even if they manufactured rideable clouds made of pure sexy, it’s hard to imagine city-dwellers trusting them any more.

Now, Bird and Lime could have paddled against this perception by prefacing their rollouts the way Vespa did-- with a good ol’ fashioned ad campaign. Rather than leaving image-making duties entirely in the hands of journalists, Vespa romanticized its scooters in magazine ads that recall the clean lines and perpetual motion of Italian Futurism. Teetering yuppies tend to look sleeker when rendered in pen.

But dorkiness is like a finger trap: on the rare occasion that 2018’s scooter companies do craft their own images, the grip of dorkdom clenches further. UScooters’ Instagram, as Pearce points out in Wired, tries to surround its stark metallic product with sensuously lit trees with unintentionally comical results.

The best hope for the scooters, in turns out, may be to double down. We’re in the year of the Dad Sneaker after all, and the Fanny Pack Renaissance is going strong. A device that has been branded dorky may still catch on, once the stench of Patagonia fleece has dissipated just a bit.

[nomanwalksalone]

A SUIT FOR THE WHOLE GROUP

by Steve Gottschling

Let’s pretend for today that universal harmony exists, and everything has a foil somewhere that keeps the world in cosmic balance. Now, unfolding in a tailor’s shop in Naples is a disaster, a real crashing to Earth moment. A man stands before a mirror at the second fitting for his next bespoke suit, doing his best to deal with the fact that the gentle ruffles of the spalla camicia shoulders, having first seemed so nonchalant, now just remind him of kale. His grasp at perfection has gifted him a dashing set of leafy greens.

But thanks to something unexpected, the world is still in balance. A crew of museum staff haul outside a 50 by 50 foot sheet of gleaming white fabric. A crowd ducks one by one under the sheet to poke their heads through slashes cut all across its surface. And there they stage Lygia Pape’s 1968 performance piece Divisor, whose underlying assumptions diverge so widely from those of bespoke suiting that the two approaches to wearing fabric just have to be spiritually connected.

Divisor plays so freely with the tensions bespoke tries to resolve-- tensions between cloth and body, ideal and reality, that I’m convinced the piece is sent onto the streets every few years like a sacrificial goat to cleanse bespoke customers of any shame they might feel when tasking tailors with bringing to life the Platonic ideals swimming in their heads.

A ready to wear garment that is never really ready, Divisor is always getting in the way. One of several bits of footage on Youtube shows participants walking slowly to avoid stepping on each other’s feet, holding the fabric aloft with whatever hands they’re not using to adjust the fabric around their necks. It’s a constant, gentle bickering with a garment that will never submit to their bodies’ needs.

The entire possibility of an ideal form disappears under the sheet. It shapeshifts as the crowd expands and compresses, sagging in some sections while taut in others until concepts like fit and proportion become completely alien.

And when participants themselves aren’t reshaping their giant communal suit, outside forces are. Staff members direct them to jump, crouch, spread apart, rush together, and even duck back under the sheet to trade places with others. And when Elisa Wouk Almino participated in Divisor at the Met Breuer, she found city officials working as de-facto tailors:

“We were sadly given only one lane of traffic, which meant that the sheet was not entirely unfolded, accommodating only 60 people. The rectangle of fabric sagged between us, rather than appearing taut and expansive as I’d seen in archival footage. Police and Met staff were on either end of us, making sure we kept within our limits, watching out for the cars and curb. This, to me, defeated the point of the whole thing. We were supposed to take over the street, not be dictated by its laws.”

But submitting to someone else’s idea of order is always what the piece was about. Pape originally intended the sheet to occupy an entire room in a gallery where parallel jets of air would flow, hot air blasting the participants’ feet while cold air refrigerated their faces. Had Pape secured the funding, participants would have let her control the very air they breathed.

And yet, in spite of sacrificing their basic comforts to a giant white sheet, participants come away seeing the experience, like another Hyperallergic writer did as “wonderful” and “intimate.”

Which makes me wonder: maybe to ease bespoke’s cruel cycle of expectation and letdown, cloth houses could set up a side business just for making enormous swaths of communal fabric. Groups of like-minded gentlemen, weary from their fittings, could duck under a larger quantity of Caccioppoli wool than any of them had ever seen. The constant hoisting and adjusting of cloth, not to mention the thematic weight of negotiating the individual and the society, would keep them from wondering if a linen blend would have made a nicer choice.  

[nomanwalksalone]

IN 2018, WE DANCE LIKE OUTLAWS

by Steve Gottschling

I’m worried about the state of dancing in 2018. Sure, three months ago New York City repealed its Cabaret Law, which required bars and restaurants to have a license to let their patrons lapse into rhythmic motion. But even now, with some New Yorkers surely testing the new boundaries of where their hips can and cannot sway, there is one constant companion that makes a night out something other than the transcendental blur it could have been.

That companion, of course, is work. To accept a salaried position in 2018 is to befriend a kindly corporate ghost who lives in your phone and asks for your attention at odd moments throughout the evening. It is to feel the pinprick of an unfinished project tickle the back of your mind all Saturday night, a tiny anxiety nudged along by an ever buzzing Slack channel. Then there are the holiday parties, those secret Drake performances and paid model extravaganzas that rub out any remaining hope that partying might liberate us from daily toil, at least as long as the source of the toil foots the bill.

If there is an escape, menswear magazines can’t seem to find it, judging from the articles Esquire and Fashion Beans published about what to wear to a nightclub. Both articles advocate for a sort of minimalist chameleon look, a dark sombre ensemble that gels so perfectly with the room’s level of formality that everyone’s attention drifts away from your clothing and toward your face. Your poor, work-addled face.

But this year, we can try another model for partying, one that might actually let us transcend our unbalanced lives. It comes from a scrappy group of New Yorkers who thwarted the Cabaret Law, oh, until the leader’s murder conviction brought their whole scene to a halt.

In the late eighties, Michael Alig and his Club Kids would hold “outlaw parties” in spaces like Dunkin’ Donuts and McDonalds, none of which expected or wanted to play host to dense crowds of social-climbing youngsters. For years, I read interviews about the Club Kids and their legendary outlaw parties. Then I found footage of one.

A 1989 outlaw party at McDonalds comes across like a leaky liferaft in an ocean of boredom, where the guests use their sheer force of ego to bail out the grey encroaching water. The most impressive thing about it is how much faith they have in their own ability to keep it afloat. Aside from the tinny squeal of a stereo in the corner, loud enough to cue maybe a handful of bodies to dance, the only sound is the clatter of personalities trying to assert themselves as flamboyantly as they can.

Partying with the Club Kids wasn’t, after all, only about the physical pleasures of dancing and drugs. It was about total obliteration of previous identities. Many of the kids came from outside New York, Midwestern cities too cramped for their galaxy-sized ambitions.

And for the hour they’d spend at McDonalds before the authorities sent them scurrying to an actual club, none of them could follow advice like Fashion Beans’ or Esquire’s because there was no dress code to follow, no darkened dance floor to cloak an all-black minimal look. Just a ceiling full of fluorescent bulbs casting into relief the costumes of worn-out selves rebuilding into brighter ones.

[nomanwalksalone]

BRITS IN INDIA, PART 2: THE RESISTANCE

by Steve Gottschling

You may recall my last post where I discussed the peculiar dress of the East India Company, one of the most infamous mixers of capitalism and violence before the world gave us United Airlines. I shared accounts of soldiers like Garnet Wolseley and WSR Hodson as they marched across the Indian subcontinent beneath heavy woollen uniforms to fulfill some far-off authority’s idea of national pride.

It was a portrait of stoicism, but more importantly it posed a counterpoint to my own hyper-meticulous dressing style for spring’s wobbly toddler stages. I can forgive myself a little more easily for choosing too warm a jacket when my mind is littered with images of redcoats fainting gracefully.

But my portrayal of Company troops as wool-wrapped martyrs, I’m sorry to say, wasn’t entirely accurate. As is expected for an operation that spanned a whole subcontinent, where dress regulations are easier announced than enforced, the British troops couldn’t quite transplant their national uniform to another climate without one or two garments changing along the way.

Captain FB Doveton, who fought in Burma in the 1820s, puts it nicely in the Asiatic Journal:

“When troops are on active service in the East, great license is permitted in the way of costume; in fact, the Regulations could not very well be enforced where there are no army tailors to supply deficiencies. On such a barbarous and distant service as that in question, it may well be imagined we were soon a most motley group…”

“My own corps ran riot very much in this particular, our colonel not being over[sic] strict as to dress. Many wore trowsers[sic] made of a coarse blue calico used for lining tents (this was my favorite material); others wore white, and some tartan; in fact, every one suited his own taste, and all the colours of the rainbow were son seen in the ranks.”

Part of the reason for this trouser diversity was the garment’s combustibility. Trousers were among the first garments to give way to the rigors of plunder, but an imminently trouserless soldier could choose among local sources for a cheap and lightweight replacement. Your torso would still bake beneath your flannel jacket, of course, but at least everything below the belt could breathe.

Things were hardly more uniform atop soldiers’ heads. Garnet Wolseley, whom I introduced in the last post, wrapped thin blue puggaree around his forage cap for added protection. And Doveton describes his regiment having “a great diversity of taste as to head-dress, some wearing the high oil-skin shako, others foraging caps of various shapes.”

And the shako! Some soldiers hated it. “It had a peak before and one behind, whence the felt crown rose to the altitude of six or eight inches, stretching out at the summit in a style that I might have thought picturesque if I had not found it confoundedly top-heavy,” wrote one soldier in the Asiatic Journal. Many soldiers simply lost their shakos, wearing instead cloth-wraps soaked in water. No wonder the lighter-weight forage cap was frequently the preferred choice.

Perhaps the most relatable regiment of the lot, however, were the First Bengali Fusiliers, who gained the name “The Dirty Shirts” from, as Charles John Griffiths writes, “their habit of fighting in their shirts with sleeves turned up, without jacket or coat, and their nether extremities clad in soiled blue dungaree trousers.” Scores of other regiments kept their jackets on and left battle with no nickname at all.

So fret not, all you who worry about rising temperatures forcing you to shed your outerwear and whatever sense of identity comes with it. Your chance at legendary status is not lost.

Picture: The 1st Bengal Fusiliers Marching Down from Dugshai, by George F. Atkinson, 1857

[nomanwalksalone]

IDIOTIC PRIDE: THE UNIFORMS OF THE EAST INDIA COMPANY

by Steve Gottschling

Clothing designers never prepare you for the slow death of a season. Sure, every six months they fill stores with clothes of various lengths and thicknesses, but when their customers are riding the mechanical bull that is transitional weather, designers are hiding behind their mood boards working on the next batch. All the strategizing then falls upon us shoppers as we struggle to match garment to weather condition. How do you dress for a day that starts at 40 degrees and rises to 70? The industry shrugs.

But standing at my closet, one eye on its contents and the other on the weather report, I wonder if it’s possible to dodge this conundrum entirely. Not through ingenuity, but endurance. What if we gave up on adapting to the whims of transitional weather and wore heavy woolen fabrics all day long? Even better, we could cede the outfit selection to someone else, say, someone thousands of miles away, and they could ship over the clothes via a literal ship. Thinking about early spring really takes me back, you know, to the East India Company.

When the Company’s troops plundered the subcontinent between the 18th and 19th centuries, they had better things to do than stare at an open closet. They had one outfit. It was tight and stifling and made them sick. Before the Indian Rebellion of 1857 prompted the English government to step in and, as one of many changes, make lightweight cotton the uniform of Indian subjugation, soldiers dressed “as warmly, and even more so, than in England at this season,” as WSR Hodson described in a letter in 1848.

Garnet Wolseley, who fought in Burma in 1852, was less polite. ”Our clothing was entirely unsuited for campaigning in a tropical climate,” he wrote. “The Queen’s Army took an idiotic pride in dressing in India as nearly as possible in the same clothing they wore at home… We wore our ordinary cloth shell jackets buttoned up to the chin, and the usual white buckskin gloves. Could any costume short of steel armour be more absurd in such a latitude?”

You can imagine how this worked out. Heat exhaustion is just as much a character in Hodson's letters as New York City is in romantic comedies. And as historian Edward Henry Nolan wrote, “the mortality of British soldiers both in peace and war arises from long marches in the heavy clothing with which, under so hot a climate, they are encumbered. Under the burning sun… many incur death, or disease by which they are permanently invalidated.”

It’s refreshing, in a perverse sort of way, that Company leadership would discard weather concerns for the sake of national pride. Somewhere amid their creeping lightheadedness, the soldiers must have felt at least a dash of esprit de corps, the sort that DC government employees must feel as they hobble home in their suits underneath the August sun, passing throngs of cargo-shorted tourists along the way. Except when the DC folk get home, they can slip into cargo shorts of their own.

If there is one reason to envy the Company troops, however, it is this: when I choose the wrong outfit and end up baking on my walk to lunch, I blame myself and the parade of poor decisions that must have led to this point. But when you suffer at the pleasure of a distant authority, you can direct your ire-beams to an unseen place thousands of miles away. Resentment is healthier than self-loathing, at least until the permanent invalidation comes.

[nomanwalksalone]

SURVIVING YOUR CRITICS

by Steve Gottschling

When a man’s tastes tend toward the idiosyncratic, when he sports a French tuck at the bar where everyone else’s hems hide entirely behind their waistbands, we would like to think those tastes are protected. That he has knitted his various coping mechanisms into an invisible shield that sends all but the kindest words ricocheting across the floor.

But more often, this shield isn’t invisible. It’s nonexistent, and his ability to survive his critics has everything to do with the number of stones flying in his general direction.  

In the late spring of 1876, military tailor Henry Hill purchased Edgar Degas’ L’Absinthe, then called simply Au Cafe, from the Deschamps gallery in London and brought it back to his collection in Brighton. This purchase in 2018 would have been like an executive strolling into his accounting firm on a Friday wearing his new pressed-collar rayon shirt.

Sure, Paris’s Impressionist movement faced in England its share of detractors, like Dante Gabriel Rossetti who called their work “simply putrescence and decomposition.” But much like the colleague who fixates on that rayon shirt while stammering something like “well it’s certainly eye catching,” the country’s broader mood seemed to be a sort of uneasy praise.

Hill expected as much when he titled the work A Sketch in a Cafe for an exhibition in Brighton, anticipating sideways glances at the work’s rough appearance. The glances came as scheduled. The Pall Mall Gazette wrote:

And yet in such material, graceless and unattractive as it is, Mr. Degas finds occasion for the exercise of the most delicate art. He takes these tawdry colors and submits them to a series of the most interesting experiments in tone.

And the Brighton Gazette:

The perfection of ugliness; undoubtedly a clever painting, though treated in a slap-dash manner, amounting to affectation....The very disgusting novelty of the subject arrests attention. What there is to admire in it is the skill of the artist, not the subject itself.

Hill never exhibited Au Cafe in England again. The painting returned to Paris for one more exhibition and then disappeared back into Hill’s collection until his death.

If Hill faced an atmosphere of uneasy enthusiasm, the painting’s next two owners stared down a whirlwind of hostility. By the time Hill died, England saw a rise in upper middle class art collectors who preferred paintings with pleasant, morally righteous narratives. When Christie’s auctioned Au Cafe in 1892, the audience hissed.

Two men, however, did not. Collector Arthur Kay recounts in his memoir A Treasure Trove in Art the moment he stood at the back of the room and watched as fellow collector Alexandre Reid bid on the painting:

I felt it would be wiser to let him become buyer, and offer him a profit afterwards, rather than run him up in the auction. This policy worked; he bought the picture. When I met him he told how some of his friends were chaffing[sic] and abusing him for having acquired such a thing. He evidently thought that he had made a mistake. I offered to relieve him of his mistake for a very moderate consideration, which pleased and satisfied him.

But Kay found scarcely better reactions among his own peers. “At last,” he wrote, “after frequent requests to sell, and wearied by the questionings of those who were incapable of understanding it, I exchanged it in part payment for another picture.”

Two days later, in a move way too many consignment shop clients would find relatable, Kay returned to the dealer to buy it again.

Kay’s real test of devotion began in February 1893, when he exhibited Au Cafe at the Grafton Gallery. The painting appeared under the new name L’Absinthe, almost destined to make critics convulse by drawing attention to the green liquid enjoyed by one of its subjects.

The news cycle lasted months. Arts journalists in various English papers staked their careers on L’Absinthe. D.S. MacColl of the Spectator and Elizabeth Robins Pennell praised Degas’ technique, while the Westminster Gazette’s J.A. Spender denied it had any artistic merit at all. Artists William Blake Richmond and Walter Crane wrote letters to the Gazette supporting Spender.

Kay was exasperated. In a letter to the Gazette, he wrote:

You have asked me to answer a question. How could one live with such a work as Degas’s “L’Absinthe”? For so the picture has been named, but not by me. Mr. Crane says cohabitation is the test which never fails. Perhaps he forgets that it depends on who lives with a picture, and that true connoisseurs should be without prejudice…. I have lived with “L’Absinthe” for many months. It was hung in a position which enables me to pass and see it constantly; everyday I grew to like it better.

But was all too much. Kay sold the painting in April 1893 to a Parisian dealer, this time for good.

As for the owner of the rayon shirt, some say they can hear him clacking away at his keyboard, writing his own screed for the next time someone dares accuse him of working for Magnum PI.

[nomanwalksalone]

THE INDOORSY BASEBALL CAP

by Steve Gottschling

The baseball cap is an indoor hat. I know that sounds weird. You probably wear yours only when outdoors and remove it when you go inside. Maybe you voiced mild befuddlement when Morgan Freeman attended the SAG awards wearing a black one. But there he was, the brim low on his brow, until Rita Ora implored him to raise it a bit so the audience could see his face, which by then had shaped into something between amusement and annoyance.  

None of the news outlets covering the show could pin down a reason for Freeman’s cap. But the reason is clear: the baseball cap is an indoor hat. And for further proof, we need only shift our gaze to the current lifetime achievement award holder for ceremonial cap-wearing, composer Steve Reich. He wore a cap while shaking Prince Charles’ hand to accept an honorary doctorate from the Royal College of Music. He wore one while accepting his Pulitzer prize in 2009. Wearing caps in large indoor spaces is Steve Reich’s thing.

But unlike Freeman, Reich discusses his cap frequently. In a 2016, he told the Globe and Mail:

“This is my kipa – this is my way of squaring the circle, of being able to be comfortable in the various worlds in which I find myself. In synagogue I have a regular yarmulke on, but outside, I wear the hat. I wear it on stage and I feel good that I can do that – that I've found a solution, a way of maintaining a couple of 1,000-year-old traditions while still not trying to force myself on people.”

Reich’s cap isn’t just celebrity insouciance. It shows how decades of social changes can collide into a single garment. In the 70s, after the counterculture and all the squares it influenced began embracing identities that had been overlooked or suppressed in the West, Reich jumped aboard a wave of renewed interest in Judaism. He enrolled in a religious education class at a Manhattan synagogue. He picked up Hebrew. And then came the cap.  

Reich’s display of faith was coy compared to what happened in the decade prior. In 1962, according to a paper by Aminadav Grossman, the American Jewish Congress convinced the governor of New Jersey to let men wear yarmulkes to court after a judge forced an Orthodox Jew to remove his yarmulke at a traffic hearing. In 1970, after the New York Stock Exchange’s policy of prohibiting the yarmulke prompted a Jewish employee to complain to the City Council of Human Rights, the Exchange reversed course and let workers wear the hat after all. Meanwhile, a meeting among Jewish advocacy groups shows the degree to which students were bringing their yarmulkes to the classroom:

“...over the years the practice of deeply observant Jews in covering their heads during the waking hours, has become firmly imbedded [sic]. In fact, it is apparent that increasing numbers of Orthodox Jewish youth are beginning to assert themselves by wearing yarmulka [sic] in public schools and colleges. This is in sharp contrast to a previous era when Orthodox Jews, sensitive to the hostile attitudes of the Christian world, compromised themselves by removing their skull caps in public spaces.”

But even after so many American Jews fought for the right to wear their yarmulke in public, Reich chose the cap. And that is less a fault against Reich than it is a testament to the cap’s meaning-shifting, comforting ways.

Unlike the fedora, which carries its history like a wet sock, the baseball cap picks up and sheds meanings at will. The same blank cap that helps a barely undercover celebrity thwart the paparazzi could drift onto the head of a fast food worker without disturbing anyone’s idea of peace.

And while baseball caps have always been malleable-- declaring allegiance to both sports teams and military branches-- the design itself is like a telephone booth for the head. The crown is just the right size for the scalp, the brim just long enough for the brow. Nothing protrudes further than it has to, no extra fabric to curl jauntily toward an unconsenting audience unless the wearer swivels the hat himself. It simultaneously reveals part of the wearer to the world, while giving him enough of a ceiling to feel like he can keep something to himself.

None of this, of course, tells us what Freeman is hiding. But whatever it is, we know it is safe.

[nomanwalksalone]

WHAT TO WEAR TO: THE GREAT AMERICAN CHEESE SURPLUS

by Steve Gottschling

Men’s magazines often focus so intently on their readers’ self-advancement that they forget how much of a public service menswear can be. Your stack of GQ magazines might have told you all about proper fit, for example, but they probably neglected to mention the ways your wardrobe can save the livelihoods of a bunch of cheese farmers you have never met.

The Wall Street Journal reported last month that, thanks to the strengthening US dollar, fewer overseas buyers are importing our cheese, leaving stateside cheese farmers with massive stockpiles that have proven impossible to move. Farmers face financial ruin unless someone steps in to stabilize demand. But who will shoulder the burden?

Storing the surplus won’t work. Only some types of cheese can be frozen for long periods, and even then, those cheese wheels will watch from their freezers as the farmers outside lose their houses and their savings. Some of you might know what it’s like to grow up with financially struggling parents. Imagine the cheese feeling that same helplessness, except multiplied by its lack of arms, legs, and any vital organ not made from coagulated milk. We only achieve real success when we give the cheese what it wants: fresh air and a taste of adventure.

We must therefore squeeze cheese-eating into every facet of our lives, to bring it with us on life’s little journeys. Luckily, menswear’s abundance of pockets makes this easy. Most men’s lifestyles simply do not require enough objects to fill every available pocket. Even if we asked the stuffed-pocket fetishists at Everyday Carry to line up against a wall for a rather fascist pocket inspection, we would probably spot one or two internal jacket pockets still sewn as shut as the day they left the factory.

In other words, while women let out a sigh of relief every time they spy a pocket hiding amongst a rack of dresses, pockets for men are like New York luxury condos. They were certainly designed to be used, the owner might remember buying a few of them, but no one can guarantee they were ever actually inhabited.

Now that summer is peeking into view, and wearing a jacket invites either sweat or the suspicion that the wearer is secretly The Punisher, our cheese-eating mission grows more challenging by the day. But no one said public service is easy. Here is your NMWA-approved outfit for keeping cheese demand steady:

Eidos Field Jacket. Four pockets on the outside. Two on the inside. To maintain your tailored appearance, store the bulkier blocks of cheese in the lower pockets and fill the upper pockets with the shredded and grated varieties. This allows the cheese in the upper pockets to mold to your chest and give off the appearance of well-developed pectorals.

Monitaly Herringbone Pants. The usual four pockets, plus two extra pockets at the thighs. Stuff these with tiny wrapped gouda cheeses. You can toss them to anyone on the street who looks like they deserve it.

Sage de Cret Pocket T-shirt. One tiny pocket. This is where you store your best gruyere. Save it for when the bouncer at the club has wrinkled his nose at all the fivers you passed his way. Seriously, cheese bribes are the best bribes.

[nomanwalksalone]

ALONE WITH STYLE 

by Steve Gottschling

You know what would be great? If the key to fixing adult life’s nagging loneliness had nothing to do with actual people. And I don’t mean drilling your mind Sarah Palin-style into the wells of social media. What, arguing for three hours about cropped trousers on that menswear forum didn’t leave you socially satisfied? I mean ridding your body of all lonely traces without any communicative aid at all, as if loneliness were just a big pimple you could puncture at will.

It seems strange that, after over two centuries of industrialization tearing communities apart, no one has found a foolproof way to make meaningful connection something you can do by yourself. By now, I should be able to juice-cleanse away my sense of isolation while I watch American Idol reruns and wait for that recipe from my Microwave For One book to finish cooking. Sorry guys, I can’t meet you all for dinner tonight. I’ll be at home nursing a bottle of Social Drank™.

Thankfully, in the absence of magic juice, we have the social sciences. Researchers have long known that wearing symbolically-charged clothing doesn’t just broadcast your station in life to everyone you pass, it can change the way you feel about yourself even when your only companion is a photo of your dog because the real dog ran away. In 2012, a study from Northwestern University showed that subjects who wore labcoats answered test questions with greater concentration than those who wore painters’ coats. In a 2007 study, respondents reported feelings of competence and authority while dressed in garments they considered formal.

As these studies clearly suggest, all it takes to stave off loneliness is to dress like a social butterfly. Let’s envision the outfit: a suit with a lighter, more inviting fabric! Shoes made from a suede that says “come here everyone and feel my shoes!” Socks in a shade of orange that, if your friends were moths, would compel them to circle you in a beautiful spiral of confusion as they slowly starve to death! If scientists told their subjects to wear these things, they wouldn’t be able to collect any data. The subjects would have disappeared behind a swarm of all their new friends.

I’ll wait a moment for you to make your purchases. Feel free to bookmark this page and come back when the clothes arrive. They’re here? Good. Notice how you sit a little straighter, hold your head higher. You pour some wine and strike up a rousing conversation with the tiny cactus beside your computer. You smile knowing that if anyone else were here, they would love you. “You talkin to me?” you ask the mirror. “What took you so long?”

Ten stories below, crowds rove along the sidewalks, unaware of your new outfit. Had they stopped to look up at your apartment building, they would have noticed you standing against the window, lifting and lowering your trouser cuffs to expose your orange socks. The lone onlooker who knows morse code would have recognized the sock-flashing pattern as “Be-My-Friend.” They would have watched as you sank to the floor, disheartened by the sea of blank faces, to untie your suede shoes before rubbing them repeatedly against the window. What would have appeared to everyone as a silent scream would just be you inviting them to touch the suede.

Next time, we’ll stick to the juice.