I am not a fancy dresser. My job requires that I wear a suitjacket and tie, and for a while I tried dressing as nattily as I could, but this soon died out when it became too much of a bother. I'm not that much different from the students I teach -- I wear a tie that is serviceable even if it will never win awards from GQ and the same suitjacket all year: something to fill the form if not the spirit of the rule. Convenience will out.
My attitude toward clothes is pretty much governed by that criterion: convenience. I look for clothes that will last so that I don't have to buy into the planned-obsolescence roulette game: a good pair of workboots, jeans or painter pants, flannel shirts (tee-shirts for the summer), and a useable suit for interviews and the occasional formal party. I have never had the body or the mind to play the clotheshorse scene. With my 29-inch inseam, 32-inch waist, and size 40 coat, I am not what anyone would consider svelte, sleek, suave, or snappy. And never having had great quantities of money to spend on clothes, I've never acquired the addiction for designer appearances that some males and many females have. My mother used to buy my clothes: I wore what was in the closet.
A couple of times I decided to break out of this rut. When I was a teenager in the infamous 60s, I bought a pair of hip-hugger pants, with a zipper about three inches long, and a string of beads. But the beads came unstrung quickly, scattering wildly over the floor at a high school dance, and the hip-huggers felt as if they were in imminent danger of sliding down to my ankles at any minute. I could never coördinate the picture of the free-loving adolescent hippy with the geography of my body and my tastes, so I settled for Ken Kesey novels and incense. The only other sartorial excursion was when I bought myself an Edwardian-cut suit, with the slightly flared skirt at the waist and the clanging bell-bottom pants. I looked like Disraeli when he was accused of looking like a French dancing master. Out it went, and so it goes.
In all my clothes-wearing life I have never run into anything like stares or questions about what I was wearing and why. As I said, I dress mainly for convenience and comfort, and that usually means a fairly low-key look. Last summer, however, I decided to buy a pair of clogs because I was tired of the chore of tying shoes, a conspiracy for time-wasting and frustration if ever one existed. (That is also partly the reason I have a beard, for the simple fact that I hate wasting the time on the barbarism (pardon the pun) of scraping my face every day. A slight trim is all the tonsorial reconstruction I need.) Suddenly I started getting comments and stares about these wooden shoes.
People are not as shy about this as you might expect them to be; they feel quite free to comment openly. Children are perhaps the worst. I was once walking down the concourse of a mall and a little girl stuck out her finger and said to her mother "Why is he wearing girl shoes?" Other children will point and run to their parents with whispered questions. I've had students ask me why I wear girl shoes, whether I wear them all the time (I do, up until the first snow), and, gall of gall, why would a man ever wear such things. In Europe, I understand, men wear wooden shoes all the time without comment. Something very American is going on here.
I think the clogs confound peoples' ideas of what a man is, or at least what a man should look like. He should not look like a girl, which is euphemistic for not being a homosexual. My clogs, combined with my earring (yes, I have one), jar expectations, and at the same time set in motion subconscious prejudices firmly planted by parents, friends, television, and cultural norms. And to American males, who have never really been encouraged (or allowed) to be fashionable unless they happened to be homosexual (in which case they weren't really "men"), the clogs represent a sort of cultural betrayal. I seem to be both male and not-male, and since I don't fit neatly anywhere, I cause confusion, and therefore consternation. For instance, I've had my colleagues in the department chide me for wearing my clogs as a kind of adolescent rebellion! Yet their flash of brightly-colored Nike sneakers is accepted as mature and stylish because it falls within the perimeters of the male uniform.
All of this is so foolish. Fashion is froth, insubstantial puffery, despite the money it generates and the history it commands, and one should heed Thoreau's declaration that he would never think less of man who wore at patch at his knee. We would all do better to dress more simply and with less attachment to image. Barring that impossible revolution, however, I think we should all encourage whatever expands and increases the possibilities for male clothing in this society, anything that loosens up prejudices. Perhaps then the men, as the song in Hair suggests, might regain their place alongside the males of other species, baring their rightful plumage to an admiring world and banishing their willful blandness to the back of the closet.