OP-ED: IS DRESSING BADLY A SIGN OF PRIVILEGE?

Over the decades of watching how people dress in America, this question has preoccupied me. It returned to my mind with renewed intensity over the past several years, as aspirational consumption in this country has kicked into overdrive. This observation comes from various directions: watching kids on the streets of SoHo strut in their logoed gear, looking at my daughter’s boyfriend who spends his hard-earned money on Moncler and Yeezy, reflecting on my own dress habits since I immigrated to America at the age of fifteen. We are all disparate, but we have one thing in common – we have known what it’s like to be poor and we are from ethnic minorities. We have something to prove, namely our worth, to each other and to this country. In other words, we are aspirational.

Clothing plays a major role in aspirational consumption because it is on constant display. Contemporary American society encourages a constant change of outfits. And, though expensive, nice clothes are not as expensive as nice furniture or a car. Since we have witnessed the continuous casualization of dress, relatively affordable items like sneakers and hoodies have also acquired aspirational connotations. Additionally, we live in a culture where aspirational consumption and “making it” has been enshrined through pop music. Rappers and athletes – who more often than not come from disadvantaged backgrounds – serve as the blueprint for displaying status.

There is, however,  one group of people that I have always watched with fascination – white middle to upper class Americans – who by and large don’t seem to care about what they wear. I am talking about lawyers and accountants in their uniforms of gingham button up shirts and slacks and of Washington politicians in ill-fitting suits. In their “on” time (translation: “at work”), they tend to dress in bland mall stuff, and in their off-time, you can see them in ill-fitting jeans and tee shirts. And while this is a generalization, I don’t think it’s widely off the mark.

Throughout my thirty years of living here, I have watched white Americans with fascination. I have marveled at the ease with which they move through life, knowing full well that this country belongs to them. I don’t know how this feels and I can never know how this feels, despite being an American citizen for twenty five years, despite having white skin, and despite no longer being poor. Aspiration comes from the need to constantly prove that you have earned your place in society. This is what people from disadvantaged backgrounds signal by dressing up. Conversely, privilege is not having to think about these things, because they have been granted to you by virtue of your birth. If you have nothing to prove, why dress up?

“In societies with sexism, racism, and other discriminatory beliefs, dominant groups receive automatic privileges that sociologists call a ‘status advantage.’ By contrast, to be a member of a ‘status-disadvantaged’ group (whether by class, gender, race, or sexual orientation) requires over-compensating in signaling just to reach parity with advantaged individuals,” says W. David Marx, the author of Status and Culture. “Being white, rich, male, and heterosexual is to be born with status-advantage, which reduces the need to show off status in one’s possessions. This also allows for ‘dressing down’ because people don’t assume you are actually poor. Over time, this detachment from signaling through possessions itself becomes a mark of high-status.”

How did this state of affairs come about? It seems that there is a two-fold historical reason for why the well-off whites dress this way: America’s Puritan roots and the myth of the “classless society.”

This country was founded by Puritans, whose version of Protestantism was so severe that they were marginalized in the already conservative England and sought refuge in the New World, specifically in what they called New England. In their harsh view of life there was no place for anything that had to do with esthetics. As the art critic Robert Hughes pointed out in his book Culture of Complaint, “The men and women of 17th-century New England didn’t have much time for the visual arts. Painting and sculpture were spiritual snares, best left to the Catholics. Their great source of aesthetic satisfaction was the Word, the logos.” Max Weber, in his seminal book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, posited that “sober utility” among Puritans “was especially true in the case of decoration of the person, especially clothing.”

Many of the first American rich were minted in Boston, the capital of Puritanism. In fact, when wealthy Bostonians began to move to New York in the 18th Century to take advantage of its fast-growing industry, the more liberal Dutch descendants of the local elite scoffed at the harshly moralizing values of these newcomers, who in turn deemed the Knickerbockers decadent.

The Puritan lack of esthetic appreciation has permeated America ever since. The vast majority of the newly arrived European immigrants were poor and had no use for esthetics (the Germans, also largely Protestant, were the second biggest group of American settlers after the Anglo-Saxons) Consequently, there were no American cathedrals filled with great art to admire; the awe of God had to come from the Bible and not the churches. The ruling elite was small and not interested in the visual arts all that much – business, not culture became America’s true religion. Protestant values came with it – asceticism, frugality, and the unwavering belief in hard and constant work.

To be sure most of these values were myths – most wealth in America was not gained by hard work; it was extracted from the land stolen from Native Americans by using slave labor and indentured servitude. As America’s tiny elite got richer, these myths became  harder to sustain. 

By the end of the 19th Century worker unrest spread throughout the country, morphing into outright class conflict by the early 20th. The Prosperity Gospel – the late 19th-Century American invention that postulated that wealth was given by God to those who work hard – looked exactly like what it was: a self-serving lie. The American elite of the early 20th Century made a concerted effort to replace that gospel with one of a “classless society,” which created a bureaucratic, managerial white collar class as a barrier between the upper class  and the poor. This newfound managerial class was taken as proof that the Protestant mythology of success through industry was the cornerstone of the American way of life. This worked splendidly: as soon as the newly minted members of the middle class – especially those who were, ironically, lifted out of poverty by the socialist New Deal policies – came into existence, they immediately turned on the poor, blaming them for their “moral failures.”

In sartorial terms, this mythology manifested itself as uniformity of dress. The rich decided that it was best to fade into anonymity in order to protect their wealth from the pitchforks. Their status was determined more and more by the kind of neighborhood they lived in, the kind of a house they owned, and which university they sent their children to, and not by what they wore. Status became more subtle, and the illusion of equality more pronounced. This illusion was completed by the 1970s. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates looked exactly like the people who worked for them.

Meanwhile, the lower classes from ethnic minorities had no such luxury, which was especially manifested in Black enclaves of major cities and in all-Black colleges. The Harlem Renaissance is best known for setting the tone in natty dress that has gone through various iterations but has not abated. According to Diedre Clemente, a dress historian at the University of Nevada, ”The Black students were dressing as a means of imitating the white students at the Ivy League. But the kind of dressing that they had to imitate was the Ivy students at their most formal. So they were dressing to be a version of white students that only existed in certain situations and certain contexts. Princeton men were not going around campus with buttoned up collars and perfectly tied ties. They knew the rules, so they could break the rules.”

From jazz to funk to pop, Black musicians continued to set the tone. Status display became a central tenet of the hip-hop explosion of the  early ‘90s. Not only did it sanction dressing up, signaling that minorities also had a right to luxury, it made it de rigueur. Hip-hop’s legions of global fans followed their favorite artists, as many of them were being slowly lifted out of poverty both in the US and abroad, and an appetite for logos and fine jewelry followed. 

Fast-forward to today and fashion has become central to aspiration. Athletes, who used to dress in tracksuits before a game, now dress up in designer clothing on their walk from the bus to the locker room. And kids today no longer want to be artists or musicians, they want to start their own fashion brand.

Fashion has many problems and is often seen as superficial and materialistic. It certainly can be those things. And I’ve heard it scoffed that “perhaps it would be wiser if people from disadvantaged backgrounds should be saving their hard-earned money instead.” But such thinking misses the point; for those who don’t have much dignity in their lives, there is dignity in dressing up.