Recently, a New York City area elementary school teacher I know reported that, since the pandemic, a number of her colleagues have begun showing up to teach in pajama bottoms.
In Barcelona, a city whose culture I have studied and admired for more than three decades, and that was once known for the stylistic splendor and interpersonal graciousness of its inhabitants, is now beginning to resemble many places in the United States for its inhabitants’ embrace of louche sloppiness in matters of dress, and zombie-like indifference in their public interactions.
The boiling frog metaphor is a popular one among cultural analysts precisely because it gets to the heart of the way we tend to behave as stasis-seeking creatures. The passage of time—our only true resource as mortal human beings—is indeed inexorable. Knowing this is frightening, we thus develop mental tricks for ignoring this salient fact. One way of doing so is to downplay the nature and magnitude of revelatory historical trends taking place right under our noses.
It seems that we may very well be doing this in regard to the growing indifference in the United States and many places in Europe to personal care and public courtesy.
For many, that may sound like an attempt by a nostalgic person to bring behavioral canons of the past back to life. What we are seeing, I suspect they would argue, is yet another of the many normal oscillations in style and taste over time. Others might even see what is going on as a needed liberation from outdated social models that greatly impinged on personal freedom and sartorial creativity.
To dismiss things in either of these ways is, I think, to ignore the implied link in most cultures throughout history between aesthetic self-presentation and presumed moral character. Though we are told again and again from an early age that you can’t judge a book by its cover, most of us don’t really believe that. Most people, even those who are quite poor, have long wanted to look their best when going out in public. And they have often gone to great lengths to ensure this is so.
So why is this long-standing urge seemingly disappearing before our eyes today?
On one level, I think it has a lot to do with a strange post-modern invention known as the concept of the fully autonomous self. Until recently, no one was raised to believe that one could or should exist, in large measure, in social or spiritual isolation from other human beings.
While the town or city street was once a place where one hoped to literally or figuratively “run into” one another, exchange pleasantries, and yes, check on their visually apparent level of well-being, it is now increasingly a place where the “pragmatic” ideal of getting from one place to another as efficiently as possible is the guiding principle.
The same can be said about its adjacent businesses, where automatic payment systems and other distribution technologies have done away with the abundant and humanizing chatter that once took place in checkout lines or meat counters.
In short, our public spaces are increasingly places where we go not to be touched or transformed through dialogue, but to carry out individual tasks alone, albeit in the accidental presence of anonymous others.
Another, perhaps more important, factor in our increasing indifference to aesthetically pleasing self-presentation is the notion, hammered home by the advertising industry, that achieving beauty of the type you would be proud to exhibit in public almost always involves copious spending on expensive products and procedures. And since most people do not have the money needed to accede to what they have been told is the minimal threshold of this manufactured True Beauty, they simply give up.
Lost in this crass commodification of aesthetics is an important and ennobling ideal of longstanding cultural importance: the pursuit of elegance.
Though it is (intentionally?) often confused with the type of purchasable glamour described above, elegance is something very, very different.
Whereas the pursuit of glamour is about the process of adorning the presumptively inert self with external baubles to create an artificial image that recalls similarly conjured, if equally contrived, constructs of beauty in others, elegance is the result of a process of personal mindfulness and alchemy rooted in taking careful stock of what one is, and what particular attributes one brings to the table, and then finding a way to highlight them in the most powerful yet simple way.
But what if, between home, school, and marketplace, you never were given any cues about coming to see the self in the light of transcendent forces that have been endowing the world and human life with mind-blowing levels of heterogeneity for millions of years, and were instead provided with crude taxonomies that grouped people into rigid behavioral and attitudinal categories on the basis of the most superficial physical traits?
In such a reductively “settled” world, where would you even begin to find the spark or the urge to begin the process of self-discovery that is a necessary prelude to the development of elegance? You wouldn’t. No, you’d be like an increasing number of people apparently are today, bereft of the idea that you have anything meaningfully unique to bring to it.
And you’d probably express this internal surrender to the logic of mass culture in your manner of dress and the ways in which you address others, treating these others not as the potential sources of surprise and illumination they all are, but as mere integers in the great and bland algorithm of human existence.
Yes, elegance matters, not only because it makes the world more aesthetically pleasing, but also because it reminds us in these times when obscenely powerful elites are trying for their own nefarious reasons to convince us (cruelly and paradoxically under the banner of diversity) that we are all pretty interchangeable. That is not true. We all carry within us the ability, once we rediscover our own gifts of self-authorship, to not only illuminate the self, but also inspire those whom we meet in public to also begin the process of trying to find out who they are and why they are here.
