FASHION IS DEAD! LONG LIVE FASHION!
The first catechism learned by every aspiring Internet Gentleman (which last year displaced Norm MacDonald’s infamous Crack Whore Trainee as the worst job in the world) is that their interest is in style, not fashion, which is for women, or possibly the gays (NTTAWWT). Style is meant to describe timeless grace, easy elegance, and all that rot, while fashion is about runway shows, new (probably Chinese or Russian) money, and brand whoring. One of the most trafficked menswear blogs is even called Permanent Style in homage to this shibboleth.
The second iGent catechism is that style was brought into its most perfect form at some time in the 30s by men of flawless taste and character, and set down in the pages of the trade publication Apparel Arts so that future generations might receive the good word that the question of what gentlemen should wear had been answered.
Anyone who has ever read even a couple of articles in Apparel Arts knows that this is a ruse. AA was a trade publication. The main target audience was the retail industry. It was not (mainly) a magazine about how to buy or wear clothes. It was a magazine about how to sell clothes. That’s not to say that the ideas aren’t good or the illustrations aren’t charming. It’s a very well done magazine, the kind that hardly exists anymore. But that’s because today’s magazines are aimed at the customer, not the retailer. Hence the endless coverage of what Ryan Gosling is wearing or which of the fragrances sold at the Duty Free shop are most likely to get you in bed with Kate Upton.
But I digress from my thesis, which is that the first two iGent catechisms are contradictory. Apparel Arts never championed “timeless” dress. In fact, quite the opposite, as shown by this quotation, which I stumbled upon in Gent’s Gazette’s article on the drape cut:
…men have been less inclined to buy new suits simply because, but only when their old ones were worn out. Thus the men’s clothing industry has been in a long decline. For there has been nothing to accelerate suit buying, even when times were good, other than price, pattern, and color—all three very weak as compared to the slate wiping effect of a sudden and complete model change.
The war ended the age of style and inaugurated the age of fashion. That was not apparent at the time, but its truth has become increasingly evident every year since. In other words, the days when manufacturers could with impunity “put over a style,” in disregard of the trend of authentic fashion, were really at an end the moment the period of post-war disenchantment began. Some manufacturers learned the lesson soon, others late, but all learned it, some with greater sorrow than others, as the years rolled by. Fashion, for men, became concerned with minutiae of accessories and embellishments, brooking no change in the basic structure of “coat, vest, and pants”, in which sales, most naturally, lagged behind.
Draped clothing must be sold on an entirely new basis. That is the danger—and that is the big advantage. It offers a chance to wipe the slate clean—to batter down all the old conceptions—to make men realize that they need new suits now, not because the old ones are worn out, not because there is lofty economic patriotism in a “buy now” decision, but because, at last, the time has come when one’s old suits are “dated” by something more than wear.
Read carefully here. Not only does the author lament that the basic structure of coat, vest, and pants remains unchanged, he calls this era of ossification the Age of Fashion. And he calls what preceded it - presumably with a rapid churn of different cuts and details, which accelerated suit-buying - the Age of Style. So not only is style not permanent, even the matching of word to concept is not permanent. Apparel Arts, iGent Bible, did indeed advocate for “style, not fashion.” But in doing so it meant the exact opposite of what the phrase means today.
