The Erie County Fair is winding down this weekend, and we made our annual treks two Fridays in a row. Last week was our all-day-at-the-Fair day, where we do EVERYTHING that we like to do (seeing the animals, shopping, touring the Creative Arts exhibits, and eating), while last night we went for a “Date Night” in which we walked around and did a bit more eating and drinking, including a couple of adult beverages, and so on. And yes, I took a ton of photos, none of which I’ve edited yet, so those will be forthcoming at some point; this month has been great for getting out and shooting, and I suddenly have a pretty sizeable backlog of photos to edit. (As always, my photography is mainly available on my Flickr stream, and I feature individual photos on my various social media outlets, links in the sidebar over there on the right!)
One thing I noticed especially this year is…well, it’s not a new observation, but it’s a phenomenon that seems to be getting worse as time goes by. I really noticed this phenomenon at the County Fair this year (and, to a lesser extent, at the Sterling Renaissance Festival as well), and it was particular driven home by the contrast I noted between white people at the Fair and Islamic people at the Fair. I guess there’s no other way to bluntly say it:
For the most part, white men dress like shit.
Before I delve into my thoughts on this, here’s a short video (under two minutes) by Chelsea Fagan, a creator I follow who is always insightful and who is one of those people who, if I find myself in disagreement, makes me think, “OK, what am I missing here, because I’m probably wrong”.
@faganchelsea Feminine men
(Link if the embed goes wonky)
One of her money quotes: “We are driving such an obvious race to the bottom with what it means to correctly perform masculinity or heterosexuality for a man to the point that basically the only thing they can do to prove themselves is just be disgusting.”
And as I’ve looked around when I’ve been in public situations of late, I have to say, she is very much not wrong. I’ve noted for years a frequent complete mismatch when I see couples out in the world. This almost always applies only to straight couples, and honestly, it also almost always applies only to white couples. The phenomenon is simply this: the woman will look good, and the man…will not.
I’ve wondered for years why this often seems to be the case. In any such couple, the woman will often look nicely put together, wearing a good outfit and have her hair done and she’ll be wearing makeup and, well, looking good. The man, on the other hand, will be wearing a casual shirt, maybe at most a golf shirt, in a neutral color, paired with boring jeans or khakis. The man’s outfit may include a sports logo, and he may well be wearing a ballcap, which is pretty much ninety percent of the hats worn in America today.
And this is if we’re lucky, because what I’ve noticed even more is the man doesn’t even look that good. Instead he’ll often be wearing a dirty shirt and jeans with holes in them. The shirt will be tight-fitting regardless of the guy’s shape, almost certainly one size too small, and it will either sport a sports team logo or whatever undergarment manufacturer is this fellow’s brand of choice or, if we’re really going for the gusto, a political slogan that marks them as being firmly on the crimson side of the tracks.
Now, obviously it’s not always like this…and to be sure, our fashion world has not exactly decided to give men nearly as many options for stepping out on a warm summer’s night and looking good while doing it as it has to women. And who knows, depending on your opinion of overalls, you might be thinking I’m being a tad hypocritical right now…but I try to pair my overalls with a decent shirt, a linen button-up perhaps, or one of my Renfest shirts. But no, menswear options have simply not kept up with all the ways women have of looking good while out on the town.
And now, having watched Ms. Fagan’s video above, I wonder if that’s just not the way we’ve wanted it all along…for some annoying definition of “we”, that is. Masculinity in America has become so weirdly constrictive a thing, and it has become so incredibly performative, that now we’ve reach a weird point where looking “manly” is defined down to a small selection of available clothing, and we’re not supposed to look happy or comfortable, either.
This is where my brain likes to make pop-cultural associations. There’s a scene in Casino Royale, the 2006 James Bond movie, where Bond is on his way to Montenegro to play in a high-stakes poker game as part of his mission for MI6. (The reason doesn’t matter.) On the train ride there, he meets Vesper Lynd, the British Treasury employee whose job it is to give him the money and oversee how he spends it while playing. What follows is one of the best scenes in all of Bond:
The dialog here crackles as Bond and Ms. Lynd size each other up, but what has always caught my ear here is the bit at the 2:27 mark, where Ms. Lynd remarks on Bond’s suit:
By the cut of your suit, you went to Oxford or wherever. Naturally you think human beings dress like that. But you wear it with such disdain, my guess is you didn’t come from money, and your school friends never let you forget it.
I’ve admired that scene ever since the movie came out, but that one line about Bond wearing his suit “with such disdain” always stood out to me, because I never understood what it meant. It’s just a suit, right? And Daniel Craig looks very good in it.
What I think Ms. Lynd is expressing here is something I’ve noticed–or, rather, had pointed out to me by fashion experts–in right-wing man-o-sphere circles. It’s that when you look at “important” figures on the right, the Pete Hegseths and the Tate Brothers and others of the world, you see them often wearing suits because they’re supposed to wear suits and they’re expensive suits because of course they are, those guys are our superiors, don’t you know, why would they wear anything cheap? But they don’t wear them correctly. Their suits are always not tailored quite correctly, they choose details to get wrong so as to communicate that they’re not taking their dress seriously, and they make sure their posture always conveys “manliness”. There’s a right-wing social-media influencer guy who goes by “Conceptual James” whose profile picture is him sitting in a chair, wearing a suit, but manspreading as widely as he possibly can. More often than not, when these guys post their photos to social media, they’re in workout clothes, or they’re in shirtsleeves with the sleeves rolled up to T-shirt length with collars open halfway down.
They are wearing their suits with utter disdain. Because that’s now men should really look. Men should look manly, and looking manly means looking dirty and sweaty and showing off muscle because how dare anyone tell a man how to look.
And I do think this shows up, to some extent, to those couples at the Fair. The woman looks pretty, but he looks like absolute shit. And why shouldn’t he? He’s a man, you see.