One of the things I really enjoy about Episode 47 on “Style” is Leigh’s growing realization that style is not something that one can opt out of. Even if one wears hoodies and jeans, that anti-style becomes a style. Not to mention the fact that style is not limited to clothes but also encompasses one’s way of speaking, comporting oneself, and occupying space. All of which serves to reinforce the point that style is to some extent inescapable, one cannot speak or write generically, just as one cannot stand, sit, or move as everyone else.
Everything we do as humans we do in our own unique way. Style is part of the individuation we all perform unknowingly or knowingly, (what Quentin Crisp, pictured above, calls “being oneself on purpose”). At the same time, however, the things that make up our style are not created ex nihilo, and to some extent what we draw our style from, the hoodies and jeans, come to us not just from the general world of clothes, but often come from particular moments in the history of clothes, in other words, fashion, or specific cultural or subcultural moments that we pass through at particular points in time.
Since I was not on the podcast when this episode was recorded, I am going to embarrass myself by revealing that my particular style was once referred to years ago as “dresses like he is in a 90s indie band.” This was definitely true at a particular time–like when the picture above was taken!– but has hopefully become less true as a particular professorial affection has taken over my style. At one point in time, in college, I decided to dress like the coolest people I knew of, and there were people in bands like Fugazi, and some aspect of that still lingers. I still wear black jeans a lot, and although I have long since ditched the mechanics jackets, a certain predilection for the dark colors and a thrift store aesthetic lingers over my style choices.
I should mention at least briefly that, although not a philosopher, my father has a theory of style that everyone still dresses a little like they did during the most social period of their lives, which for most people tends to be the college and early adult years. All of which serves to illustrate the second half of the dialectic, that not only can we not fail to have a style we also cannot fail to have our own style in that it is invariably shaped by not only what is available, most of us buy rather than make our clothes, but also the associations and meanings that we attach to what is available.
To paraphrase Gramsci, our individual style comes with all sorts of cultural baggage and associations, and this too can be intentional or unintentional. Some people clearly never get over their heydays and dress like it is still ’68 or ’94, and some of us just keep picking the same dark colors without thinking about it being an afterimage of the photos we used to emulate. This is what I would refer to as the “dialectic of style,” the mutual inescapability of individual look and collective association. I only underscore it here to point out that even something as supposedly trivial as style can, with the right conversation, reveal something about what it means to be human, namely that we are inescapably individual and collective in our existence.
