We all know those moments when a vaguely troubling impression that has been floating round in your peripheral vision suddenly focuses into knife-sharp clarity. Such a moment struck me when, on our way to the National Gallery a few weeks ago, my daughter and I found that London's Trafalgar Square had been taken over by a festival to celebrate St Patrick's Day.
What does this say about us? On a base level, we think we're too fat, so we slim our silhouettes with the darkest tones we can find (notwithstanding that, thus clad, far from our bodies aspiring to the condition of a temple, they actually resemble the fully lagged hot water tank socked away on the half-landing). But, more deeply recessed in our collective psyche as it responds to the zeitgeist, what our Benedictine-black North Face outerwear says is that like any fugitive from the unwelcome attentions of too much reality, we feel safer hugging the shadows. So we wear the shadows that hug us.
Today we make do with plainer fare. We beat a retreat and pray for stasis, clinging and conforming for dear life, displaying dissent only behind closed doors and the skulking anonymity of cyberspace avatars. The North Face jacket is the talismanic sign of the times where we feel the need to fade into the background and tone down our style to match today's mood of muscular austerity.
It's a look with its roots and first shoots preceding the recession. Since at least the turn of the century, the North Face look has been soaking eastward like a damp patch into the visual fabric of society from its foggy San Francisco epicentre, where North Face's outdoor-wear first wind-and-waterproofed weekend hikers and sailors sandwiched between the roaring Pacific and soaring Rockies.
Today, of course, the most daunting ascent faced by most outward-bound North Face wearers is a shopping mall's escalator, assuming their apparel is bought in a store and not mouse-clicked from an online catalogue illustrated by healthy wind-burnt families backdropped by enticing peaks of surf and mountain. Colour-matched with just about every laptop that does not bear an Apple logo, the grimly fun-free North Face leisure look is actually a form of casual Friday work wear which looks forward to the weekend, while chromatically restraining itself from any visible joy at the prospect. It emanates from Seattle and Silicon Valley, where Starbucks-glugging Microsoft monkeys, Cisco kids, Facebook friends, Intel drones and the rest hit the great outdoors straight after clocking off on Friday.
Almost Soviet in its Utopian vision of a high-tech working week blending into 48 restorative hours in the pines and on the briny coast, this portrait of the information economy salariat at work and play is the compliment today's desperate insecurity pays to yesterday's dreams of freedom. Solemnly braced by North Face for the rigours of the weekend, we loosen but never lose our chains in wholesome release from screen time and the pension plan.
Having as your style gurus the likes of George Melly and Eddie Waring in his It's A Knockout pomp is not for everybody, but it works for me. Hats, tweeds and brogues keep me just as warm and dry as would a North Face anorak, while checks, stripes, mixed earth tones and peacock hues give the inner man a lift, endowing me with the buoyancy, bounce and bumptiousness without which I would struggle to bubble as a self-employed salesman whose only product is himself.
But in my own way, I believe I offer a dab of colour in a sartorial landscape which these days is almost all blot. In your jeans and North Face cagoule, you look to me like Centre Point on a wet Tuesday in November – an overbearing, ugly architectural import with set-square design and drab externals as demoralisingly ill-suited to our soggy flat light as can be. Contrastingly, people like me may be likened to the Natural History Museum, defying the grim outdoors by rooting ourselves in a native vernacular of materials and decoration which draws from the motley, ruffed and cavalier mainstream of our sartorial culture rather than a handful of self-effacingly clerical episodes in which from time to time we have piously repudiated earthly pleasures and surrendered to the gathering gloom.
Today, with the likes of North Face as its ubiquitous manifestation, we're being marketed an ersatz freedom that expresses itself as a uniform of self-repression. Moreover, we're being sold a talisman of technological progress enmeshed with outdoor environmental consciousness that is no less bogus upon a moment's examination. Leaving aside the inconvenient truth that its very fabric owes much of its being to unsustainable fossil resources, the popular off-black default choice turns its wearers into living, breathing, grey-day office-blocks – an environmental eyesore no less drearily offensive to the retina and crushing to the soul than Centre Point. Depressingly for the beholder who refuses to blank out such humdrum visual static, what cannot be claimed in monumental size is more than made up for in ever-proliferating number.
But, you may be asking, is all this no more than the hyperventilating bleat of an overwrought, self-styled aesthete of the street? Have we not far more important things to occupy our minds than what we choose to wear when the sun doesn't shine? Does it really matter?
It matters enough to hold up an ornate mirror to the plain truth. Ask anyone of the wartime and post-war generation their recollections of the era, and sooner rather than later they will talk of the dinginess of those decades, the smog-bound, soul-sapping greyness of an age whose one memorable splash of colour came with the Coronation viewed in cinema newsreels. It was the more widespread colour that came with money – budding at the end of the 1950s, flowering in the 1960s, reaching full ripeness in the 1970s – that brought a smile to faces, brightened lives and made things possible.
Today, money and colour are no longer index-linked – except in our minds steeled for adversity, austerity and self-denial. Now is not the time for exuberance, says every fibre of your inner and outer being; now is exactly the time for exuberance, says mine. If ever there was a moment to take a lesson from Heath en fête, it's now that he's safely out of the way: what's worn can and will wear into the wearer. Dress to depress, and depression will take a grip. But cast off the winter weeds of mourning and life will burst renewed into spring flower.
No comments:
Post a Comment