Dressed to bore

Interesting article in the listener from Douglas Lloyd -Jenkins on why New Zealand men dress so badly.

His contention is that our bad dress is due to gay panic. The logic seems to be

a) Only poofs dress stylishly
2) Therefore if I dress stylishly, people will think I’m a poof

If this is the case, I suspect that it’s a subconscious thing, but I don’t thing he’s right.

First of all, it assumes that men actually think about what they dress like, and I’d suggest that most of the time they don’t. Their main concerns on clothes would be comfort and cost. It would be a hang up from childhood that your “good” clothes a re always uncomfortable, so if you have a choice, why wear them? There is also the imperative that you’ve got to keep your good clothes looking “nice”, which often seems like a bore.

Dressing well for men often means wearing a tie. I can’t speak for all men, but I hate ties with the passion of a thousand suns and only wear them when I have to.

Then there is the issue of cost. I remember being horrified when a colleague at work bought a $400 shirt, not least because at the time, $400 was close to my weekly wage. And it was just a shirt. Why spend a lot of money on a shirt when you could get something that is conceptually the same thing for cheaper.

Then there is the shopping angle. Most men, I would suggest, think that buying clothes is like shopping for groceries-it needs to be done, but you don’t need to spend a lot of time on it. I can spend hours in book or DVD stores, but just going on memory, I think that over the last year I have spent less than an hour shopping for clothes.

As for dressing to emphasize my heterosexuality, I don’t think I’ve ever done this. I’m a firm supporter of Albert Einstein who claimed that he had several identical suits in his wardrobe so that he didn’t have to think what to wear in the morning.

Douglas Lloyd-Jenkins’ article was a precusor to his book on a History of Fashion. I suppose that a theory of gay panic will sell more copies than a theory that men just don’t care about fashion.