I’ve spent most of the holidays wearing very expensive sweatpants. They are a pair of those fashionable things, made by a brand named after a woman and a fruit, that I ridiculed before we were all locked in our rooms.
A few years ago, I was gifted a pair of pricey shorts that I kept with much skepticism. Nearly immediately after first wearing them, I called my friend who swears by the brand - I said “I owe you an apology, you were right about these damn shorts.” He was right, the shorts fit incredibly well, and made me feel less like a vagrant on Saturday morning coffee runs. I continued to my friend, “I feel taller. Like one of those tall people, that accomplishes things with intention. When I wear these, I’m almost some kind of suburban superhero. I can jump over buildings in these things. I need to find a kitten to rescue from a tree.”
Societal acceptance of high-priced sweatpants and athleisure wear, in general, may just be another symptom of the decline of Western Civilization. First, they came for our neckties, then the Oxford Comma, and now that we’re all wearing pajamas regularly, they will come for us.
When I was 10 years old I flew to Europe with my Grandfather - TWA, first-class. My mother dressed me smartly in khakis, a shirt and tie, a blue blazer, and some Sperrys. My Grandfather, who had adopted a flamboyant sartorial style, similar to Steve Martin and Dan Aykroyd as the Wild and Crazy Guys, nonetheless always wore a sport coat when not at work. I remember I liked the feeling of dressing up. I recognized you could get away with a lot of shenanigans if you looked like no one needed to keep an eye on you.
So, what the hell happened to me?
Speaking both personally and for the general public, I don’t want clothes even touching me any longer. Until
invents some sort of cloud clothing that we can spray on in the mornings, my preference remains for soft fabrics, with rounded edges. Nothing stiff, or too hot and without tags, never tags. Everything article of clothing should wear as if it were laid in a stream, softened by gentle ripples.Today, there is a virtual cornucopia of companies attempting to sell us comfort for our bodies - underwear with hammocks, socks without seams, and sweatpants for the office.
I have seen you, and you have seen me. In our fancy sweats that will never see the gym and surfwear that has never seen a break. Look around at any public event and there we are, the preponderance of us anyway, like the patients in some psych ward, recovering from some great trauma that has inflicted humanity. (Incidentally, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest is an excellent book that you should read, but will you? But even there the patients dressed coolly in watch caps and bomber jackets)
What then, I wonder, are we all recovering from?
A century ago, in the 1920s, No one dressed or behaved like this. They were dressed uncomfortably and they got stuff done.
The rich and powerful in society created and ran companies that built the modern world. Hulking, industrial companies, that were transformative and produced objects of wonder. Today they wear expensive hoodies and run companies that are essentially scrapbooks that sell advertising to sell us expensive hoodies.
Life has grown absurd. Now we’re through the looking glass here people. White is black and black is white.
Like many trends (not all negative ones) the global governmental response to the pandemic accelerated our sweatpant-clad slide to Gomorrah but it didn’t start there.
Katherine Boyle, a reporter turned venture capitalist and a proponent of something called American Dynamism (investing in companies that support the national interest, think aerospace, supply change, and domestic manufacturing) points to the end of World War II as a turning point for our lack of seriousness, which I believe has led to our collective slovenliness. Read her great article On Seriousness this weekend.
So the Greatest Generation saved the world, became Beatniks, gave birth to the Boomers who became hippies and set societal norms and fire, and now I am writing this wearing expensive sweatpants.
Is it our collective lack of seriousness that has caused us to dress this way? Or did the gradual destruction of formality bring about global silliness? Maybe it’s a chicken-and-egg situation. Either way, here we are.
I wonder while writing this if dressing better might make a serious person. That moment has passed. Likely, I will never know. I will hold fast to my AC/DC t-shirt, jeans, and chucks. The expensive sweatpants are in permanent rotation now.
You can’t stop progress, but at this rate, we’ll all be lying down in restaurants and having our food cut for us long before assisted living age.
