Dress Codes

Clothing concerns all of the human person, all of the body, all the relationships of man to body as well as the relationships of the body to society. -- Roland Barthes

For the past year, I've been going on a series of research trips for my book into the economic "belt regions" of the United States (Cotton, Rust, Bible, Sun, Frost, Corn, Gun, etc.), to see whether the economic ecosystems of each region manifests in the way people dress.

Fashion can be like a really vivid tabloid that society agrees not to look at too closely or take too seriously; sartorial choices are chock-full of weirdly personal information. Fashion is a language of references, and a wardrobe is a vocabulary that sometimes blurts out everything -- your whole psychological, societal, religious and political purview. Like raincoats repel rain, personal style is often an overcompensation mechanism for protecting character weaknesses, social insecurities, sexual and/or body anxieties.

Three main libidos seem to drive most human ambition in the United States: Fame, Greed and Power. Fame causes people to spend their lives circling the drain of Los Angeles. Since the logic of getting dressed is organized around the pursuit of attention, an L.A. fashion statement tends to say: Ooh look at me, I am so sexy.

New York is primarily driven by Greed, so fashion statements generally reflect bank statements: I have money/I need money/Don't take my money/I am taking your money.

Washington, D.C. dwellers crave Power, so clothes, in a psychological sense, resemble the defense industry that drives the D.C. economy -- it's office-wear so over-protective as to resemble body armor or camouflage. Intelligence is power in D.C., so the city's fashion statements read like documents released under the Freedom of Information Act -- they betray absolutely no relevant or interesting information whatsoever. It's deliberately boring: an Ann Taylor LOFT label might as well be tattooed on the C7 vertebrae of every woman under 60. D.C. fashion statements are almost entirely redacted.

Salt Lake City has a kind of bipolar fashion approach: the fashion there seems to reflect either total obedience to the patriarchy (Father, Husband, God, America, Santa Claus) or total disobedience to the patriarchy. This tends to create a kind of weirdly persistent infantilism in women's clothes. In the thrift stores, there was a spellbinding glut of adult women's fuzzy flannel pajama bottoms with cartoon characters all over them. For days, I couldn't figure out why so many ladies wore flowers crocheted out of yarn strapped to their heads. Then it dawned on me -- most of the babies in Salt Lake City were dressed in fuzzy little onesies with animal ears on top. The women who hadn't gone completely retrograde (rejecting their entire upbringings and becoming inked-up Gothic Jezebels) mostly seemed to be wearing grownup-size variations of baby-clothes. To wit: Yes Daddy/No Daddy.

I got cocky after a few trips; I thought I could read people like cheap airport novels just by looking at their outfits. But I got my ass handed to me on a few occasions, because I was so bad at reading women in certain cities. The sex-volume on certain urban wardrobes is cranked so high or so low in comparison to New York as to be totally distorting -- I was rendered completely fashion-illiterate.

Last month in Seattle, I noticed a vast proliferation of tough-looking girls with the sides of their heads shaved, big tattoos, ripped-up T-shirts, lip rings, expanded earlobes and work-boots, sitting around coffeehouses together.

"There are so many comely young lesbians around here," I commented to my friend Necia.
"Ha. Those aren't lesbians," scoffed Necia, killing my gaydar dead. "Those are just girls who were forced to become men, because the men around here didn't."

In South Beach, Miami, I was having drinks with my friend Amanda, when two smoking-hot, wholly oversexed-looking twenty-something girls crossed the street in front of us -- long, ironed hair, teeny-tiny metallic dresses, yards of shiny waxed legs, nosebleed-high hooker-heels, breasts augmented unto near verticality.

"My God, look at those spectacular whores!" I cried.

"Ha. Those aren't whores," chided Amanda. "Those are just regular girls, going out for the night."

I thought: no fucking way. Their outfits were 100 percent semiotic hooker, right down to the two-girl, fashion-twin doppelgänger effect: They were using all of the signifiers of prostitution, and nothing else -- no other informing fashion sense whatsoever. They were like cartoon hookers. It reminded me of that old argument about how to distinguish pornography from art: you don't know how, but you know the difference when you see it. I couldn't see the difference.

By the end of the weekend, however, I realized that those girls were basically wearing burqas compared to the rest of the South Beach girls, who walk around casually in restaurants and sit on barstools wearing mini-monokinis, the spatial equivalent of two gold Band-Aids and a cork, with five-inch heels, art nails and body glitter. The fashion statement of Miami: I am nude, cha-cha-cha.

But what went on to become an even bigger joke on that trip were the contents my own suitcase.

"Jesus," said Amanda, looking at my clothes strewn all over the floor of our Miami hotel room. "Is there anything you brought that isn't black?"

Shit, I realized. Is there anything I own that isn't black?

You never really know what you look like until you leave home and decontextualize yourself. By my own metrics, my wardrobe was psychologically ridiculous. My total mistrust of God, country, sex and my fellow human beings was literally right there, unpacked. Obviously, New York had turned me into a cross between something like a bar-fighting nun and one of those deepwater anglerfish with twisted needle teeth from the Natural History Museum -- shiny, black, barbed, spiky, predatory -- absurdly contrary and menacing, all the time. My fashion statement boiled down to one word: No.

I thought I'd lost it, but there it suddenly was, sitting frightened, naked, and quivering in the mound of angry black unmentionables at my feet: my mind.

Above, left: Some women (who are not prostitutes) out on the town in South Beach; right: tough-looking Seattle ladies. Photos by Cintra Wilson.