Say It With A T

Except that you can't very subtly can you?

I'm reading Sherlock Holmes mysteries, doubly excited by this third follow on to John Sandford, and GK Chesterton in my move towards mysteries. The recent film was an excellent entertainment and fine introduction to the character, and I had been boning up through Netflix' library of Brett & Hardwicke videos. I must say that Brett's Holmes becomes more interesting in combination with reading Doyle on my new Kindle every day.

Of course what you learn about Holmes is that he is not just some super brainy dude with a waddling walk, a pipe, a stupid looking hat and a habit of insulting Watson as the stereotype has reduced him to. Rather he is much more, and to my point, an astute observer of those ways a person carries themselves in their habits of dress, eloucution and bearing. While I'm hardly expert in the ways someone might dress in 1890s London, I'm getting the gist.

 Now what's going around these days in American contemporary fashion is something called the Dress T. From what I understand, for dudes, it's all about the embroidered sort of faux heraldry that has become popular over the past two years. Yeah I was up on that two years ago here in the Worlds Most Expensive Suburb, and my first born has several in his closet. You buy them from Armani and they cost $75. It's the shirt that you wear when you have enough money to buy a shirt and tie, but you refuse to wear a shirt and tie on principle. Fortunately, my son got his at Target on his own budget.

One of the things creeping around my noggin this weekend was the limits of capitalism and free markets, and the one thing that arose stridently in the path of Adam Smith was the idea of beauty. That's one thing you don't want the market to determine. Of course we have a lot of that here in the US; beauty is a designer label. Why? Because Sassoon says so. (I invented it you Madison Avenue hacks, I want my percentage). Sometimes a lot of creativity goes into the reinvention of beauty, it's not always "Exciting !daho" or some crummy slogan from the Home Shopping Network. Sometimes it's actually a Crank Dat idea that becomes a fad and then a trend and then a style and then a statement or however the hierarchy goes at People Magazine. Then they guy on Entertainment Tonight wears it and walla!

Such a thing is the Dress T.

But then T Shirts have been making statements since way back to I'm With Stupid. But before that it was a smiley face or a peace sign. I mean after you burned your draft card or your bra, you had to wear something besides your long hair to signify the seriousness  of your rebellion from the standards of beauty and propriety of your racist pig parents, right? And well, unless you were really close you couldn't do the Dashiki with the Brothers. So why not stick a slogan out there? Yeah. Once it was enough to have Joe Cool or Mickey Mouse. Or maybe that Rolling Stones blah thing. I think the only really cool one that I recall from my highschool hood was a Pinball Wizard, and I could deal with the original Mr. Natural or the Quicksilver logo. Some Hawaiian sunset logo wouldn't be bad, but then things got out of hand. 

I have recently asserted in some acerbic debate that which I'm sure all men approaching 50 should assert, that kids today have lost their minds. But I've gone a step further because I think that most of the juicy delicious reform flavor has been chewed out of the bubblegum of rebellion of the past three generations. I'm really at odds with the results of the sexual revolution, and with Sherlock Holmes, I'm feeling rather Victorian. 

Everything is on display today. People are surely working their way towards a transparency that is lurid in this cult of I me my body. So I have a hard time looking at peasants in their denims, t-shirts and flipflops with any seriousness. The only mystery they present is how they have managed to become so causelessly rebellious. To walk about with bare arms is fine for sports, but as my daughter's disgust revealed to me the other day, there is no way to dignify a wife beater, or short shorts with words on the ass end, or in fact, half of the clothing that passes for reasonable casual fashion for the average dude or chick. Which is why I find it doubly pathetic to try an intelligentify stupid clothing with brain spew. 

There she is on the great lawn. She's reading a book on a bright spring day. She's attractive and she's wearing a black t-shirt with a white woodcut bust of Shakespeare. And she's, oh, she's reading Shakespeare. Kinda ruins it. Forever. 

I started wearing T-Shirts with writing back about a year after I got comfortable driving the minivan. It was all about that classic American Family thing - everybody wears the same colors from Old Navy for our trip to Legoland. Then, for practical reasons, as I had to go incognito and downmarket, my attitude had to become casual - casual clothes helped a great deal. Right about now, I'm feeling somewhat uncomfortable not wearing a tie. Something's bugging me. Something indeed is bugging me. 

The thing to say with your clothing might be ineffable, like the human spirit. It must therefore reflect standards of beauty which are timeless. It may be something that counters the spirit of our demos and our quest to make mainstream middle class out of every peasant within our borders. And perhaps it is snobbish and Victorian of me to be so cranky as to rub noses in the capitalist craptasm of marketing style for the masses. 

OK. I'll accept that.