Snobbery

by Joseph Epstein

  Fashion operates under its own, not always easily decipherable laws. It swerves off in new directions regardless of dissidents or even adherents. Fashion fades of its own success; as it spreads it loses appeal, and hence strength; in its accessibility lie the seeds of its own death. Without a feeling of exclusiveness—the snobbish element—fashion isn’t successfully fashionable. Nothing can do a fashion in quicker than unselective appreciation. Fashion requires a safe and selective originality. Once this originality becomes too widespread—the supermarket checkout girl wearing a T-shirt with Gucci across its front—the game is up, and people who pride themselves on being fashionable are gone, hot on the trail of fresh fashion newly created.

  “After all, what is fashion?” asked Oscar Wilde. “It is usually a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.” Like many an Oscar Wilde witticism, amusing but not quite true. It doesn’t take in the odd way that what seemed smart and chic today can seem boring and vulgar tomorrow. Nor does it take in the compulsory character of shift in fashion, which is not finally about ugliness but about the need for change, for some people to cut themselves off from the herd, to set up as that select group once referred to as PLU, or People Like Us. “Fashion,” as Tom Wolfe rightly says, “is the code language of status.”

  The origins of fashion are in status, and in status, too, are to be discovered the mechanics of fashion. The kinds of status that one’s clothes can reveal are obvious: one’s wealth, one’s rank in society, one’s age or generation, one’s aspirations, and not least one’s interest in fashion itself. Fashion was once fixed by law—the so-called sumptuary laws, promulgated by Charlemagne early in the ninth century—which prescribed that a person’s dress match his place in the social hierarchy. As a carryover of this, in the court of Louis XIV only certain men were allowed to wear certain ribbons. The Due de Saint-Simon, that careful chronicler of status at Versailles, complained that nobles at the Sun King’s court were kept near bankruptcy by trying to outfit themselves at the level of splendor set by the king—an instance of fashion setting an economic tyranny.

  The trick is somehow to find a place between being fashionably stupid and stupidly unfashionable. The aim is to avoid vulgarity yet never join that world, which Balzac speaks of in Lost Illusions, “where the superfluous becomes indispensable.” If one can arrange all this, there is no reason why fashion cannot enliven existence, infusing it with an ever-refreshed lilt, with change in dress, manners, and styles of living lending life a witty, zany, breezy, lyrical, charming feel. Not to know the fashion of one’s time is to keep oneself ignorant where really so little is required to be informed. In his journals, Ralph Waldo Emerson reports a woman saying to him that “a sense of being perfectly well dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquility which religion is powerless to bestow.” That may be pushing it, but to feel oneself in fashion without feeling enslaved by it can give one a sense of living in harmony with one’s time.

  The snob’s problem is that he allows himself to make judgments based on fashion, to let the competitive edge that lurks about fashion gain sway, to find being out of fashion veritable hell. For the snob, fashion becomes a standard of judgment, a means of gratification, a method for acquiring self-esteem, an ethics, something akin to a religion, and of course a stick with which to beat on those who fall behind or get it wrong. Once, at a meeting of the National Council on the Arts, a wealthy and well-turned-out woman, a fellow council member, regarding the new chairman of the Endowment, whispered into my ear, “He really is off the rack, isn’t he?” Cruel SOB that I am, I laughed.

  Yet one doesn’t have to be a snob to want one’s own tastes in life’s superfluities not to become too widespread, to want to keep one’s minor passions from becoming too popular. Especially in a democracy one needs to feel one is not always traveling with the herd. But which way the herd is traveling is getting to be a more complicated question than it once was. Once it was thought to travel from the top down. Thorstein Veblen was the authorized guide on this trip: “Emulation occurs,” he wrote in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), “where social groups become strong enough to challenge the traditional patterns of society, in fact in those places where a strong middle class emerges to compete with the aristocracy and, at a later stage, a strong proletariat emerges to compete with the middle class.” The notion here is that the upper classes set the fashions, which percolate down through the nouveaux riches to the middle classes and thence make their way merrily on down. How efficient! Unfortunately, no longer very true.

  Georg Simmel, writing only five years after Veblen, felt that the fulcrum of change in these matters was the middle class. “The higher classes, as everyone knows,” he wrote, “are the most conservative, and firequently enough they are even archaic. They dread every motion and change, not because they have an antipathy for the contents or because the latter are injurious to them, but simply because it is change and because they regard every modification of the whole as suspicious and dangerous. No change can bring them additional power, and every change can bring them something to fear, but nothing to hope for.” The middle classes, Simmel felt, were in control of changes in fashion, giving them their peculiar tone and rhythm. True, the upper classes have seldom supplied the artists, designers, editors, curators, interior decorators, and other arbiters of taste; the middle and even the working classes largely have. Often they have produced fashions in clothes, literature, and home decoration that attempt to convey their sense of upper-class life—see here Ralph Lauren, John O’Hara, Martha Stewart.

  For a time, this general line veered off and the spirit, if not the actuality, of the avant-garde seemed to prompt changes in fashion. Whatever was new was the fashion. The great cliché—in clothes, in art, and in ideas—was “cutting edge,” and particular clothes and styles came to be called “edgy.” People who practice the profession, as the Austrian novelist Robert Musd put it, “of being the next generation” have been on the scene for centuries. “There are people,” wrote the eighteenth-century German aphorist G. C. Lichtenberg, “who possess not so much genius as a certain talent for perceiving the desires of the century, or even of the decade, before it has done so itself.” Alma Mahler, who married, seriatim, Gustav Mahler, Walter Gropius, and Franz Werfel, was such a person; she captured the spirit I have in mind when she said: “For me the only thing that exists is tomorrow’s truth.” This spirit calls for one to be the first in and the first out; another word for it is “trendy.”

  For people caught up in the trendy life, the true and the new are the selfsame; the new is the word and the way. Trends, though a part of fashion, are even less stable. Fashion magazines run small sections of help to their readers, letting them know what’s in (thin belts, red vodka, the novels of Arturo Perez-Reverte) and what’s out (shearling coats, kiwi fruit, David Letterman). Under the regime of the trendy life, as Kennedy Fraser has written, “clothes will never make you fashionable. Friends, thoughts, face, and life must match.” And all these must conduce to make one seem to belong among the right people, the happy few. A pretty damn grim business it can be.

  People who work in advertising, public relations, sometimes journalism, what generally goes by the name communications, have nonetheless to keep up with this business. David Brooks has caught something of their spirit in an essay called “The Clothing of the American Mind,” in which he writes of the type in communications: “He is a protean figure, constantly changing in surprising and contradictory ways in order to win attention. He has a short time horizon, because the great blizzard of messages quickly obscures anything that has happened as long as a few months ago. . . . He has a great tolerance for flux and insecurity. He has a genius for reading cultural signifiers, knowing how to behave with the cowboy hat crowd and another way with the counterculture set. . . . He has a great rhythmic sense for when people are sick of a cultural trend and ready to hop on a counter-trend.” Why do people bother, one wonders? It all sounds rather like the man who, a
fter years of cleaning up after the elephants in the circus, when asked why he doesn’t go into some other line of work, exclaims: “What—and leave show business?”

  Trendiness and fashion have by now become so intermingled that they can scarcely be separated, with the only thing uniting the two being marketing, which is, not to put too fine a point on it, money. Money has now invaded fashion as never before. According to Ten Agins, the great couturiers were more snobbish than greedy. Christian Dior rated aristocrats much higher than movie stars, she reports, and would not design clothes for a Brigitte Bardot movie. Fashion was once defined, if by nothing else, by its exclusiveness. But in our day it has sought to become inclusive, attempting to sell everyone.

  T-shirts, jeans, and underwear with designer logos have become, and remain, big moneymakers. Designers licensed all sorts of manufacturers to make everything from socks to perfume for them, with perfume being the biggest moneymaker of all. Something known in the trade as “lifestyle merchandising” came into play. Styles of living were now designated by the designer clothes one chose to wear. And for the first time people wore the labels, or at least the names or logos, of the designers on the outside of their duds. (“Once upon a time,” noted Esquire, “labels were worn only on the inside of clothes—those were better times.”) Teri Agins notes that, in this new social calibration, a wealthy man’s wife might wear Armani, his mistress Versace. At the same time Ralph Lauren stood for vanished Waspishness, Calvin Klein for what-me-worry-about-kinky? sexiness, Tommy Hilfiger for a vague kind of ail-American good time. Other hot designers—Jd Sander, Marc Jacobs, Antonio Berardi, Tom Ford, Helmut Lang—gave off their own messages, all perceptible to people who perhaps care a little too much about such things.

  So pervasive has this designer culture become that, in the July 19, 2001, issue of Winnetka Talk, the newspaper for an upper-middle suburb on Chicago’s North Shore, the following item appeared in the police blotter: “A Coach purse containing a Gucci wallet and Louis Vuitton change purse valued at $800 was reported stolen Sunday from a black Jaguar parked in front of the Winnetka Golf Course. Two cell phones and $200 in cash were also missing from the car.” Strange, said a friend to whom I read this item, one doesn’t feel an immediate rush of sympathy for the victim.

  The goal in this new mass merchandising was to give people clothes that they felt were somehow cool and sexy, and that conferred status upon them—with the status having a good deal to do with what constituted the cool and sexy. Thus Ralph Lauren told a reporter from GQ about Purple Label, his high-line menswear: “I was trying to say this isn’t about fashion; it’s about aspiration. Now I know about aspirations. What do you want to be? What do you want to have in your life? Purple Label has an aspirational quality to it. It says you have money, you are chic, you have arrived.” Perfect clothes, you might say, in which to look down on people who either can’t afford them or, sadder still, haven’t the freakin’ good taste to acquire them.

  Earlier, socially prominent figures became known for wearing the clothes of specific designers: Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis wore first Oleg Cassini, then Halston, for example. On the male side, the basketball coach Pat Riley became known as an Armani man. In a curious reversal, people once thought to be part of capital-S Society went on the payroll of designers: Princess Lee Radziwill worked for Giorgio Armani as something called his “special events coordinator.”

  More interesting, as the country went bonkers for youth culture, with the new ideal being not to grow into an adult as soon as possible but instead to stay youthful as long as possible, another shift took place. As mentioned earlier, black youth took the lead in fashion design among the young, with white middle- and upper-middle-class kids following the lead of black kids in clothes—in gym shoes especially, but in style generally. Part of the success of the Tommy Hilfiger operation was that rap singers began wearing Hilfiger clothes. Shoe and clothing manufacturers, wanting to pick up the custom of these kids, sent people into inner-city neighborhoods to find out what the kids thought cool. Other people made their own fashions by main force. “My job,” remarked Isabella Blow, a (at the moment) hot fashion consultant, “is to make bad clothes look good.” Of Miss Blow, a fashion director for Max Factor reports: “She feels trends in the ether, as it were.” A strange world, volatile, febrile, explainable only after the fact.

  Before the fact, however, there loomed an odd, slightly ghoulish figure, a commercial artist, a man a little nutty about women’s shoes, best known for saying that everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes, though he himself held the limelight for more than a decade and, dead since 1987, hasn’t completely faded from prominence yet. Andy Warhol, pop art painter and maker of mesmerizingly boring films, is in many quarters thought a serious avant-garde artist; in others, a man without whom the culture today would have been in a good deal better shape. I wonder if he isn’t best considered a fashion leader, perhaps the most significant of the twentieth century, and all the greater for having no real products for sale.

  Born to Czech parents in Forest City, Pennsylvania, in 1930, awkward, shy, pale nearly to the point of being albino, Andy Warhol, during a childhood in which he was often picked on, fell back for solace on reading movie fan magazines. Given to fantasy, he had an early fix on stardom. Enrolled as an art student at Carnegie Tech, he thought he might like to teach art in the public school system. Instead he moved to Manhattan, where he shared an apartment on St. Marks Place with a classmate, the painter Philip Pearlstein. Before long he was getting jobs from advertising agencies and second-line women’s magazines; his specialty was drawing shoes. Unassuming and passive though he might seem, he was excellent at ingratiating himself with the people whom he needed to advance his career.

  Warhol graduated from movie to fashion magazines, which he studied with great care. Glamour, aura, chic, such things had an endless fascination for him. Soon his own work as a commercial artist began appearing in the toniest of these magazines. He moved from St. Marks Place to a townhouse he bought on Eighty-ninth and Lexington. While still in his early twenties, he dyed his hair white. With his pale skin, white hair, and red-rimmed eyes, he looked, as a friend later described him, “like a super-intelligent white rabbit.”

  Star-struck Warhol may have been, but he was no naif. He was very sharp about status and, in the world of Manhattan advertising and art, knew where it was to be found and how to work his way close to its most fashionable sources. He was highly perceptive about the world of contemporary art and the mechanics of promotion within it. Contemporary visual art had long had an element of fashion, but Warhol knew how to combine the two, art and fashion, and manipulate them in his favor.

  Not yet a celebrity himself, Warhol remained hung up on celebrity. He was of the species of upward-looking snob. Truman Capote reported that Andy Warhol used to write to him daily and hang out in front of his house. One day Capote’s mother let him in. “As far as I knew,” Capote said, “he was a window decorator . . . let’s say a window-decorator type.” (Nice piece of downward-looking homosexual snobbery here, I’d say.) Capote later revised this view. Warhol, he said, wanted fame. “I can’t put my finger on exactly what it is he’s talented at, except that he’s a genius as a self-publicist.”

  Warhol soon enough became famous, hugely famous, on his own: through his Campbell’s soup can paintings, through the filmmaking at the Manhattan studio he called The Factory, through the rock group got up in S-M garb he called the Velvet Underground, through being shot and critically wounded by a madwoman named Valerie Solanas. In his journal he recounts how he had become too well known to use a public washroom; at the Vatican, awaiting an audience with the pope, nuns asked for his autograph. Yet he bemoans not being invited to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s party for the Statue of Liberty or to Caroline Kennedy’s wedding. At his own parties amazing human combinations were found, the most zonked-out acidhead next to Judy Garland, Montgomery Clift next to a transvestite, Tennessee Williams next to the wife of a wealthy Jewish New York
state assemblyman. So many worlds came together under his roof and auspices: that of the watered-down New York avant-garde, of drugs, of homosexuality, of the beautiful people (so called), the worlds of publicity and money and show business, all orchestrated by a once bashful boy with a bad complexion and a sense of fashion of the highest power.

  But fashion and an upward-looking snobbery were always at the center of the Warhol enterprise. At one point, Warhol told a friend that he thought of opening a store that sold the used underwear of the famous—$10 a pair of washed, $25 if not. Today those prices seem way too low, though the difference in price between the washed and unwashed items still seems just about right. If anyone could have made a go of this particular business, Andy was the man.

  19

  Names Away!

  NAME-DROPPING is the act—as performed by some people, the art—of using one’s connection to famous people to establish one’s own superiority, while at the same time making those who are without such connection feel the hopeless want of glamour in, the utter drabness of, their own lives. As such, name-dropping is almost always an act, however indirect, of snobbery. “I really must put an end to this name-dropping,” an old joke has it, “as I was saying only the other day to Queen Elizabeth and the Pope.”

  I am a bit of a name-dropper myself, and once wrote an essay on the subject called “A Nice Little Knack for Name-Dropping.” In that essay I recorded a few significant “drops” from my childhood years. These included two champion boxers of the day, the welterweight Barney Ross and the middleweight Tony Zale. I had a neighbor whose cousin was Morey Amsterdam, a comedian whom I don’t think it would be imprecise to describe as a third banana. Everyone in the neighborhood in which I grew up seems to have known Shecky Greene, a comedian once higher on the banana bunch than he is today, though I somehow missed meeting him.