On Intention, Rituals, And Making An Effort

We dress for ourselves and for others. It's complicated.

A linen sheet monogrammed by my mother from the 1960s.

In ‘Forks’, the seventh episode of the second season of The Bear, Ritchie (played by Ebon Moss-Bachrach) has been sent to a top-tier Michelin-star restaurant to learn the ways of the high-end restaurant trade. He goes from polishing forks (hence the title of the episode) to observing and participating in the methods of producing a sophisticated customer experience for the esteemed dinner guests. In order to participate in the latter, Richie is made to wear a sharp suit. This is a new experience for Richie, a bitter divorcé whose life has gone nowhere, and whom we’ve only seen wearing scruffy t-shirts and work pants until now. When Richie returns to his normal life in episode eight, he decides to keep wearing a suit. He carries himself differently from then on. When his colleagues snicker at him and question him about the suits, he eventually says that he chooses to wear the suits because they make him feel better about himself. Even though he is broken inside, wearing suits like armor helps him keep his act together.

I found myself thinking about Richie last week, when a customer at my shop said that she needed to get out of the house more often and wear her nicer clothes to feel like a human being. Since the pandemic she had mostly been working from home. She found it difficult to pull herself together stylewise because she spends so much time by herself, immersed in work and her home life. Hers isn’t a unique story: in fact we hear similar things at the shop almost every day. “Where would I wear these nice clothes –  I just sit at home in my sweatpants every day” is a frighteningly common sentence. 

It’s not just about lovely clothes not being worn. Fashion experts predicted a surge of people wanting to party and get dressed up again post-pandemic, but it seems to me that in the grand scheme of things the opposite became true. People no longer get out and about much. They don’t do things in person as much as they used to, many continue to work from home, and as a consequence they are not seen by others outside of their immediate circles. We live in a time where everything seems to be a click of a screen away, so we isolate ourselves and become further removed from daily human connections. We become untethered without real social contacts: social situations outside of our closest family and friends begin to feel challenging, and we are uncertain about how to present ourselves. It’s a much bigger conversation than just our sweatpants: it’s about losing our sense of self and our role in society. 

I’ve been thinking about the links between ourselves, our clothes and the people around us again. It’s a constant theme that I like to investigate: how we perceive ourselves in our clothes and how differently others might see us, regardless of how we see ourselves. (I wrote about it previously here.) In reference to my WFH customer, and Richie and his suits, I’ve been thinking about how clothes make us feel about ourselves. There is clearly a difference between when it’s just us and our clothes, and when we are exposed to the gaze of others. If just wearing nicer clothes really made us feel better about ourselves, why would we sit at home in our sweatpants? The bigger question is: can we have style if there is no one to witness it?

In April this year Derek Guy interviewed Yukio Akamine, a Japanese menswear guru, for Die, Workwear! In the interview Akamine discusses living one’s life with intention: making one’s bed, doing laundry properly, and ironing one’s clothes are important daily motions to Akamine even though no one else is witnessing them but himself. The (impeccable) clothes that he wears are one thing, but the way he wears them and conducts himself in his clothes is another. Akamine argues that carrying oneself with grace and consideration leads to a type of elegance that is disappearing from the grasp of younger generations. There is inherent value in doing these things just for oneself, to live the right kind of life.

These days performing the types of routines that Akamine describes is called ‘exercising mindfulness’, but it used to be how most people conducted themselves in their ordered, structured, everyday lives. People used to mangle their sheets and tablecloths because it was the proper thing to do. Linens were embroidered with initials, shoes were polished, the outerwear aired out, loose buttons sewn back on. People got dressed as a sign of self-respect on the one hand, and to signal to others around them that they were respectable members of society on the other. They bought the best they could afford, because clothes had straight-forward signaling power and good clothes also had a personal meaning to the wearer. You had fewer clothes so your clothes became your daily armor. You had your everyday dress and your Sunday dress. Societal consequences of dress were straight-forward: if you were dressed neatly in clothes that were well taken care of, you were treated differently than if you wore shabby clothes. 

Thinking about this, I was reminded of my first reading of Mary Douglas’ ‘Purity and Danger’ (1966) back in university. All societies function around a framework of inclusion and exclusion, and our societies include and exclude consistently, like well-oiled machines, to produce order. We learn in childhood, very early on, what is acceptable, proper, and allowed, and what is not, and where lines are drawn between the self and the group you belong to. The monogrammed linens of the past were a way of taking up your space in the world you lived in, or quite literally, making your mark, and by doing so, reproducing the societal order that you had grown into. Girls who embroidered their first linens with more finesse were held in higher esteem in the family than those who weren’t as skillful. To us living in today’s society, monogrammed linens or towels seem like a luxury product  – just something that might feel a little bit more special than linens without initials. What we are missing is the ritual of us embroidering our initials, the work that had to be put in, the care and the consideration that was exercised, even though only your immediate family would ever see your work on your bed sheets. You, however, would see it every day, so it was important.

In post-modern, capitalist times we’ve deconstructed and disengaged from a lot of our clothing- and home-related rituals. We emphasize what’s easy instead: enter non-iron shirts, leggings, sneakers, and yes, sweatpants. Signaling with clothes has become complicated: a distressed Balenciaga hoodie might set you back a month’s paycheck, but the vast majority of people live outside of the fashion bubble and would just see it as a dirty, broken piece of clothing that tells others that you’ve lost control. In our fast-paced entertainment-filled world, we still subconsciously value some of the things we have historically as human beings known to appreciate and guard: cleanliness, neatness, and composure. It’s just that exercising those values is becoming a lost art. Clothes have become so cheap that rather than learn to sew a loose button back on, we just buy a new blouse. A lot of my customers don’t even own an ironing board. We’re so far removed from making our own clothes that the notion of ‘handmade’ clothes has a new definition these days: all garments (excluding 3D-printed ones, perhaps) are handmade, but we use the term now to describe clothes that were made by one person, from start to finish. 

I recently came across a story in the Finnish public broadcasting company YLE’s website, about consumers who want to normalize wearing torn or dirty clothes in public. (They were not talking about Balenciaga hoodies.) A woman posed for a picture wearing a polka dot blouse with a big hole on the arm. The purpose of the article was to highlight our inability to wear our clothes until they can’t be worn anymore. The argument was that we should wear what we already have as long as it serves a basic function, like keeping us warm or having emotional value to the person wearing it. I can appreciate the environmental angle of wearing torn or stained clothes, but I was left thinking how estranged we have become from seeing clothes as a sign of respect – respect for ourselves and our surroundings. It’s like we’ve stripped away other people from the equation of wearing clothes: it’s only us, our physical comfort, and maybe our relationship to larger contexts like the environment, the trends, fashion, what have you. The social aspect of wearing clothes is strangely missing: that our clothes have a deeper meaning not just to ourselves, but to the people around us, the people whose gaze we are under every day.

More often than not, you hear people say things like “I don’t care about what other people think of my clothes” or “I only get dressed for myself”. And yet we do care, and we still dress for others, and clothes can still lift us up when we pick them wisely. We continue to long for recognition from others by posting outfit pictures on social media, we choose to see our clothes through the lens of identity building, and we actively participate in consumer tribes. It’s strange to me that we don’t see the value of social bonding through our garments, when it’s so clear that our clothes can make us feel differently about ourselves, and that we do, in fact, continue to wear clothes to signal to others, whether we like it or not.  

Last week I talked to a woman in her mid-60s who wore a fabulous, Charles James-esque black gloss-sprinkled suede coat with narrow-cut black trousers and mid-heel two-tone brogues. I said to her that I loved her coat, and after getting past the ‘“oh this old thing” routine, she told me that because of the coat’s showy nature, she doesn’t wear it much, except when she visits Helsinki from her home in the countryside. “I figured I’d make an effort, coming into the city and all”, she said. The interaction reminded me that the desire to show up for others as a sign of belonging and appreciation is still within us. We dress up for rites of passage, like weddings and funerals and important family gatherings. After the deconstruction of the social significance of the clothes we wear in recent decades, we are still able to recognize and appreciate when an effort is being made. Our clothes can be transformative, both for us and for others around us, and we should take advantage of that more. Life is a special occasion, after all.