Why Is Caring About Fashion Considered Unserious?

Honoré de Balzac’s 1835 novel Old Goriot is the story of Eugène de Rastignac, a handsome boy from the south of France, who tells his parents that he wants to move to Paris to study law. But, like most teenagers, he has an ulterior motive: all he wants is to become a fixture of Parisian high society. If only it were that simple. Rastignac, who came from nothing, needs to look like a fashionable, well-dressed man if he really wants to make it. As Balzac wrote in his Treatise on Modern Stimulants, being fashionable was the only way to look civilized in a big, booming city like Paris. In Balzac’s novels, fashion is a central narrative device used to highlight a character’s personality as well as their motives and he took fashion so seriously that his Human Comedy, a series of interlinked novels and short stories written between 1830 and 1848, contains at least 375 clothing portraits.

The first time the penniless yet ambitious Rastignac shows up at a fancy ball hosted by a high-powered distant relative, Madame la Vicomtesse de Beauséant, he discovers she is one of the most fashionable, connected women in all of 19th-century Paris. And with that, he is well on his way. “Being admitted to those glittering salons was tantamount to a certificate of the highest nobility,” Balzac wrote. “By appearing in such company, the most exclusive of all, he had gained the right to go anywhere.” Despite the fact that Rastignac is a poor student who lives in a hostel, everyone believes he belongs to the noble class. At the party he meets Madame Anastasie de Restaud and mentions he is related to Madame de Beauséant. Impressed, she invites him to stop by. Rastignac is excited. “What it is to be young, to have a thirst for the world, to be hungry for a woman and to see two grand houses open up to you! To have a foot in the door of the Vicomtesse de Beauséant’s house in the Faubourg Saint-Germain and a knee in that of the Comtesse de Restaud in the Chaussé d’Antin!”

Rastignac is technically a student of law but the reality is that he is a student of appearances. When he goes to Madame de Restaud’s house he puts on his most elegant clothes, which are nice but frankly not all that nice, and he walks there from the hostel. Along the way he takes “a thousand precautions to avoid being spattered with mud.” Getting spattered with mud in 19th-century Paris was a dead giveaway that you were part of the working class. A respectable member of the leisure class would have traveled exclusively by horse carriage. Splashed in mud and not wanting to ruin his chance for upward mobility, Rastignac stops at the Palais-Royal to have his boots polished and trousers cleaned, but traces of mud remain—when he arrives at the courtyard of the Maison de Restaud his cover is blown. Madame de Restaud’s servants assume he is a nobody because he arrived on foot. They are reluctant to let him inside, and when they finally do he makes matters worse by pretending he knows his way around the house. Obviously he doesn’t, and “stumbled clumsily into a room filled with lamps, sideboards and a contraption for heating bath towels.” Better luck next time, young Rastignac. The lesson we learn is that appearance is everything.

No one can opt out of the visual world or the laws of appearance because that’s how social worlds are managed. Fashion theorist Susan Kaiser believes that styling the body is an important part of understanding who we are and how we express the intersectionalities of our identities. But being is always a two-way street: as soon as you are aware that you can see, you will also know that you can be seen—and judged. What Rastignac does not realize is that it’s not enough simply to act as though he belongs in the house. Everyone else needs to believe he does. As a student of appearance, Rastignac has been outed as an impostor, and as one influential social theorist has said, that happens when the impostor has no business doing what he is doing. Rastignac may have the right to pretend to be noble, but the lesson is that as a student of appearances and modern living, he can fake it until he makes it—if he can fake it.

“But being is always a two-way street: as soon as you are aware that you can see, you will also know that you can be seen—and judged.”

Many say that appearance is irrelevant because of its connection to artifice, pleasure, and rituals of vanity. Research on appearance usually emphasizes how surfaces are “naturally” deceptive. Appearances are fake because they highlight the artificial rather than the natural, the ornamental instead of the substantial. Carolyn Cooper, a scholar of Jamaican dance hall culture, reminded me of the meaningless association between seriousness, plainness, frivolousness, and the superficial when she told me she often wears “party clothes” to work:

I might wear very bright colors, as opposed to people who are going to work in navy blue or brown. And I wear jewelry that people would not consider “work” jewelry. I remember one day I was at work and I had on a jumpsuit. One of my friends is a designer and she had done a sort of jumpsuit thing, off the shoulder, shoulders bare. One of my colleagues said to me, “Carolyn Cooper! Instead of wearing your clothes on the wrong side why don’t you go home and write a paper?” I said, “But I am writing papers.” Why is that stopping me if I wear my clothes on the wrong side?

The Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, in an essay called “Why Can’t a Smart Woman Love Fashion?,” wrote of her frustration that women in Western culture who want to be taken seriously need to show an indifference to appearance: “I hid my high heels. I told myself that orange, flattering to my skin tone, was too loud. That my large earrings were too much. I wore clothes I would ordinarily consider uninteresting, nothing too bright or too fitted or too unusual. I made choices thinking only about this: How should a serious woman writer be? I didn’t want to look as if I tried too hard.”

Indeed, why is it that if you care about fashion, style, and being a bit flashy, then somehow your work is unserious? Why does wearing a sequined caftan to a department meeting make you unproductive and incompetent? I agree with Jack Halberstam, who wrote in The Queer Art of Failure that “being taken seriously means missing out on the chance to be frivolous, promiscuous, and irrelevant.” The problem with “seriousness” is that we don’t get the chance to follow “visionary insights or flights of fancy.”

In 1991, fashion historian Valerie Steele wrote, very humorously, that “academics may be the worst-dressed middle-class occupational group in the United States,” not because they are roundly incapable of fashion, but because they have been trained to associate an interest in surfaces with frivolity, inappropriate to their practices of close reading, deep interpretation, and analysis, all tools that aim to dig beneath the surface. In the essay Steele explains how her dissertation on fashion history was received by the Department of History at Yale with scorn and suspicion. “Academics implicitly believe that fashion is frivolous, vain, and politically incorrect.”

The issue is why certain people believe that fashion is not worth pursuing, intellectually or aesthetically. The answer to this hostility to fashion, for the art critic Hal Foster, might be that we are in an age of “total design”; in the megastore of commodities, packaging is more important than what’s inside. This culture of superficial appearances is “all image and no interiority.” If only we could get rid of surfaces once and for all, the suggestion seems to be, then we would finally be liberated from the chains of capitalism and able to enjoy a truly democratic social world.

Appearance matters, so much so that the French philosopher Guy Debord once said, “All social life is mere appearance.” As early as ancient Egypt, laws were in place to rigidly define who could wear what kinds of clothing. At the time, only the upper classes were allowed to wear sandals, and later in Rome only a citizen could go out in a toga. In medieval Europe both church and state viewed luxurious clothing as an indication of the excesses of vanity. As citizens aimed to outdo their neighbors in the ballet of appearances the church retaliated by inaugurating sumptuary laws that defined how members of a given social rank could dress, essentially sifting them out by controlling how they could appear. At one point it was illegal for lower classes to wear clothes that were above their social class even if they could afford them. The whole point was to prevent confusion between the upper class and the lower class. What these laws tell us is that appearances matter enough that large-scale institutions, like the church and the government, have intervened to manage how people look.

By 1750 Jean-Jacques Rousseau railed against the emptiness and vanity of luxury and the pursuit of appearance, advocating for a more naturalist state of humankind. “There would be neither vanity nor luxury” in his vision of an idealized, definitely unfabulous Christian society, because such artifice places emphasis on the external rather than on the qualities of one’s character. In 1792 Mary Wollstonecraft took it further, describing women who follow the whims of fashion as slaves. “The soul is left out,” she felt, “and none of the parts are tied together by what may properly be termed character. This varnish of fashion, which seldom sticks very close to sense, may dazzle the weak; but leave nature to itself, and it will seldom disgust the wise.” Wollstonecraft believed that the artifice of fashion blinds the weak, whereas the truly wise do not feel a need to enhance the natural. Here again is the association of fashion and appearance with artifice and deception, wherein the naturalness of the body automatically means the display of truth.

“Why is it that if you care about fashion, style, and being a bit flashy, then somehow your work is unserious?”

Despite church- and government-backed sumptuary laws and intellectual efforts to control appearances up through at least the late 18th century, the boom in industrialization and the rise of commodity culture in the 19th century ushered in a heightened role for appearance, shifting the focus away from the body as an expression of truth and toward external appearance as a manifestation of personal character. Take the volume of novels, realist fiction, fashion journals, and etiquette guides published in the 19th century, such as Stephane Mallarmé’s 1874 fashion journal La dernière mode as well as writings by Zola, Balzac, Charles Baudelaire, Barbey d’Aurevilly, and Oscar Wilde on the dandy as a creature of cultivated appearance. As Lord Henry memorably tells Dorian Gray in Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, “It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.” But the emphasis on appearances and new ways of looking that exploded in the 19th century, which included things like world exhibitions, arcades, fashion, the display of commodities, and the flâneur, did not mean that appearances were finally emancipated from theories of deception. Negative critiques of appearance increasingly led to what one historian called “conspiratorial theories of mass deception,” or the ways skeptical critics argue against the value of spectacle, fashion, and ornamentation.

In 1904 the German sociologist Georg Simmel argued against fashion because he felt it differentiated groups at the same time as it actually created a certain unity within them, at least temporarily. The evolution of fashion was largely about keeping the class boundaries intact. “Just as soon as the lower classes begin to copy their style, thereby crossing the line of demarcation the upper classes have drawn and destroying the uniformity of their coherence, the upper classes turn away from this style and adopt a new one, which in its turn differentiates them from the masses; and thus the game goes merrily on.” Fashion, for Simmel, is a line of demarcation that visually solidifies unity and membership within a social class. This is still true today: the moment a red-hot fashion item becomes all the rage, the trend is over. Trends are less about class status and more about subcultural status and an access to cool. The reason fashions change so quickly is essentially to make sure that a higher class status is not given in error to someone like Rastignac who can afford to purchase the status symbols of a particular class but isn’t actually a part of it.

For what it’s worth, I don’t actually believe in “trends.” Trends do happen, of course, but I’m of the mind that having a personal look, a signature style, is a much more interesting way to go about fashion. A signature look means you are you all the time, no matter what’s going on in the fashion world. I will always love black leather pants and big hoop earrings, whether or not they are “in.” Period. Have you ever seen Anna Wintour with a different haircut? Or Lady Bunny? Even as you hold down the fort of your personal look, the fashion system will still move at a breakneck pace, but having style is timeless.

No matter how much or how little you’re interested in fashion, whether you’re invested in the latest trends or if you march to the beat of your own drum, and even if you think fashion doesn’t impact you, know that it does. I have a pair of spiked wedge shoes that are always a conversation piece when I wear them out. They are my favorite thing, and I would be totally depressed if I lost them somehow. Whenever people see them in my room they always ask to try them on. Everyone does this—male, female, heterosexual, gay. They try them on for the fun of it and they love the feeling the shoes give them. But then they say: “I could never wear those,” a phrase we have all used to describe an item of clothing that makes us uncomfortable or that we don’t see ourselves in because it goes against the image we have already constructed for ourselves. But who actually says we can’t wear it?

Spiked, gravity-defying “heel-less” wedges are the ultimate conversation piece and icebreaker at any party.

The power of appearance, that’s “who.”

Fashion naysayers are often people who are “uncomfortable with taking full responsibility for their own looks,” Anne Hollander tells us, “who either fear the purely visual demands of social life—‘appearance’ or ‘appearances’—or don’t trust the operation of their own taste,” which means in the end that they “feel threatened and manipulated by fashion.” Negative theories of appearance emerge out of a nervousness and anxiety about one’s own way of looking, which coincidentally works to reinforce the power of appearance. When Rastignac puts on his best clothes and shows up at the house of Madame de Restaud he believes he is entitled to be there. The influential sociologist Erving Goffman, who used theater as a metaphor to explain everyday social interactions, also believed that as soon as we walk into a room we are already busy trying to understand details about a person’s background, things like his or her class status, trustworthiness, and sense of self. Appearance prompts a close reading of other people, a reading strategy meant to tease out biographical and contextual information.

Everyone has a ritual of appearance. When we groom ourselves and choose what to wear for different social occasions we are already performing a specific version of ourselves. Even choosing not to groom, wearing the same thing every day, or saying things like “I don’t care about fashion!” is still a confirmation of appearance. It is still a look. There are ways of dressing up for job interviews, going shopping, first dates, and gym class that are different from going to a concert, getting into exclusive nightclubs, attending a vogue ball, or working at avant-garde fashion boutiques. No matter the given socio-theatrical situation, people are always subject to the laws of appearance. This is what the American drag icon RuPaul meant when in his 1995 autobiography Lettin’ It All Hang Out he said, “You’re born naked and the rest is drag,” a significant comment because it implicates everyone in the act of getting dressed.