This is a most interesting article and I rather wish I had time to read the book, which I don’t, so I will put it right out of my mind. I’ve been thinking about the question of what any of us can wear relentlessly since Synod when I was in the unusual position of driving back and forth to church every day looking at What Binghamtonians Wear, and also obsessing for three days about what I myself would wear. The early part of the week was eaten up with considering the wardrobe, and the latter half with impulsively changing all the carefully wrought decisions.
Our public lives are mostly confined to Sunday, and then, as the people who are desperately shoving the machine of divine praise (I mean, the organic well spring of love from the congregation towards God) we try to look presentable. It seems like it should be possible, one day a week, to show up with shoes and combed hair. But truly, figuring out what everyone is going to wear that one day comprises a modicum of emotional trauma not just for me, but for the whole family.
When the children were very small I would lay their clothes out on Saturday night and then bathe them, most kindly, as a good mother should. They would go to bed clean and ready for the long day ahead. In the morning they would wake up and I would shove them into carefully coordinated outfits. Alouicious, in particular, had a bow tie which made going to church the highlight of our lives. Somehow, as the bow tie fell away, so did my desire to get there early and in a cheerful frame of mind.
Now that they’re older I scream at them at 8:30 on Saturday night to, ‘for Pete’s Sake, take a shower and find something to wear tomorrow.’ This command is usually met with no response at all. Having cried it out, I retire to bed without following anyone around to inquire about socks, shoes, tights, shoes, coats, shoes, anything. We all wake up in the morning and are shocked to learn that no one has anything to wear. No one put their trousers from last Sunday into the laundry bin so that they could be washed during the week. No one listened to me the night before. Jam is still plentiful in the hair of the youngest child. In the wisdom of motherhood, rather than screaming, now I just shrug and say I’m so sorry, I should have screamed louder the night before. ‘Mother is sorry she didn’t berate you. Perhaps next week you’d like to remember on your own to be ready for church.’
There are Two Reasons civilization is collapsing, I believe. One is that we only have to dress up once a week. All the other days are abominated by the jeans and sweatpants of modern ‘self expression.’ The idea that I, as a short, greying, forty year old mother am actually ‘expressing myself’ by what I wear is one of the greatest lies of the age. The clothing I cobble together in no way reflects who I desire to be, or even, I would say, who I really am. Except perhaps ironically in that I, who hate jeans, wear them religiously every day with one of seven black shirts matched carefully with one of three gray sweaters. I bow to the spirit of the age in my dress, but I do so resentfully and because there is no other clothing to be had. What am I going to do? Sew myself a dress? I can barely see this screen, let alone a very tiny needle and thread.
The second reason civilization is collapsing is because, crumbling under the lie of self expression, we are all still having to clean our own clothes. The revolution of fabrics to make them easily washable in your single machine at home, so that you can not only wear ‘whatever you want’ but also ‘clean them all yourself’ produced the slavery of the modern women to her laundry. This isn’t slavery in the traditional American sense. This is slavery in the biblical sense. The human person is a slave to sin. He thinks it’s going to be lovely, and so he does it, and then it turns out to be awful. It’s the slavery of the lie. The woman with her washing machine thinks it’s going to be no problem to blow through ten loads of laundry, fold them, put them away, put them away again when they are thrown out of all the drawers, wash them again when they are thrown down a third time and then the cat, in the bitterness of his spirit, decides to relieve himself of his feelings all over everywhere. All the ‘self expression’ of ‘cute’ outfits really only produces an impossible task of trying to keep the body clean and clothed. Individualism wins the Day. You wear whatever you want and wash it yourself. Good luck to you.
But the lie is abiding, because you’re not wearing whatever you want. You’re wearing what some jerk in an open concept manhattan office wanted you to wear. You are a puppet on the string of someone else’s broken imagination, someone who probably hasn’t read Jane Austen or the classics, or even Asterix, and who thinks that buying a new wardrobe every six months is a good idea (it’s not).
The quest for self expression is buried in the limitless consumption of tv to make laundry folding bearable and the millions of tons of clothes that we all have to throw away because we hated them as soon as we paid the money. And we pass this system on lovingly from mother to child. I myself have been caught saying to my own child, ‘what do you want to wear?’ She looks sadly at her bed covered in jeans and sweaters and says, ‘I dunno.’ But at her core she does know. She doesn’t want to wear jeans. She doesn’t want to wear another binghamton sweater. She doesn’t want to wear sensible shoes. Her wall is covered in carefully curated old calendar pictures of women, arranged elegantly in exquisitely arrayed garments, reading books. She pulls her abundant hair into a pony tail and trudges downstairs to face modern life. It’s too bad, I think, adjusting the broken button on my gray sweater, but at least it’s only for a lifetime. Better clothes are on the horizon.
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