What Is The Point Of Clothes?

There’s a lot of crazy stuff out there in the world this morning. I awoke listening to the long saga of Jesus being unjustly tried before the Sanhedrin (you know, you hit play, you go back to sleep, you wake up and try to orient yourself into the daylight, discovering that you slept through seventeen chapters of Matthew) and then wandered away from that to see what’s going on on the interwebs. And it seems to be the usual–Facebook is collecting all my personal information, the NFL bla bla bla, Harvey Weinstein “loves,” cough, women, and the stock market is doing really well. (Sorry, no links–that’s what google is for.)

All that is terrible, or something, but what alarms me most is the preponderance of those tops that are completely normal looking except that the bit at the shoulder has been cut out. You know what I talking about, surely. It’s an ordinary, even modest blouse, often quite nice looking, but the part where your arm is probably the fattest and most pathetic, they just cut that bit away.

Who ‘they’ are I don’t pretend to know. Probably the same people who are distributing incremental rips up and down the be-jeaned trouser legs of all our young people. Really surprised that this trend came back round. It was dumb in the 90s, or whenever we all had to live through it before, and it’s dumb now.

I mean, as I was wandering around Walmart two days ago, and enjoying myself to the uttermost, it did occur to me that someone out there (probably Facebook) seems determined to force the young woman of our day into the ugliest imaginable garments. Once you start cutting bits out–the shoulder to set off the fatness of the arm, the bit midway down the leg to illuminate the fatness of the thigh, the midriff to show off the fatness of the stomach–you have misunderstood the Point of clothing.

I mean, the point of clothes is not to get the attention of the Harvey Weinstein of your social circle, no matter what anybody tells you. And it’s not to be as dowdy and covered up as possible. And its not to only be comfortable. And its not to make a few numbskulls very rich and everybody else in the world very poor. Although, I do understand, in saying this, that I am poking the eye of the entire economy of the world.

No, the point of clothes is to cover the body with gentleness and kindness–such as what God did for Adam and Eve after that unfortunate trouble over the apple or pomegranate or whatever it was. The point of clothes is for protection–your naked flesh can’t win against the elements, especially in post industrial, economically fading upstate New York. And for kindness–to cover the awkward and broken bits. And for beauty–to give you a sense about yourself in time and space that you are a person valuable enough to be clothed and cared for, not flung down by the side of the road like a ruined carcass.

Every age has its failures, of course. We’ve gone on from watching Ruth Goodman helping to build a medieval castle in France, to watching Ruth Goodman living as a Tudor Tenant on a Tudor Farm, and greatest failure of the past, I think, was probably a universal suspicion of soap and water. And of monks having, apparently, to wear wool next to the skin for spiritual reasons. And the underwear looks awfully bunchy. I’m pretty sure that when we watch Ruth Goodman living as a Victorian on a Victorian Farm we will begin to really understand the true dumbness of the past and its fashions, but we haven’t got that far yet.

The thing about a Tudor Woman beating about her dairy and her garden is that she got to wear something that was pretty nice to look at, and that was apparently very comfortable and workable. She wasn’t poking about her hovel in some shapeless piece of sacking, she got to wear something rather dignified.

That’s the word I’m groping for in the darkness of our modern stupidity–Dignity. Where is it? Why can’t we have it any more? Why do clothes on the rack ostensibly for me, a forty something year old woman with a body broken by motherhood and work, have to still shove myself into stuff marketed to my 15 year old daughter? Funny thing–she doesn’t like the clothes either. We both hate them. We wish we could look both dignified And elegant.

Oh well. Maybe next season.