Sartorial Objections

[Tango Yankee]

A collar that is not folded down like it's supposed to be. A hallmark of the frat-boy trad look in recent years.

Recent years? Wearing polo shirt collars up like that was popular in the early '80s! I was guilty of doing the same from time to time.

Cheers,
Tom

 

[jamespowers]

Random image from a google search. It's not the worst fashion crime out there, but it is SO prevalent, at least where I'm at, and it's not flattering either. :eusa_doh: [huh]

That picture needs a caption: "duh!"

 

[Jovan]

I imagine, Master Jovan, that your greatest sartorial objection would be dudes dressed in black robes with heavily tattooed faces. lol

I feel like I'm being stabbed in the stomach whenever I see them.

 

[Jack Scorpion]

Umm... Maybe it is time for a new avatar picture.

 

[Miss Neecerie]

Umm... Maybe it is time for a new avatar picture.

Yes...but you pull it off...which just goes to illustrate that there are a lot of rules that can be broken if you have enough -personal- style to pull them off.

I say keep the avitar and make the 'rule followers' cringe. If thats all they have to worry about in life.....

 

[Maj.Nick Danger]

Yes...but you pull it off...which just goes to illustrate that there are a lot of rules that can be broken if you have enough -personal- style to pull them off.

I say keep the avitar and make the 'rule followers' cringe. If thats all they have to worry about in life.....

Uhmmmm,...couldn't help but notice your new avatar,....maybe you had a bit too much coffee that day? lol

 

[Tommy Fedora]

Red Yankee hats are the accessory of the devil.

I bristle at the very thought of it.
My son thinks its funny and points out to me the Yankee hats in different colors, then we same the same word together...blasphemy !!! lol

 

[Feraud]

Recent years? Wearing polo shirt collars up like that was popular in the early '80s! I was guilty of doing the same from time to time.

Cheers,
Tom

Wasn't it the eternally young Matthew Broderick in the hit movie Ferris Bueller's Day Off who kickstarted this look in the mid 80s?

 

[LadyStardust]

I don't know if that was an unintentional jab at me, but just for the record, that's not "all I have to worry about" in life, in my original post I was simply replying to the topic at hand, and I was certainly not referencing any members of this forum who might subscribe to such fashion. I certainly won't argue with the philosophy of 'If it truly works for you, wear it.' That's wonderful if that's the case. Maybe I'm just too paranoid about this whole situation. Pardons all the same.

 

[Baron Kurtz]

oh, what's a popped collar?

Popularised in Britain about 10-15 years ago by Eric Cantona, an impressively arrogant French footballer.

Best known for his attack on a fan . . . Note his collar stayed up throughout the action:

bk

 

[Feraud]

Nice to know the spirit of Vincent Price was in attendance.

see the fellow in the upper right corner wearing the trench.

 

[Baron Kurtz]

I've always loved that photo. Note the guy over Cantona's right shoulder. I've never seen anyone look so stunned. The chap on the far lef top row who has the expression of "i've been waiting for this to happen for years . . . The excited person to the right of the kick-recipient . . . the dude in the black leather jacket behind the kick-recipient who just doesn't care about what's going on in front.

All around, a great picture.

I think Cantona was banned for 6 or 8 months because of this incident, though as it turns out, the fan probably said enough to deserve a kicking.

bk

 

[Jovan]

Hah... he actually kicked him? That's definitely a footballer if I ever saw one fight.

 

[Tango Yankee]

Wasn't it the eternally young Matthew Broderick in the hit movie Ferris Bueller's Day Off who kickstarted this look in the mid 80s?

I always thought it was the immortal Elvis who started the trend.

Cheers,
Tom

 

[Feraud]

Hmmm The King certainly had large collars but did he "pop" them?
I am not sure if I can remember seeing that. Does your picture show it? I cannot make it out.

 

[Jovan]

I'm pretty sure the collars were meant to be like that... a large "Nehru" collar or something.

 

[Fletch]

I Object

...to all these people wearing A-2 jackets that are in any way inauthentic. I feel it dishonors the memory of our valiant WW2 airmen. Those huge flapping bodies and oversized pockets are just proof of how soft and materialistic America has become.

lol

 

[Maj.Nick Danger]

...to all these people wearing A-2 jackets that are in any way inauthentic. I feel it dishonors the memory of our valiant WW2 airmen. Those huge flapping bodies and oversized pockets are just proof of how soft and materialistic America has become.

lol

Yes, true. The absolute worst is the "A2" with a huge seam running down the back, thus cleaving the back panel in two!
Totally unsuitable for nose art.

 

[Dr Doran]

My horror continues to be the ubiquitous blue hoodie and flip flops on the girls.

But here are a couple more thoughts.

1. If almost no one wore shorts, a hoodie with a pop cultural reference printed on it, and flip flops and you saw a 20 year old girl dressed like that, it could be really cute and intriguing, especially if she carried herself well and confidently, as she would need to in order to pull off that look when no one else was doing it. The pop cultural reference printed on her hoodie might even look mysterious. As it is, almost every single female undergraduate at Berkeley and I suspect all other universities wear this. It ain't so nice.
2. Likewise, if everyone dressed like I presume we (male) f-loungists (falangists? sounds fascistic, which, let's face it, some of us are approaching with all this, not that I think being highly strict with style is a bad thing) dress, in suits and ties, wing tips, watch chains, fedoras, etc., it might get a tad boring. However, I'd argue it would still look neater than the situation at hand, namely the World Of Hoodies. I cannot, cannot, cannot imagine that even someone from another culture or planet could look at a movie taking place in the 1940s and one taking place in the 1990s and, upon comparing them, would not say that people looked ... better ... in the 1940s. (Let me rephrase that, as the double negatives may have gotten confusing. They confuse me often too. I am saying that a Martian would prefer the look of the 1940s.) Further, it is this conviction, or something like it, that propels many of us to dress as we do and to become aficionados of this style, hence our appearance in this Lounge.

3. A root source of the furor here seems to be a discomfort with the argument that some styles are objectively better than others. Some people find this snobby. I can see their point. However, one way around this is to refrain from intimations that one style is objectively better than others (regardless of what you actually think) and to talk about it this way: if a learned historian of style were to look at the styles of the past 500 years, what would s/he say of the popular styles of the 1990s and the 2000s as compared to the 1910s until about 1960? Thus we avoid both what could be called "the trap of the infinite subjectivity of individual preference" as well as the perhaps "semi-fascistic intimation of objective standards." An analogy would be as follows. A friend of mine said that Bukowski is better than Shakespeare. I answered that I think he is dead, dead wrong. He said it is all a matter of taste and that no one has the right to tell him he is wrong. This is what I next answered: All opinions are not equal. Some have more merit than others. The person who has the greatest right to make a judgment on the respective quality of two authors is the one who has studied literature for a very, very long time. A person who has spent seventy years studying literature of various cultures and of the many intersecting trends in Western literature -- a person who has studied western literature from Homer on up -- would have a better ability to judge quality than someone who had never spent the energy and time to study literature. A serious student of literature has an opinion that is less ephemeral and less subjective. I think the analogy can be extended to fashion and style. The opinion of someone who has closely studied the styles of countless decades has a less subjective opinion than someone who wears whatever is on his floor that morning.
Who has studied this? Anne Hollander in her fascinating and theoretical masterpiece Sex and Suits; G. Bruce Boyer, in a different way, in his book Elegance; and most interestingly, Jacques Barzun in his book From Dawn To Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, especially at the end of it. The last is the most valuable as it connects fashion and style to all, yes, I said all, other cultural, demographic, and political currents in the last 500 years of history. He also wrote it recently, so it is up to date, and while he was very old, in his 90s, so he had seen the entire century.
I know that our democratic instinct causes us to recoil at opinions that sound snobbish. But I think that simply saying "it's all a matter of subjective taste, and don't be judgmental of others" is not an interesting way to complete the conversation.

 

[Feng_Li]

You argued with a postmodernist in Berkley? Brave man!