[Series] Fig Leaves and Fancy Pants (introduction)

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NOTE: This page is intended as a thematic overview of the meetups in the series, but is not itself a meetup. To RSVP, please see the individual events as they are announced on the Wisdom and Woe calendar.

Clothing is protective of health and hygiene, but it is also ornamental, communicates wealth, status, political ideals, emotional states, group membership, and personal identity. It can be expressive or repressive of one's inner life (via disguise, compulsory uniforms, sumptuary laws, etc.). It functions symbolically not only to distinguish one's relationship with society, but as synecdoche for society itself.

In the 19th century, dandyism promoted extravagant costume and opulent lifestyles closely associated with aristocracy. Dandies provided a surprisingly consistent foil for Melville's satire, while scantily-clad Polynesians dramatized his philosophy of austere egalitarianism, ala Thoreau, Tolstoy, and others.

The sacred and profane aspects of ceremonial clothing were treated by Melville in "The Whiteness of the Whale" and "The Cassock" chapters of Moby-Dick, respectively. And even the Pale Usher is "threadbare in coat, heart, body, and brain." For Edward Carpenter, clothing's spiritual significance was in its ability to stifle both body and soul: "one might almost as well be in one's coffin as in the stiff layers of buckram-like clothing commonly worn nowadays.... Eleven layers between him and God! .... Who could be inspired under all this weight of tailordom?"

Political revolutions and counter-revolutions can manifest sartorially, as in White-Jacket's fictionalized "Rebellion of the Beards." The psychologist J.C. Flügel protested the so-called "Great Male Renunciation" that stigmatized colorful menswear. He declared that "Our motto should be 'Better and Brighter Clothes,'" while (ironically) also prophesying that a more enlightened age would embrace a "nude future." His views were shared by the "Men's Dress Reform Party" and "Sunlight League"--the latter of which euphemistically promoted nudity as a form of alternative medicine deemed "helio-therapy." Despite their discontent, no protestors were known to publicly set fire to their unmentionables.

Series schedule:

Fig Leaves and Fancy Pants (schedule)

Extracts:

"...if yonder Emperor and I were to strip and jump overboard for a bath, it would be hard telling which was of the blood royal when we should once be in the water." (White-Jacket, 56)
"But do these buttons that we wear attest that our allegiance is to Nature? No, to the King." (Billy Budd, Sailor, 21)
"By this code, the minutest things in life were all ordered after a specific fashion. More especially one's dress was legislated upon, to the last warp and woof. All girdles must be so many inches in length, and with such a number of tassels in front. For a violation of this ordinance, before the face of all Mardi, the most dutiful of sons would cut the most affectionate of fathers." (Mardi, 2.23)
"People may say what they will about the taste evinced by our fashionable ladies in dress. Their jewels, their feathers, their silks, and their furbelows, would have sunk into utter insignificance beside the exquisite simplicity of attire adopted by the nymphs of the vale on this festive occasion. I should like to have seen a gallery of coronation beauties, at Westminster Abbey, confronted for a moment by this band of island girls; their stiffness, formality, and affectation, contrasted with the artless vivacity and unconcealed natural graces of these savage maidens. It would be the Venus de' Medici placed beside a milliner's doll." (Typee, 22)
"“All is vanity.” All." (Moby-Dick, 96)

For further exploration: