The Clothing of the American Mind
BROOKS, DAVID
The Clothing of the American Mind Fashion in the Information Age BY DAVID BROOKS Milan People who know me well will not be surprised to learn that I attended men's fashion week in Milan this...
...What manly American man would want to have to go up to one of his hunting buddies and say, "Excuse me, I think I left my brooch on the floor of your Yukon...
...And that's the way it is throughout the information economy...
...In eyewear, I saw a range of colors beyond all describing...
...They invent laws like Moore's Law to illustrate the relentless pace of progress, and they use phrases like "ashheap of history" to situate people who do not stay on the cutting edge...
...But it was still pretty intense...
...On the contrary, he's got to have antennae finely tuned for others' reactions...
...The brave individual stays ahead of society...
...He is a risk taker, saying and doing extraordinary things to win attention, knowing that once you're famous there are few penalties for being wrong or outrageous...
...I am an activist, not a drone...
...He fused the attention-getting techniques of art and advertising, and so created a potent combination for staying famous...
...They are the industry geniuses, like the genius chefs of the restaurant world and the genius analysts of Wall Street...
...We'll never remember anything that happened more than a few months back, and we'll never think more than a season ahead...
...So you can pretty much tell at a glance how long the person you are talking to has owned his costume...
...We are moving into an overcommunicated world, in which there are too many TV stations, too many websites, too many start-ups, too many commentators, too many conference panels, too many brands competing for eyeballs...
...Businessmen used to disdain genius...
...In fact, Gigi's clothes were so nice, and yet in a tasteful sort of way, I began wondering, Why don't I have a look...
...But really the whole point was for him to be this way...
...Each individual and each company has to wade into this tangle of messages and find a sustainable spot where survival is possible...
...We're used to identifying the harmful effects of bad ideas...
...While Gigi was talking, the reporters kept up a running commentary with each other about what he was saying...
...Across town, Tom Ford, another more celebrated designer who has worked at Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche, was spoken of in hushed tones...
...He was bouncing all around the exhibition space, talking to everybody and readjusting everything...
...The quintessential American designer, on the other hand, is Ralph Lauren, a Jewish guy trying to succeed in the world by mastering the art of Anglican restraint...
...Gigi is a passionate man, and he leapt up from the table to show off the menswear he had designed for the season...
...And I like to think of myself as a fashion vacuum even by our local standard...
...Living in this sort of industry takes total commitment: cultivating one's brand, staying on the cutting edge, building up one's cultural capital, hopping from job to job as the winds of innovation shift...
...That's why they dress so perfectly, to enhance their persona...
...Nevertheless, there I was jetting into the brand new David Brooks is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD and author of Bobos in Paradise, now available in paperback (Touchstone...
...Everything revolves around an animating genius...
...It looked like Mamma Leone running a design revolution...
...Gigi's line is rich, layered, and a little intellectual...
...Gigi was so proud of the little thermometer mounted inside the jacket that I didn't have the heart to point out to him that a thermometer pressed against a human body won't give you much useful information about the weather outside...
...Money is important, but apparently it is secondary to buzz, since money follows buzz...
...But today, CEOs are no longer just chief bureaucrats...
...He has a genius for reading cultural signifiers, knowing to behave one way with the cowboy hat crowd and another way with the counterculture set...
...Even the fashionistas don't get this grandiose...
...Arthur Schlesinger called anti-intellectualism "the anti-Semitism of the businessman...
...They have to be seen as members of the avant-garde...
...He succeeds through application and industry, not flights of vision...
...Whatever I can imagine, I can accomplish...
...You stay on the cutting edge or die...
...I work all the time...
...More broadly, in this economy, a company's value is measured less by its fixed capital in plants and equipment and more by the talent of the people who temporarily work for it...
...I made a little note to myself: Brown is in...
...There was also a stunning diversity of facial hair...
...He is about 35, balding (he styles his remaining fuzz in a little pyramid on the top of his head), and slightly built and frisky, sporting the three-day growth of beard that Italian men do so well and Yasser Arafat does so badly...
...Some years, I swear, I go out with the full intention of buying a suit that isn't gray...
...They don't quote Rousseau...
...This whole publicity apparatus had been erected to celebrate him and his ability to intuit the mind of the consumer...
...Gigi showed me luxury sweatshirts with four or five different fabrics in them ranging from wool to distressed leather, for people who can afford the best but want to hold onto that just-out-of-art-school look...
...This is exactly the sort of high-pressure teamwork that they rave about in Wired and Fast Company magazines...
...Milan was full of people nurturing their brand...
...If you own a restaurant, you want it to be the place where the supermodels go...
...He is, above all, self-confident...
...They have to go to tech conferences and make big, 500-year predictions about the sweep of history...
...You develop your brand...
...It's the economy peppered with consultants and freelancers that economists have been noticing...
...Instead people had strips of carefully shaped fuzz slicing from sideburns to chin, vaguely suggesting the roadmap of a large central city tapering off into a peninsula on either end...
...Milan international airport (which, judging by the time it took to get to the city, seems to have been located in southern Norway...
...But the Information Age really does pose new cultural challenges...
...They worked all night, building and painting the sets, arranging the footwear, organizing the catalogues for the press, making the hors d'oeuvres, and by early the next morning they had transformed the room into a weird glowing space full of earth-tone clothes and lines of footwear, soon to be occupied by hundreds of milling fashionistas chatting over their champagne glasses...
...It is the quality or aura that defines your role in the marketplace...
...Consider some of the operating principles of the fashion world: * The workers are free agents...
...For underneath the glitter, fashion is a highly competitive industry...
...The dot-com shakeout underlined the importance of having a big and trusted brand...
...away from national industries and toward transnational hybrid firms...
...But maybe it's essential...
...On the contrary, it's imperative to deviate (within socially acceptable limits) from the norm in order to establish that distinct identity...
...They have to write wild books with titles like The Road Ahead...
...Nor is he a rugged individualist, as one might have found on the American frontier...
...At the fashion events, the pecking order is marked by where you are seated...
...The people who tell the old fashion world joke—"That's so 5 minutes ago . . . "—are scarcely exaggerating...
...Their whole industry is about cultivating a brand...
...I am a revolutionary...
...And the keepers of the brand are quite supple about attending to the care and nurture of their per-sonas...
...For when you actually look at the fashion world, you see two things...
...But I wonder who is being delusional here...
...In his recent book The Future of Success, Robert Reich drops in the stray sentence "Harvard University is becoming the world's preeminent brandportal for learning," which is certainly an interesting way of putting it...
...The essence of this new mode is the competition for attention...
...The colors were black and the materials artificial, so everybody walked around looking like they were wearing a laptop travel case...
...Why I Never Hire Brilliant Men" was the title of an article in American magazine in 1924...
...The race is fastest at the front...
...The fashionistas have been climbing the status ladder from one prestigious house (or brandportal) to the next for decades...
...The underlying clothing might be brown or black, but half the men I ran into this week had some sort of obsession with florid scarves...
...And ambitious young strivers are supposed to think, in the words of Gary Hamel's current business bestseller, Leading the Revolution, like "seers" and "heretics...
...He has a great rhythmic sense for when people are sick of a cultural trend and ready to hop on a countertrend...
...Nor is he a Dale Carnegie gladhander...
...He has a short time horizon, because the great blizzard of messages quickly obscures anything that happened as long as a few months ago...
...The high status front row is generally given to celebrities and celebrity journalists...
...Some journalists specialize in writing about footwear, but they are so low status they have to sit in the back and can't see the shoes...
...So how do you attract attention and get hired...
...Most of these freelancers had been flown in at the last moment to build the show: a producer from New York, models from Paris, lighting people from Italy, others from Britain...
...You wear the hell out of it...
...That's why their dinner parties are always at the "it" restaurants...
...The next rows are given to the buyers from the big stores, the people who do the millions of dollars of actual business with the houses...
...The value of the company depends on the mystique that surrounds the genius...
...The designer's name is Gigi...
...away from rigid hierarchies and toward flexible teams...
...If Donna Karan designs three-tier shirt collars that look like folded napkins, you'd better not be caught in a single-tier collar...
...There were sweaters, hooded parkas (artificial fur for environmental reasons...
...No sooner did I arrive downtown than I was whisked over to a fashion house, where I found myself sitting at a table with a hot designer on the eve of his winter show...
...In the Information Age we have a set of industries where many people are either free agents or short timers...
...Every other year or so I drag myself out to buy a new suit, and when I come back my wife greets me with, "What shade of gray did you buy this time...
...It's the sort of temporary arrangement that sociologists worry about in essays on the "Death of Loyalty...
...This is my work...
...But aside from that, we are an unbelievably demure lot—even in supposedly arty neighborhoods like Santa Monica and Soho, where brown would be a daring departure from the normal black on black...
...But second, and more ominously, you see the shape of things to come...
...The problem is to figure out what sorts of temptations and corruptions the information economy does pose, and then—since we're not going to abandon the Information Age economy—figure out what sorts of cultural institutions we can set up to remind people how to separate what really matters from the onslaught of ephemera...
...A brand is like an identity or a persona...
...When you look at the fashion industry you Businessmen used to disdain genius...
...He showed me rich chocolate colored corduroy jackets and intricate herringbone cardigans with little pockets for your cell phone...
...Nope, too loud...
...We don't have time to spend agonizing in front of our armoires, trying to figure out if the green in our silk chemise brings out or overpowers the blond tinting in our hair...
...If you type "branding" into the Amazon.com search engine, you find 69 recent books with that word in the title...
...There's a reason Andy Warhol is still on people's minds...
...One of the perplexities of my week in Italy was that I repeatedly found myself deep in cocktail chatter with semi-beautiful women with no fixed address and no clear occupation, talking about, say, the wonders of homeopathic jet lag remedies...
...But then I get to the store and look at the suits, a rainbow of gaudy navy blues and garish blacks...
...The Brand Called You is the title of Tom Peters's advice book...
...Then I notice a gray one fading modestly into the background on some distant rack, and I admire its self-effacing dignity...
...In Germany and Holland the newsreaders on the nightly news wear bright plum sport coats...
...If you were a dashing young anthropology professor who had just won a MacArthur grant, this is how you would dress on your way to a corporate-funded technology conference on Lake Como...
...He's unembarrassed by a level of self-promotion that would have seemed distasteful a few decades ago...
...Conservatives are veteran culture warriors...
...But at least they get to be in the room...
...away from patient verbal communication and toward fast-paced visual communication...
...Various aides walked up to Gigi while he was talking to tell him things, and one finally told him to pipe down and get off the stage...
...Eric's brother has a wonderful collection of just barely out of date menswear...
...If you come into a meeting in an Armani suit, that says one thing about you...
...One jacket was made out of some fuzzy wool—shorn from the Phyllis Diller of sheep—with a lining of one of those hightech polyesters...
...If you own a fashion house, you want Madonna at your show...
...The Clothing of the American Mind Fashion in the Information Age BY DAVID BROOKS Milan People who know me well will not be surprised to learn that I attended men's fashion week in Milan this year...
...Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, and the like are auteurs—visionaries, philosophes, charismatic leaders...
...They sit in full view of the crowd, ignoring the show and talking on their cell phones...
...The fashion people have been perfecting for decades the mentality, tactics, and behavior that other Information Age workers are only now coming to grips with...
...In France they are French...
...vatism of American male fashion, which has silently shaped my wardrobe, and probably yours, too...
...We’re simple cowboys who drive cars with names like Yukon, Expedition, and Durango...
...We're simple cowboys who drive cars with names like Yukon, Expedition, and Durango...
...There was a profusion of male brooches— sophisticated clusters of gold and silver—sprouting on their lapels...
...One night I found myself at a dinner table next to an American named Eric, a big blond guy who looks like a more ruggedly handsome Andy Gibb...
...You could tell by the way our gratitude glowed off the strands of jewelry in her elegantly shaded blond hair...
...I am no longer a foot soldier in the march of progress...
...There’s a reason Andy Warhol is still on people’s minds...
...Commerce follows the stars...
...They want their brand to have some of the prestige that rubs off from those glamorous brands...
...Some go for green glasses, some bright orange, and a handful favor the chunky black that suggests intellectual seriousness...
...Everyone is an auteur...
...Then you give it away...
...By the morning of the actual show, Gigi was out of his mind...
...And the more I thought about it, the more I began to be amazed at the stunning conserWe stolid Americans are supposed to look at all this as decadent frippery...
...The next day they both showed up at work in brown...
...In traditional capitalism, the hero is utilitarian and practical...
...Recently Calvin Klein got into a bitter and public feud with one of its licensees, Warnaco, in part because Klein thought Warnaco was tarnishing the brand...
...And even in Britain they wear those electrocuted pinstripe suits, with vibrating striped shirts and oversized cuffs...
...They are the ones who focus attention on one brand or another...
...He pointed out that almost all of them were wearing brown, whereas eight months ago they would have been wearing black...
...He is always productive, using every social event and chance meeting to build his network and publicize his brand...
...But the Information Age johnnies live in a jungle of communication...
...The trivial will crowd out the eternal...
...We were surrounded, and I am not exaggerating, by nine publicists for his company—two from the United States, two from Germany, one from Japan, and four from Italy...
...If Christian Dior is doing the trailer trash look, then you'd better get on the Winnebago...
...That's why they seem to be on a first name basis with race car drivers, club owners, and the best polo ponies...
...The Silicon Valley guys talk about the need to stay at the forefront of change...
...This is my life...
...Why don't I try to express anything with my costume, anything beyond pure nullity...
...In Milan, I came across men wearing an incredibly wide variety of looks, and not only among the fashionista types...
...There was a press conference at 8:30, which started about 9:15...
...You forget about wearing anything for a year," Eric said, speaking of people in his line of work...
...But the cultural offensive of the 1960s isn't the only thing that influences American character...
...But this year the trend is a natural look on the outside, and high-tech on the inside...
...In fashion, of course, people have been competing for eyeballs, as the Internet types say, for centuries...
...The experts who write about the global economy point to the emerging trends: away from industrial production and toward the manufacture and marketing of ideas and images...
...The rule seems to be that if you are beautiful you can be yourself, but if you are ugly you must be interesting...
...They have the worst view of the action...
...In other words, this show was put on by an ensemble of free-agent consultants who were called together to complete this one high-pressure project before dispersing to the four winds, or the next show...
...There's a reason the new elites revere Picasso...
...Gigi had racks of knitwear, all nubby and textured...
...She was affiliating her brand with our brand, and we all knew something glorious was happening...
...Then further back are the non-celebrity journalists, the ones who are not high profile editors but who do the actual writing...
...But if their world becomes the whole world, pretty soon we'll all be changing scarves and looks and personalities every six months in desperate competition for attention and cool...
...That was good, because Gigi certainly wasn't going to let them interrupt him to ask questions...
...Instead, he is a protean figure, constantly changing in surprising and contradictory ways in order to win attention...
...Some prefer to set up sprawling exhibits, with models standing around like sculptures and the rest of the clothes displayed on the walls and racks like pieces of environmental art at the Guggenheim...
...He is not the conformist that David Ries-man worried about in The Lonely Crowd...
...Gucci has shown that you want to leverage your brand into the mass market to make the big profits, but you've got to do it without diluting the brand identity...
...We stolid Americans are supposed to look at all this as decadent frippery...
...The big designers maintain their prestige not by having any fixed capital, or even by staying at one house, but by sustaining their aura...
...I even considered returning home and buying a brown suit...
...He probably didn’t create great paintings, but he created one fabulous brand with staying power...
...There was a brief moment around 1972 when Joe Namath was wearing fur coats, when American men dressed creatively (and horribly, it must be said...
...I see something and I just have to sketch it down...
...We were going through Gigi's line of travelwear for next fall...
...They hop from job to job, but very often their product is intangible or a matter of taste...
...Their stock prices rise and fall on their reputations for creativity...
...We'll all be on the floor of our SUV wondering whatever happened to that damn brooch...
...In fact, this is the quintessential industry of the Information Age...
...This seems to be the ratio in the fashion business—about a dozen publicists for every actual designer...
...They say men's fashion week in Milan is only a fraction as intense as women's fashion week...
...I liked Eric because he was one of the few people who didn't look at my two-year-old suit with the expression of one who has just passed fresh roadkill...
...realize that the people who dominate these companies have been operating in a new-economy mode for decades...
...I live in Washington, which has got to be the most sartorially unimaginative city in the world not excluding Tehran under the ayatollah...
...Everybody else has to wait outside...
...Hamel has a little creed in his book: "I am no longer captive to history...
...This was the first time I'd been to an Italian press conference, and it was a little bit different in that nobody stopped talking...
...This is my passion...
...People are more influenced by the way they live than by ideas passed along in a lecture or on a TV show...
...So of course Gigi was the center of the marketing effort for his house...
...and AOL, survive, and the little brands that are out there competing for recognition perish...
...They will quickly perceive that while the leading members of the global fash-ionocracy flock to the city to review the new lines, none brings my unique perspective—a total lack of any sense of style...
...The old pioneers faced a daunting wilderness...
...Stop me if this is beginning to sound too much like Bill Clinton or Tina Brown or Al Sharpton or any of the other titans of buzz...
...And if the Information Age workplace threatens to turn Americans into frenetic self-branders, competing for buzz and attention, that's just as big a threat to virtue as anything the tenured radicals could dream up...
...The day before Gigi's show, I walked into the space where the "installation" was to take place...
...Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Richard Branson are auteurs —visionaries, philosophes...
...if you come in wearing Betsey Johnson, that says another...
...Big brands thrive...
...But in their world, companies have always been structured like workshops, with teams of creative people striving to implement the vision of one "genius...
...For people in the industry, this isn't frivolous trend-mongering, it's professional survival...
...When Gigi made that comment about most of the publicists in our meeting wearing brown instead of black, I noticed that in fact two women at the table were not wearing brown...
...People rush into things like e-commerce willy-nilly because they feel that the cost of missing the next big thing is death...
...Industrial age managers were under constant pressure to make their production processes more efficient...
...Journalists and celebrities are the keepers of the buzz...
...We are all becoming fashionistas...
...But this is the way more and more people are going to be living...
...The publicists kept telling me what a genius he is...
...Their goal is to become the genius around whom a company revolves...
...The jungle of communication breeds a certain type of individual...
...But today, CEOs are no longer chief bureaucrats...
...Not all designers have traditional catwalk shows...
...You buy something you like...
...Sometimes if you read conservative literature, you get the impression that the American educational system is absolutely incompetent at teaching students how to read and write, and deviously brilliant at passing along every corrupting idea hatched in a New Left faculty lounge...
...he exclaimed...
...We're substantive, sensible folk, after all, with more important things to think about...
...The fashionistas don't write books that you can refute...
...Gigi pointed to all the publicists sitting around the table: "These fabulous, fabulous women," he called them...
...And in his hyper mode, he looked the part...
...By constantly reinventing himself, he kept himself in the public eye...
...He's got to show he is cerebral, edgy, avant-garde...
...He's worked at Hugo Boss and other houses and said that in his business you get to recognize the signs—the notch in a lapel, the placement of a button—that mark each season's suits...
...People who know their fashion would be able to describe his stuff in evocative terms...
...If you catch me not wearing a blue shirt, a red tie, and a gray suit, it's probably because the dry cleaner sent back the wrong items by mistake...
...Few men wore the standard issue goatee that relief pitchers in America tend to adopt...
...Let me just say first off his clothing is brown...
...A screenwriter can't measure his or her output in widgets, neither can a computer game designer, a publicist, a graphic artist, or an academic...
...Too loud...
...One of the interesting effects of this brand-consciousness is the way it elevates the cultural power of journalists and celebrities...
...He has a great tolerance for flux and insecurity...
...That means that the workplace is supposed to become a creative workshop, where the masters help their underlings stretch their minds...
...The flood of e-mail and instant messages will be overwhelming...
...Andy Warhol probably didn't create great paintings, but he created one fabulous brand...
...The firm's French publicist phoned to say she wasn't going to be able to make it because of traffic...
...We're used to regarding the fashion world as a frivolous carnival, a sideshow to the really important parts of life...
...Last year, Gigi explained, the look was "technological...
...In the middle there was an old woman in black peasant garb shouting orders to everybody...
...As the modern cliché goes, the company's chief assets walk out the door each evening and go home...
...I went to one that was part-restaurant, part museum, part eclectic lifestyle shop, part hotel, and I knew my hosts were chic because when the main course was cleared (at about midnight), the owner of the restaurant, a big local celebrity, sat down at our table and had the waiter bring her some tea...
...Men in the rest of the world are not like this...
...First, and most obviously, you see what is indeed a decadent floating party cycle for Eurotrash...
...The industry is already a highly evolved version of the global Information Age economy, and the people you see in the fashion industry are highly evolved products demonstrating what it takes to thrive under the new rules...
...When the going gets rough, the big brands, like Yahoo...
...This is the way the fashion industry has always worked...
...The room was bare except for a few raw boards and lots of technicians running around...
Vol. 6 • March 2001 • No. 25
