Dressing for War
LEVIN, MARTIN
Dressing for War Paul Fussell on the history of uniforms. BY MARTIN LEVIN "All my life I have had a thing about uniforms," writes Paul Fussell. He agrees with Thomas Carlyle that appearances...
...This seems like a paradoxical assessment in view of his famously mordant books on the two world wars, The Great War and Modern Memory and Wartime...
...It's because we are different" was the answer...
...Patton's "performance" in battle proved that Goff-man's theory about appearance becoming reality is reversible...
...The leather flight jacket was issued exclusively to flight crews, who frowned upon their being worn by ground soldiers...
...D'Este quotes Eisenhower as saying that Patton was "a problem child...
...The ultimate uniform-lover was General George Patton, whose dandified regalia, including his famous pearl-handled revolver, is given much amused coverage...
...After fifty years, Fussell's annoyance is undimmed...
...Mencken, another unaffiliated troublemaker...
...Ike favored the prudent but slow-moving Omar Bradley—the "G.I...
...The point of all this is that we aren't always "what we wear...
...holed...
...Shortly after World War I, Patton designed for his U.S...
...Fussell also describes "olive drab" uniforms as being "the color of vomit or even excrement...
...The bell bottoms stayed on...
...Next question...
...They're not big secrets, but they can be illuminating— for instance, why the Navy's enlisted personnel has refused to modernize their archaic sailor suits...
...Unauthorized jackets and floppy headgear could lead to confrontations...
...To wit: "Who can behold a symphony orchestra all in white tie and tails without sensing something a bit funny in that anomalous spectacle...
...No way...
...Mastering the front flap was "a matter of nautical pride...
...The reporter asked why the Hare Krishnas dressed differently...
...My presiding emotion was annoyance, often intensifying to virtually disabling anger...
...Fussell assembles an intriguing batch of performance analyses...
...It can be the other way round...
...The grommet was removed from the crown to accommodate earphones...
...Goffman theorizes that there is a dichotomy between appearance and inner reality, and that individuals play a "role" that can eventually be subsumed into their personality...
...Whenever Fussell approaches the subject of the military, he loses his head...
...One sailor summed it up thusly: "The classic bell bottoms, jumper, and white hat is, in my humble opinion, the sharpest dress uniform around...
...Tank Brigade a gaudy get-up topped by a glorified football helmet...
...But the book's subtitle is A Genius for War, which D'Este found more central than the general's preference for fancy dress...
...He agrees with Thomas Carlyle that appearances matter ("Society, which the more I think of it astonishes me all the more, is founded upon cloth...
...When Admiral Zumwalt enacted a uniform change in the Navy of the early 1970s, he ignited a firestorm of resistance...
...likewise, the visored garrison cap with "the fifty mission crush...
...In his memoir Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic, he attributes his often dour critical outlook to his hitches in the Army and Harvard graduate school, both of which he detested...
...You would think that sailors would have happily exchanged their bell bottoms (with a thirteen-buttoned "broad fall front") for trousers with a zippered fly...
...Fussell speculates that it may arise from "generalized anger at anything that looks 'official.'" This changeover can be interpreted as a symptom of cultural decline if you accept Jacques Barzun's credible verdict (in From Dawn to Decadence) that decadence results from the dissolution of authority...
...But when the Germans began their final counterattack during the Battle of the Bulge, it was Patton that Eisenhower called upon to save the day...
...Pride has been the motive behind many small details of military snobbery...
...Robert Frost, among many others, would give Whitman competition...
...I spent four and a half years in uniform without getting a scatological impression...
...Another revelation seeks to explain why the Sisters of Mercy have been exchanging the traditional nuns' habit for mufti...
...When he wore it, he resembled "a football player dressed as a bellboy...
...I never sensed amusement at the Philharmonic, unless the orchestra programmed John Cage...
...General," who was no sharp dresser...
...Life is, in large part, a "performance...
...He quotes a passage from a book by Anthony Powell that describes the get-up of a retired British major who likes to relax wearing an evening dress and a picture hat...
...A large number of Fussell's reflections are amiably innocuous, such as why chefs wear white and why UPS drivers dress in brown...
...Fussell claims his ideas on dress were influenced by Erving Goff-man's classic book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life...
...Fussell identifies with H.L...
...And Barbara Cart-land may have cranked out romance fiction unlimited, but not in the butcher paper medium that gave us Dashiell Hammett...
...The Rangers protested strongly—and won...
...Uniforms is a once-over lightly on the motivations behind contemporary costuming...
...But this cross-dressing interlude appears in From a View to A Death—a work of fiction...
...So says Fussell, quoting Carlo D'Este, Patton's biographer...
...His latest book is a ray of sunshine in a season of apocalyptic publishing...
...The rest of the Army got tan berets instead...
...He is selectively "antiwar" without being "anti-violence" (his essay "Thank God for the Atom Bomb" is an outstanding contribution to devil's advocacy...
...One of these comes out of an exchange between a reporter and Swami Prab-hudbada, founder of the Hare Krish-nas...
...He did so because, as military historian Gerald Astor put it in his book on the Ardennes battle, Patton could be counted on to "get the show on the road...
...And in Uniforms: Why We Are What We Wear, Fussell tries to sort out the secrets of the wardrobe closet...
...Then there was the recent attempt by the Joint Chiefs to cheapen the Army Rangers' exclusive black berets by issuing them to the entire Army...
...And some of his notions are purely idiosyncratic...
...The author is also inclined toward unqualified absolutes, such as stating that Walt Whitman is "America's greatest poet" and Barbara Cartland is "a pulp fiction writer...
...Some sartorial attitudes are unpredictable...
...You can't argue with what is really a matter of taste...
...But Fussell's outstanding attraction is that he can't be pigeonMartin Levin is a writer living in New York...
...Fussell can be a refreshingly cheery social critic...
Vol. 8 • January 2003 • No. 18
