Wolves in Cheap Clothing

...The veiled exclusivity in downscale chic can best be viewed in one of the primary testaments to the phenomenon: those ubiquitous black-and-white portraits hawking The Gap...

...First, the privileged aren’t just importing the underdog into their penthouses like Gruyere and tulips...

...If you’re sitting with working-class types at Bob’s, on the other hand, people might mistake you for one of them...

...Downscale chic, on the other hand, seeks to sever, or at least muddle, the commodityklass connection...

...The great wonder, and the great flaw, of downscale chic is that anyone can play, even if they don’t get all the nuances of those Gap ads...

...So chic’s strange alchemy has gone to work...

...In fact, it tells you it’s better not to...

...Today, however, the interests of society and style have momentarily converged...

...Consider Sylvia’s soul food eatery in Harlem, one of the protodownscale establishments, which has managed to be an early casualty of the style...

...Still, there’s something sort of eighties about the Royalton, and Schraeger’s genius is in knowing which way the wind blows: After five years of whining about downward mobility, people now seem ready to revel in it...

...Now one has to demonstrate superiority to both the rich and (this is where it gets ugly) the ordinary...

...Hollywood mogul Barry Diller isn’t struggling, but when he visited D.C...

...Less jaded magazines seem to pull it off more gracefully...

...Six years ago in Washington, for instance, Sol Price opened a group of membership-only warehouses in deepest suburbia to sell bulk goods to Korean grocers...

...Washington Post matriarch Kay Graham has parked her limo in exchange for a four-wheel drive...

...And necessity’s never beeii the chief motivator of New York entrepreneur Ian Schraeger, who recently opened the mid-priced, muc h-hyped Paramount Hotel, which can best be described as a YMCA with attitude...

...in the sixt Les Tom Wolfe singlehandedly put an end to it with his acid “Radical Chic...

...How to convince you that the Park Avenue Cafe is hip again...

...Hip,” approved the Times, “in a Charles Bukowski kind of way...

...Schraeger is also the brain behind one of the city’s most decadent hotels, the Royalton, where rooms run about $400 a night...

...What thrilled Tom Wolfe’s East Siders about hanging out with Black Panthers...

...Naturally, haute-yup advertisers are scrambling to adjust to the gestalt...

...And given the choice between exclusivity and popularity-genuine inclusiveness-there’s really no contest, even for the downscalers...

...Then, before the guests arrived, they kicked Al’s regulars out...

...In a hyperdivided country, as politicians and sociologists wring their hands, the affluent, of all people, seem to be launching a top-down assault on snobbery, insisting that class distinctions be minimized and communal values Radical cheap The nineteenth-century French toasted it as nostalgie de la boue...

...Small change Why does the elite crave distinction from the masses even while dipping into mass culture...

...The consensus: the Bowery bash was a style coup...

...Still, it’s not derelicts he really seems worried about-it’s style-striving suburbanites...

...From the exclusivity of Nell’s to everybody’s Al’s, urban trendies young and old seem to be atoning for the overt materialism and snobbery of the eighties...

...While party chatter centered on the usual things-furniture prices and newly bankrupt young designers-the guests arrived, not in Armani, but in thriftshop high heels, retro-chiffon, and sweat suits...

...stretch limo,” Jay McInerney recently confessed during an interview at the once-chic, now empty restaurant Odeon...

...So on a Saturday night last May, Al’s became, for a brief moment, the place for Manhattan’s beau monde to be featured...

...McInerney may have felt yoked as a fact-checker at The New Yorker, but what with tens of thousands of jobs lost on Wall Street and the publishing industry foundering, today’s bright young thing is g,rateful to be a coatchecker at Wetlands...

...And featured they were, the next Sunday in the style section of The New York Times, a week later in The New Yorker, and a week after that in Newsday...

...In fact, the backlash has already begun...

...it’s probably not going to happen...

...We’re kind of against publicity,” he avers...

...In the sixties, Wolfe theorized, the elite aped the less privileged because they were rich enough to get away with it...

...It just can’t commit...

...Downscale chic started with, and is continually reinforced by, economics, but by now it’s transcended necessity...

...The nineties seem to argue that the rich ape the poor because it’s cheaper...

...People like what they like...

...The menu looks a lot like Acme’s: fried clams, mashed potatoes, peach cobbler...

...we’ve found a wonderjid stone farmhouse in Bucks County...

...Many businesses, needless to say, have a great stake in returning cheap to its original tacky status...

...Consider a recent essay in The New York Observer on the new, more catholic definition of sophistication...

...It is the matter,’’ Wolfe wrote, “of the marvelous contradictions on all sides...

...Downscale chic teases us, in small ways, with the promise of unity...

...If Al’s seems about as far away from eighties’ boites like Indochine as you can get in Manhattan, that seems to be the point...

...Of course, it’s hard to get misty-eyed over the fact that rich folk no longer venture to Harlem in locked cabs for brunch...

...For the compulsively stylish, there’s a practical payoff to this trend...

...The decor consists of POW-MIA flags and an Elvis poster...

...With so many of the young and youngish elites experiencing cash-flow problems, expensive is no longer practical as a determinant of style...

...Just as the GI bill devalued a college education-almost any hayseed could get a B.A.mass appropriation of yuppie geegaws has sent their status value plummeting...

...Unfortunately, some downscalers are intent on preserving their differences, although now it’s more complicated than it was in the eighties...

...Maybe it’s that everyone eating at Acme is in on the joke...

...It tells you, even if you are spectacularly wealthy and educated, that it’s okay not to blow the equivalent of Haiti’s annual per-capita income on an entree...

...Now Sylvia’s is a joke on “Saturday Night Live” and the elite stay away in droves...

...Waitresses...

...The credibility Gap Or at least, judging by the Levis and the cornbread, they should be converging...

...Dockworkers...

...Richard Price’s tale of a Jersey drugdealer, Clockers -Bonfire Without the Vanities, as someone put itthreatens to be the book of the summer...

...I’d be embarrassed now to step out of the back of a Katherine Boo is an editor ofThe Washington Monthly...

...Wolves in Cheap Clothing In search of substance in the new downscale style by Katherine Boo With hundreds of nightclubs in Manhattan alone-clubs with palm trees, red velvet, strobe lights, men showering in little glass stalls-you’d think there’d be no shortage of places for two guys to throw a party...

...At New York cocktail parties, the true elite is repeating it like a mantra: We hate the phony Hamptons scent...

...But it’s also easy to envision a more cosmic return from downscale chic-the subversion of America’s snob tradition...

...Instead, they’ve selected such regular guys as Tony Kushner, Joan Didion, Gus Van Sant, and John Richardson...

...Donald and Ivana may be struggling, but they didn’t have to go to K-Maxt to buy their kids’ school supplies last winter...

...Even if it’s snobbery that propels folks to pool halls, there they will at least have the chance to discover that they have more in common than they thought with the Hispanic asbestos removers at Table 9. With time and heart, the willingness to dress and play like the less privileged could conceivably bloom into a willingness to live with them...

...Lose the opportunity, and the only thing to endure from this style-blip of the nineties will be exactly what we don’t need: a smug sense among the elite, alter a few years of cheap clothes and bowling, that they’ve been there, gotten down with the masses, identified...

...Even the remnant fetishes, like Shaker furniture, seem penitential...

...They’ve learned what it’s like to really do without...

...Everybody’s looking around in a faintly guilty manner, the way people do when someone has silently broken wind at a tea party...

...Still, the cost of letting downscale chic go without a fight should be clear...

...Of course, the exclusivity impulse isn’t always as subtle as a Gap ad...

...As yuppies learned, ordinary guys are bound to catch on before long...

...Sylvia’s price barrier, unlike, say, Lutece’s, wasn’t formidable enough to intimidate the curious...

...they’re stepping out themselves...

...And a recent issue of Money magazine-one of the prime purveyors of the eighties’ show-show ethic-actually celebrated people who left Wall Street to hang wallpaper or work at Jiffy Lube...

...The Royalton’s so exexalted in the name of style...

...Of course not...

...First, the party planners furiously scrubbed and scented the bathroom...

...Ripped jeans...

...And many style-conscious eighties’ yuppies are now saddled with mortgages and kids...

...And while Spy may despise rich clothiers, its promotional campaign lampoons a parading Shriner in fez and minicar...

...As usual, McInerney’s articulating a trend...

...But nineties-style downscale chic differs in a few key ways from its predecessors...

...And while that may not indicate, as a Time cover story panted recently, “a revolution in progress,” it is a somewhat hopeful sign...

...The house wine is fortified Wild Irish Rose, which starts to flow promptly at opening-8 a.m...

...Cafe society is yielding, it appears, to a sort of lunchcounter chic...

...Instead of hankering for Hermes and other means of telegraphing superiority, the urban elite are searching for common ground: plain food, cheap clothes, basic cars, down-to-earth places like Al’s...

...Until recently, the business of being chic was damned expensive, and a finely calibrated taste could dictate an entire way of life...

...Sometimes that’s 25-year-old Glenlivet, sometimes it’s Pabst Blue Ribbon, and so what...

...Wake us when it’s over...

...The Price Club hasn’t changed much-although it now carries cellular phones-but its popularity with the elite has boosted its status...

...In the past five years, then, Sylvia’s has attracted so many suburbanites and Northern European tourists that the owners have erected an annex to accommodate them...

...These days, if an advertiser or a magazine wants to convey its downscale hipness, the easiest way is to send up the old glitz-so easy that when the June Spy calls Bijan “the horrible Irani immigrant who sells vulgar clothing for thousands of dollars and now has an eponymous perfume,” you sense its heart isn’t in it...

...the atmosphere accords with that niche...

...According to the marketing gurus at DDB Could it be, possibly, that fashion is hinting at an answer to American class isol;stion...

...The slyle-conscious middle class had to bust their butts to get that BMW or Rolex back in the eighties...

...But wait-who are the folks Gap’s creative types have chosen to feature in those ads...

...OK, so this is America...

...clusive it doesn’t have a sign, or liven an address, out front-a fact that surely delights the cognoscenti as much as it confounds the substitute mailman...

...All the June Esquire needs to promise is, “No more tongue confit with almond cookies !” But if the downscalers know that they hate ostentatiousness, it sometimes feels as if they’re not quite convinced they like the alternative...

...Back to basics,” sneers a new ad by the upscale clothier Charivari...

...If the ads actually explained to you that Van Sant makes movies about edge-dwellers in the Pacific Northwest or that Joan Didion writes sociological essays for The New York Review of Books, they wouldn’t work...

...And second, thie impulse is less political or “artistic” than economic...

...If status was determined by the car you drove and the clothes you wore, you had good reason for staying at Goldman, no matter how much you hated it...

...But it came this April, so it featured a bevy of barefoot models in white T-shirts and jeans...

...Had Vogue’s 100th anniversary occurred three years ago, no doubt its cover would’ve drowned in haute couture...

...But when events planner Edward Jowdy and jewelry designer Simon Wilson decided to fete 250 artists, writers, and fashion types this May, they knew none of the usual clubs would do...

...And, posiness notwithstanding, that makes the ethic pregnant with social potential...

...Mass icons like Roseanne...

...This is something to chew on while dining at the Bob’s Big Boy in Bailey’s Crossroads, Virginia...

...Sure it’s hinting...

...Pocket tees...

...So what makes this orange vinyl experience so unchic...

...Needham, who publish regular reports on American living and buying habits, our urban elite is in the process of a significant style shift-down- and the circumstantial evidence is everywhere...

...But the sneaky thing about chic, downscale or otherwise, is that the them-us tension is hard to sustain...

...It’s a derelicts’ bar,” explains party-planner Edward Jowdy...

...Perrier, which for years channeled its water through French countryside and operatic soundtrack, has launched a new ad campaign featuring neighborhood bars and a rundown snack shack...

...Not, mind you, that the consumption of expensive goods is necessarily an indication of snootiness...

...The trouble starts when your pleasure comes, not from savoring the libation, but from signaling your superiority-demonstrating the style chasm between you and everybody else...

...For nearly 50 years, Al’s bar in the Bowery has catered almost exclusively to men with lousy luck and shaky hands...

...Maybe the difference isn’t just that the Big Boy dinner runs about $10 less...

...We all know that America is increasingly segregated by race and class, a separation that was heightened by the money-driven style cues of the eighties...

...Today, if an ’84 Escort is chic and you can take your date bowling in the Port Authority instead of dancing at Xexon, there’s a lot less pressure to devote one’s life to getting and spending...

...And for most of the last half-century, magazines and advertisements have tenderly nurtured that symbolism, until by the eighties it seemed perfectly reasonable to believe that one’s education, intellect, sensitivity, and income level were reflected in one’s choice of lettuce...

...The message of the beautifully photographed ads seems at first democratic: Gee, I can wear $15 T-shirts and jean jackets and still have style...

...The club scene is totally contrived, totally segregated,” says Jowdy...

...While commending herself for identifying true sophistication, not just in well-groomed Chapin grads, but in ambulance drivers and inner-city teachers, a columnist still can’t resist an offhand swipe at “debutantes from Jersey City...

...I think that’s one of the big stories now-denial of the eighties,” wrote Michael Thomas recently in The New York Observer...

...And, like Acme, it’s an OK place to eat...

...Let’s go back to that style-triumph Saturday night at Al’s-back before the elite arrived in the Bowery...

...If that’s a partial explanation for downscale chic, it’s also the death knell...

...Something comes out in the press and you lose control over who shows up...

...We wanted a more natural setting...

...them and us...

...It’s harder than ever for the elite to keep the hoi polloi at bay...

...Yet if one considers the alternative, it’s also difficult to feel wholly gleeful about downscale’s likely demise...

...Their effectiveness depends on their implicitness: their ability to make you feel good-attuned, fashionable, superior -about recognizing the folks in the photos...

...In the late eighties came the elite, and soon after, the press...

...They wanted -they had to have-Al’s...

...The Price Club is still a bleak congregation of buildings, but now the parking lot’s filled with Jaguars and lawyers can be heard at Washington parties bragging about getting 36 rolls of toilet paper for four bucks...

...The same thing that thrills fashion writers about hanging out under a POW-MIA flag...

...Still, Wilson and Jowdy were willing to pay for visitation rights...

...this winter, he forsook the usual French places to sup at the working-class, hamhock-stewing Florida Avenue Grill...

...And every night, that guilt-or whatever it is-propels the fashion-forward past the fin-de-siecle fussiness of the eighties’ restaurantes d’etre to danker environs like Acme, where chickenfried steak is a specialty and the industrial sign at the entrance crystallizes the lowered expectations of the age: “An OK place to eat...

...It is like the delicious shudder you get when you try to force the prongs of two horseshoe magnets together...

...Today, even the Sizzlers Steakhouse chain offers blackened redfish, and the grand prize in a new contest sponsored by the VH-1 cable channel (MTV for the Dockers crowd) is a summerhouse in the Hamptons...

...And they did it-there’s the beauty of it-without ever having to compromise style...

...And when it gets down to it, that’s the sign of the snob, bejeweled or bejeaned: an unwillingness to be mistaken for the ordinary...

...Bonus points for knowing the Very Famous Photographers who took the portraits...