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Save us from this smart-casual hell（758 words）
By Robert Armstrong
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I am a member of the worst-dressed demographic in the world: caught between the last fumes of youth and the heaviness of late middle age; of an acceptably well-paid (or at least prestigious) profession; city-dwelling, with the pretensions of cultural sophistication that entails; and a man.
Clothing-wise, my tribe has lost the plot. And there is a single outfit that proves this beyond a shadow of a doubt: the sports jacket (or blazer) worn over jeans. Here is the very face of smart-casual hell.
The problem is widespread. On a recent five-minute walk down Piccadilly, a stone’s throw from the temples of Savile Row and Jermyn Street, I counted five men dressed in this satanic hybrid.
Nor is the disaster confined to a single combination of garments. The FT’s fashion editor, in a transparent but successful effort to provoke me, has sent me a file full of pictures taken at the Cannes Film Festival. This is just the kind of place where smart casual should have its best expression: Hollywood and Europe, business and pleasure, the Riviera and high art. If the clothes in the pictures were a movie, though, the genre would be horror and the budget would be low. Here, an ageing action star (Arnold Schwarzenegger, pictured above) paired his jeans with a seersucker jacket. There, an actor in a black suit and black shirt, with green suede trainers. This in a setting where aesthetics are at a premium and money is plentiful. If male movie stars cannot manage smart casual, the rest of us are doomed.
The problem is not the lack of conventionality — it is the lack of imagination or sense of what works, of which rules might be fun to follow and which it might be fun to break.
Some readers will bristle here. Why should a man not dress as he pleases at the weekend or of an evening? But this attitude, far from resolving the problem, diagnoses it. It expresses the motto of philistines everywhere: “I know what I like.” With this dull-witted refrain, ignorance and insensitivity about food, books, movies, visual arts and clothing are elevated. No, men, you do not know what you like. That is how you ended up wearing a blazer with jeans.
The reason this brand of aesthetic failure is characteristically male is obvious enough. The second world war generation could rely on a more or less rigid set of conventions that protected them (without any guarantee that they looked good) from sartorial depravity. One wore a suit and tie at work; when socialising, one could switch to a sports jacket, perhaps even take off the tie (this last step was not to be taken lightly — I remember my wife’s grandfather growling, only about one-third joking, at an underdressed young guest: “For my party, you put on a tie”).
In the intervening generations, the rules have fallen away, a process that has accelerated in the past two decades. With the disappearance of the tie, and with nothing to indicate informality, men have begun to flop around like fish on a boat deck. The poor dope got up in this blazer-and-jeans jumble has the vague intuition that a T-shirt or jumper and jeans no longer fits his station in life. At the same time, he is haunted by the fear that wearing a suit makes him look like the stiff that he almost certainly is. He responds by splitting the difference. Each half of the outfit brings out the incongruity of the other; the whole reads as a cry for help.
(Women, meanwhile, have long had to manage a lack of hard-and-fast rules — and been told, all along, to pay attention to clothes. This is unfair. The result, however, is that the women of my tribe dress better than the men.)
Can we be saved from the smart-casual shipwreck? Perhaps not. We must live in the world we have unmade. My solution is to embrace my inner square. When there is the slightest ambiguity about what to wear, at work or away from it, I overdress. Having picked a strategy, I know what to buy: dark suits; English shirts and shoes; expensive European ties. The problem is, I cannot pretend that my approach is anything but a personal choice and as eccentric as anyone else’s. I may be protected from looking like an absolute fool, but I have to absorb a lot of puzzled looks, too.
Clothing is like religion: once the old rules are gone, there is no bringing them back, even when we miss them.
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