There remains on the internet a surprising amount of anxiety about how men ought to dress. You'd think that in the post-Derek Guy era, it would be a settled topic. But because I follow him on Twitter, I'm exposed to a lot of anxiety in the form of what he quote-tweets: many young men on the internet, and the people who write for them, performing an unshakeable confidence about how a certain kind of dress is wrong, often because it makes you look fat, weak, gay, poor, or boring; a performance that betrays an anxiety thrumming just under the skin about precisely which awful qualities they must be broadcasting with their own clothes---and of which they must be unaware, or at best only suspect in a vague, nagging way.

And why not? Thus has it ever been. It's probably not accurate to say that your clothes say anything about you, or indeed that you are saying anything with your clothes, but that's never stopped us from reading a tremendous amount out of what other people wear. And not all neutral, factual stuff, like "that guy likes metal" and "that guy must live uptown"; stuff like "that guy is trying to be cool but he's not pulling it off"; "fuck that guy [he's wearing driving moccasins]".

The anxiety about how to dress usually stems from an anxiety about what clothes are for. I contend that we all read into what other people wear, and even that we all conclude "fuck that guy" for some subset of dress. But many of us think it's too superficial or conventional to dress order to be read along those lines¹. We often seek other lenses through which to view the whole question of dress, if only because we don't like the idea of organizing life choices around how we're perceived by others.

There's always been the vocal and thoroughly male-coded contingent that insists on a purely utilitarian reading of clothing. It shouldn't matter what your clothes look like, just whether they perform their intended function. Funnily, this contingent doesn't agree internally what the intended function of clothing is: should the utilitarian dress to maximize comfort? Durability under physical strain? Suitability to a wide variety of climates? The optimal balance between tensile strength and lightness, like the trivia about spiders' webs being thus stronger than steel? It comes as no surprise that any of those functions has been thoroughly captured by the fashion industry, and that generally speaking if you decide you want to wear only the most practical clothing, you end up dressing precisely so that everyone understands the rich constellation of values and preferences that are comorbid with practicality.

The aforementioned Guy's response to the anxiety he's quote-tweeting is often something along the lines of "clothing is a language" (And thus, to dress well, learn to speak the language). I think this is roughly true, and roughly corresponds to a lot of the assumptions that I make in the preceding paragraphs---though I think that, as organizing metaphors go, "language" is a pretty shaky one; that might just be because I care even more about language than I do about clothes².

So Guy's idea of communication is pretty close to my idea about people drawing conclusions from dress. But it doesn't completely resolve the problem for everyone. "Learn the language" isn't totally satisfactory to anyone who either remains uncomfortable with the idea of somehow arranging something that feels so personal for others, nor to anyone who is simply unresolved, maybe permanently so, on precisely what sort of person they want the world to conclude that they are. There remains a groundlessness, and the groundlessness continues to produce anxiety.

I was thinking about clothes recently and I decided that if he asked me, I'd recommend that a man trying to sort this out for himself start by orienting himself around two basic principles: love and respect.

I say love because I find both the utilitarian approach (even after resolving the question about what function we want to optimize, precisely) and the communicative approach impoverished. I propose that clothes aren't just protection from the elements, nor are they just an inventory of signs and signifiers that you can hang on your body like a sandwich board. They're also human culture, and I value human culture very much. That is, they are a very tangible representation of generations of innovation and work, all of which is situated in a particular time and place. I love those things for their own sake, just as I love languages and card games and cooking. Your relatives have spent a tremendous amount of time over the years getting awfully creative with clothing, and if you find a way to tap in to some of that creativity (I just got back from Greece; permit me the term tekhne) your life will be the richer for it. Even better news: a tremendous portion of that tremendous creativity was dedicated to beauty and pleasure! People with exactly the same nervous systems as you have have put in the hours to create textiles and shapes and techniques that have beautiful colors, beautiful textures, beautiful silhouettes, feel beautiful to the hand!

So, my interest in clothes and the way I want to dress myself is grounded first of all in a simple, exoteric love for some of these shapes and colors and textures. I would recommend that the anxious man begin there. At the simplest level, what catches his eye? Does he like open, visually interesting textures or understated, highly refined ones? Warm colors? Cool colors? Colors that contrast, match perfectly, or subtly interact? Does he feel (as I do) that Norwegian split toes have a certain universal elegance, and that part of the appeal of wide lapels or double-breasted coats is simply the feeling ot laying across the body like a blanket?

To actually know this for oneself demands attention. The man must begin by actually attending to clothes, his own and others'. He must actually notice how they look and feel, and expand his relatively simple understanding of "how they look" to encompass a lot of different visual dimensions. I say "attending to", and I want to crucially distinguish this from "learning about". He doesn't need to learn the name of that particular shoulder construction, unless that's his kind of thing. The man---especially the man who reads things on the internet in order to decide what kind of clothes to buy---is always at risk of mistaking the knowledge and mastery of a thing for the direct response of his own body-mind to that thing.

Just as critically, though, when I say "direct response", and "attention", and wax otherwise phenomenological, I don't mean that the man must somehow transcend all of the social, communicative elements of dress---the "fuck that guy" of it all--and realize an authentic, unmediated appreciation of clothes. The history and associations of dress are just as much a part of the experience of clothing as anything else. Many of the clothes that I love the most, I love in part because of who they remind me of. Even if that association is entirely internal. Whenever I think about how much I particularly like Norwegian split toes, I think about the first really nice pair of boots I ever bought---a pair of Paraboots in that style---and how well they've served me over many years, and I feel affection for them.

Let this be my provisional solution to the groundlessness we encounter if we approach clothing purely from the angle of utility or communication. If we attend to it, we will come into contact with our own, personal, incorrigible response to the clothes themselves, in their tremendous sensory richness, and that can serve as a ground when other constructs might not.

I say respect because the phenomenon of communication is just as real as our personal experience is. To the man who is aware that all day, every day, the people around him are drawing conclusions about him (or simply being made to feel a certain way) off of the way he dresses, but doesn't necessarily feel that he has a single coherent message that he wants to broadcast, I propose that good dress is grounded in an expression of respect for the people around you.

Here's the thing: respect is ineluctably, irretrievably socially conditioned. It is arbitrary and contingent and varies from place to place; and maybe we shouldn't have to demonstrate it through things like dress and manners at all. If I treat you as a fellow child of God, or a Kantian moral agent, isn't that more important than whether I show up to your wedding in jeans? It is all of these things, and yet it is also a real social phenomenon. As I say: it's not that you're saying anything at all with your clothes as much as it is that the people around you will read them.

Thus: I think the absolutely best thing we can strive to say with our clothes is that we cared enough about the people around us to get dressed properly this morning.

This is a message about those people, and I think it's much more vital than any story we might try to tell about ourselves. The inverse is true of the utilitarian caucus: a man who has decided he ought only to dress for comfort or economy is apt to be read (whether he is or not) as someone who didn't care enough about where they were heading or who they were seeing to put on a proper pair of pants.

This is also because he's a man. I'm a white man, and I'm a computer programmer; that means in the workplace I tend to occupy some of the most privileged positions, elevated over others by virtue of my sex and race, and elevated over colleagues in other functions by virtue of my role and qualifications³. The stereotype of the shorts-and-hoodied developer can of course speak to an admirably democratic, informal, and non-hierarchical spirit---and I can say that most of my colleagues over the years have possessed just that spirit. But I would invite you to look at the way women or the less-prestigious members of that same workplace dress: are they not more likely to put a lot more effort into how they show up to the same place? Is it reasonable to propose that that's in part because their position is less secure than mine?

So whether it's intended to or not, dressing like you don't really give a shit is a realization of privilege. It's unfortunately far too simplistic to make the inverse claim---that dressing nice is an expression of solidarity---and that's why we don't show up to work in a bespoke tux; but we can hopefully claim that putting in an effort is a way to attempt to project respect.