29.10.09. Fashion, or, Have you seen my ringmaster?
I have spent much of my life honing my fashion sense. If we take elementary school as our point of departure (the toddler years have nothing to offer but long stretches of onesies and nudity), we can see the first swift sprouts of my seeds of style: ribbed sideburns, knee-length socks and knee-length shirts, the latter with enough room to consume my legs and one of my smaller classmates. My fashion bonsai was vast and ungainly. Yet even then I knew that to prune with haste was to kill the tree, so I lay in wait. As I got older I kept the same stock of shirts, gradually growing into them, and I clipped with care when I found diseased branches (my Avirex shoes) and burls (my fanny packs). Other branches appeared discolored but I trusted them and let them grow, and through the years my mustard zip-off pants matured into members-only jackets which matured into fluorescence. The earth wasn’t formed in a week; I wasn’t born swaddled in neon. But one day there I was in eighties chic with my bonsai in full beautiful bloom. I danced and mounted speakers and put down my shears forever.
Oh how this world tests our hearts. I have been in Italy for five weeks and already my tree languishes. Back home my vibrant dress turned heads and my neon tested people’s retinal cones. I was a circus clown, juggling outfits and donning such socially offensive combinations as socks with sandals. I enjoyed myself and made others chuckle and groan. But I am now discovering what happens when the American clown leaves his big top and goes gallivanting abroad.
Sometimes these cultural exchanges work out well. In 1890, for example, Buffalo Bill brought his Wild West exhibition to Europe and washed across the continent. With his assortment of cavaliers, Native Americans and prairie animals, Buffalo Bill excited and intrigued European audiences with sights from beyond an ocean most would never cross. In the retrospective Buffalo Bill in Bologna, authors Robert W. Rydell and Rob Kroes write that “Cody’s show traveled across Italy with performances in major cities, including Rome, where Pope Leo XIII singled out the performers for a special blessing. … Wild West concessionaires introduced audiences to popcorn, giving them a lasting taste of American mass culture.” Buffalo Bill enjoyed such great success exporting his show to the Old World because he could provide a novelty of substance to an audience hungry for novelties. That audience is still hungry, but not for the wares I have to sell. My clothes that are outlandish in the States cause a stir here only among the more sensible British exchange students.
The story of the startling status quo of Italian fashion begins and ends with four names: Donatella Versace, Guccio Gucci, Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana. These designers’ trailblazing across the last century has diffused a kaleidoscopic fashion sense among Italians and secured the nation’s status as the most ostentatiously dressed populace in the world.
I am of course accustomed to wearing the same wide array of colors, but despite this common philosophical ground the gulf between my fashion world and theirs is yawning. My dress is based in the Amer-English eighties tradition, and there does not seem to have been an analogue here. Many of our rockers of that time have spread to Italy over the years. But their fashion was stopped at the border. Thus one can go to a bar and hear David Bowie’s “Ziggy Stardust,” but good luck finding a speck of glitter. Italy takes its color much too seriously to give a place to gratuitous things like glitter and neon.
So it is that my clownish dress is misunderstood here. In the U.S. I wear tessellated shirts and neon windbreakers to be fun and silly, and because normal people don’t wear such outrageous things. Here, everybody wears them—high fashion is based on outrageous things—it’s just that the system operates in a different spectrum than I do. This makes me an Italian with poor fashion sense rather than a trailblazing American (with poor fashion sense—that part doesn’t really change).
The other side effect of transporting myself and my wardrobe to Italy is that my most normal American clothes come under scrutiny. I can’t even maintain a low profile with tennis shoes and blue jeans. In the words of one of my collegemates, my white and black Nike Shox are ‘absurd’—this while Italians walk around in gold and silver shoes—and my ‘Loose Straight’ Levi’s look like parachute pants alongside the form-fitting pants some others wear.
That I would get razzed for my infamous American flag jacket might also be expected, but this piece goes over extremely well. This has not so much to do with Obama and our newfound popularity in Europe as it does with the jacket’s kitsch quality. American kitsch has claimed a much greater hold on Italian pop culture than I had previously thought. (This may be connected with the process Buffalo Bill began more than a century ago.) So when Italians question me about American cultural things, they ask about movies and TV shows but also about things like Pez dispensers and foam fingers and Route 66. Around town, store windows display photos and paintings of American highways, and one particularly kitschy store has tin wall hangings that celebrate Pepsi Cola, Marilyn Monroe, and the Transformers. My flag jacket is just one more oddity.
In our shared appreciation for such miscellany, the Italians and I can and do find common ground. Even in fashion. A few nights ago at dinner I wore my standard American outfit of Nikes (not my absurd white ones), Levi’s, a t-shirt and a sweatshirt (a Harley Davidson one that is kitschy in its own right). I sat down to my butterfly pasta and ate in contented silence until a girl got my attention to congratulate me on taking part in the ‘Day of Violet.’ As it turned out, I had worn my purple Sunriver shirt and had sat beside two other guys in purple shirts and sweaters. We laughed and were about to move on when the stream of violet began: nearly every third man to enter the dining hall wore a purple top, and by the end there were about ten of us. We capped the event with a group picture.
What made this coincidence notable was not the purple itself—purple is just another color that Italian men wear—but the sheer number of us wearing the same color. We likely would have triggered the same reaction had we been wearing blue. My focus, instead, was on the purple; such a preponderance of purple would never occur in American dormitories. Even if the Young American Male were disposed to wear such a thing, he would have to travel to a Great American Metropolis to find a store that would sell it to him. I don’t mind purple, but the only reason I own my Sunriver t-shirt is its obvious root in the eighties: against the purple backdrop are a Bowie-inspired skier and roe-colored skies. In Italy, there are no need for such excuses. Purple is an uncontested part of the male fashion canon, and there is so much of it in men’s clothing sections that they are nearly indistinguishable from women’s sections.
I should be happy that I have found myself among like-minded fashionistas, and I suppose I am. But sometimes I feel the need to distinguish myself. In such cases, I do have recourse to a secret weapon: the floral print Hawaiian shirt. This gaudy piece—the one I brought is all pineapples and palm trees, splattered with DayGlo yellow and green—serves as a fashion trump card everywhere outside Hawaii and Southern California. I wore my shirt to school last week, and as I walked the corridors I felt like a runway model for the Aloha Spring ‘10 collection. Certainly, enough heads turned to make me think I was working the catwalk. (It occurs to me at this point that some of you reading this from the States—those of you who are fashion-conscious—might be concerned about the impressions I am making on Pavians in terms of American fashion sensibilities. When they only have my example to go on, what must they think about our collective national wardrobe? I feel that I should offer an apology for this standard I am setting… but what I’m doing makes me so happy that it would be an empty one.)
Soon enough, though, I don’t think I will need to pull out my Hawaiian shirt anymore. I understand that fashion one-upmanship is a game I can’t win against Italians. As with soccer, they are the world’s foremost talents in this field. They have had too great of a head start, and they are willing to go farther than anyone else to make their mark. To understand the breadth of what for them constitutes acceptable clothing, one must look no farther than the Italian double-fly jeans. I met a man with them at a potluck a few weeks ago, and this diabolic bit of denim has been on my mind ever since. To imagine these pants, begin first with a standard button fly, then move a few inches down the crotch and add another. This second button fly is for decorative purposes only and is sewed in the open position. That is, even when these pants are buttoned, they’re unbuttoned. They are ready and waiting, as is the man within, to leap upon any woman who comes within arms’ reach. This is the fashion manifestation of the Italians’ Latin-lover mindset, and its innocuous promiscuity (the capacity to expose oneself while remaining decent) is unnerving and intimidating. I cannot compete with that. (Do I want to? Maybe. Yes.)
The road for me to take is therefore one of cautious and cognizant assimilation. Given my pre-existing fashion inclinations, that I will merge with the Italian stream of style is probable. But even as I tumble into this kaleidoscope and become a fashion fractal, I must keep hold of my self. I am American, my navy blue passport says so, and it would be a great personal and national loss if I were to fall victim to the double-fly jeans. Let us hope that my flag jacket is talisman enough.◊