Читать книгу The Nature of College - James J. Farrell - Страница 37

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The Nature of Clothes

My dream is to save women from nature.

Christian Dior

It is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden

You don’t have to signal a social conscience by looking like a frump. Lace knickers won’t hasten the holocaust, you can ban the bomb in a feather boa just as well as without, and a mild interest in the length of hemlines doesn’t necessarily disqualify you from reading Das Kapital and agreeing with every word.

Elizabeth Bibesco, as quoted in The Virtuous Consumer

Joe College is getting dressed. He finds clean underwear in the drawer, sorts the laundry pile to see how dirty his Gap jeans are, and searches for a sweatshirt that passes the smell test. He slips on clean socks and his Nikes, and he’s ready to go. His sister gets dressed, too, but it takes her a little longer. For many reasons, college women are taught to worry about keeping up appearances, so Jo has to consider issues like fit, color, and style more than Joe does. In addition, while he’s working mostly with a wardrobe of pants, shirts, and athletic shoes, she’s got more choices—pants or skirts, T-shirts or blouses, sweaters or sweatshirts, clogs, sandals, or athletic shoes. Today, she settles on jeans and a blue Hollister sweatshirt.

Before leaving for classes, Jo and Joe College always get dressed, because, as Mark Twain suggested, “Naked people have little or no influence on society.” Of course, naked people also have little or no environmental impact from their clothing, but nudism isn’t the best method of reducing a student’s ecological footprint. Instead, most students still dress themselves in nature, wearing fibers, petrochemicals, water, and energy as they go about their daily business. But that’s not what’s on their mind when they put on their clothes in the morning.

In general, we often don’t even have clothes in mind when we get dressed; we’re thinking about girlfriends, boyfriends, food, sex, or the party that we’re planning. Usually we just get dressed as a matter of habit. But, like a nun’s habit, our clothes are more than just fabric—they’re everyday expressions of our beliefs and values, as well as implicit statements of our relationships with nature and human nature. Because any dress code is also a consumption code, we need to think about the moral ecology of clothes—and how our fashion ethic affects the world.