"Puttin' on my top hat"

For men, sartorial good taste can be reduced to one rule: If Fred Astaire would not have worn it, don't wear it.
--George F. Will

George F. Will is the conservative columnist even liberals enjoy -- in small doses. He's intellectual, he's often funny, and he has idiosyncrasies that readers of all political persuasions can appreciate. He is also a Chicago Cubs fan, that sine qua non of polite company.

He also can be a bit of a prig.

In today's syndicated column, he takes on blue jeans. He deplores them. He hates seeing a grown man in an airport with his 10-year-old son, both wearing jeans, t-shirt, and running shoes. These casually dressed adults represent to Will the "leveling" trend so apparent today -- leveling between income groups and leveling between ages -- a trend that is so offensive to him, and, somehow, so related to voting Democratic. Today's dress code can be summed up, in Will's opinion, by a loathsome rule of thumb: "Thou shalt not dress better than society's most slovenly."

How one presents himself to the world, he argues, is important. From your dress, others make inferences about your maturity and self-respect.

He sounds like all our grandmothers.

One of Will's saving graces is a sense of self-irony. But it is frequently difficult to determine when he is, in fact, being ironic. The tone of today's column does trigger a low-grade response from my irony meter. But Will is also expressing a very real, underlying unhappiness about today's society. Blue jeans -- his code for being "slovenly" in general -- are only a symptom of a more dread disease.

How one dresses does influence how others view you. But what Will overlooks is that there is no Platonic form of "proper masculine attire" brooding above us, somewhere up there in the sky. Fashions do change. ("Change" -- a word so abhorrent to Will!) Spats in the 1920's indicated affluence and probity; they would suggest a buffoon if anyone wore them today.

Jeans are not proper attire on all occasions, even in today's world. A business suit is the correct costume for many occasions, including job interviews, funerals, and certain restaurants. But in today's society, jeans are considered proper attire in many informal situations -- including air travel and shopping malls -- locations where Will finds them appalling.

"[I]t is a straight line from the fall of the Bastille to the rise of denim," Will observes darkly. Ah! Now he tips his hand! Not only a sartorial curmudgeon is our Will, but more fundamentally a political reactionary. Most of us consider the fall of the Bastille to have been, on the whole, a rather good thing.

George F. Will's views on proper dress, however twinkling his eye while expressing them, suggest why I take both those views and his political views with more than one grain of salt. Both sartorially and politically, he recalls the old saying that the "Republican party had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the twentieth century." I won't be "puttin' on my top hat" anytime soon. Nor will I be voting Republican.