Jake Ross
Men are beginning to revolt, we are told, against the old tribal custom of desiring fatherhood. The male is casting off the shackles of being a creator and a man. When all are sexless there will be equality. There will be no women and no men. There will be but a fraternity, free and equal. The only consoling thought is that it will endure but for one generation
.~G.K. Chesterton
James, Adam and I are frequently out and about the city in search of the best restaurants Milwaukee has to offer. One thing that’s impossible to ignore is the quickly changing sartorial landscape. You may recall that famous bar scene in Star Wars Episode One, in which Luke Skywalker and his gold leafed humanoid robot C-3PO step into a smorgasbord of intergalactic bar-hoppers.
It’s clear that Luke feels out of place in the eccentric scene of huge headed alien clarinetists. More and more, I find myself in the shoes of the incipient Jedi. Does anyone else feel as anomalous among the rising tide of fashion insanity? Because it’s clear that what we now see is a social scene that has devolved into self-inflicted sartorial mayhem.
We live in an era of exhibitionism and androgyny. The exhibitionist desires to display the body, while the epicene dressers revel in their contrived sexual ambiguity, and hence the prescient warning from Chesterton. When confronted with these new trends, I often recall the powerful allocution of Venerable Pope Pius XII on fashion in 1957, in which he stated:
One cannot minimize the importance of style’s influence for good or for evil. The language of clothing, as we have already said, is the more effective when it is more ordinary and is understood by everyone. It might be said that society speaks through the clothing it wears. Through its clothing it reveals its secret aspirations and uses it, at least in part, to build or destroy its future.
It’s time we re-examine the ramifications of our current fashion madness, because it’s quite obvious to any sane person that one of the easiest ways to preserve a civilization is to dress in a civil manner. If not, the dignity that we all inherently possess will be lost in the tide of self deprecating secularism, and failed neo-liberal ideology.