MISCmedia for 7/19/00
The Look of Cluelessness

GENDER EQUALITY has taken another giant stride as of late.

Men's designer fashions have become just as silly as women's designer fashions!

The last time guys were so willing to look like clueless fashion victims in public was in the now fondly-remembered leisure suit days. Back then, flamboyance was the goal and new synthetic fabrics were the tools used to achieve it. "Hip" white guys tried too hard to mimick what they thought black guys looked like (i.e., like pimps and gangsters).

The backlash against Qiana and Fortrel was swift and severe. For almost two decades, men's fashion headlines almost all contained that soon-overused phrase "A Return to Elegance" or some variant on it. When fashion trade magazines talked about exciting new trends in "menswear," they almost always referred to the "menswear look" for women, not to clothes for males.

There have been trends and subtrends over the years, of course (logo sweaters, "casual Friday" khakies, Abercrombie & Fitch's gay-crossover look, the unisex sportswear look, etc.) But the main trend, at least as marketed for adult males by prominent design houses, has been a narrow oscillation between "casual elegance" and "elegant casualness."

But that's apparently changing. And, once again, it's at least partly inspired by white middle-class guys who hold an overgeneralized image of black guys as sexy criminals.

In some prisons, clothes are supplied in few sizes and belts are outlawed. Thus, baggy pants and butt cleavage became icons of gangsta toughness in the '90s, especially to the suburban middle-class kids who became gangsta rap's biggest market.

That concept "filtered up" to the department stores. Labels such as Tommy Hilfiger came up with big, low-riding pants and boxer shorts with logo waistbands meant to be seen in public. Rap stars were hired to wear these things in videos.

While that particular look hasn't "graduated" to the couture-designer level, the general principle of flashy outrageousness has.

Few people directly buy couture fashion, but the industry has come to use it as an early-warning marketing device. Looks that get sufficient media attention at the major runway shows soon get altered into tamer, more easily-manufacturable versions for the department stores.

So we might actually see kilt-like shorts, meant to be worn with formal shoes and a suit jacket, in six to twelve months' time.

And who knows? They might actually attract the attention of women. A woman might actually see a guy in one of these new getups and think, Now THERE'S a total clueless fashion victim. He obviously doesn't have a woman in his life to tell him how stupid he looks. He doesn't know it, but he needs me.

TOMORROW: We are driven.

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