Clothing that doesn’t say who they are

I was in China a few years ago, and I was shocked at the widespread lack of awareness about fashion. I mean, hell, nearly all the world’s fashion is made in China, but down every street there were millions of people who seemed to have no clue that a brown paisley shirt and purple stonewashed B.U.M. Equipment jeans just aren’t as cutting edge as they had been a decade or more earlier. Women dressed casually in gardener’s gloves and a surgeon mask pedaled rusting bicycles around the city with their L.A. Gears, occasionally reaching up to adjust their Gilligan-style hats out of the way of their coffee saucer sized bifocals.

Over the next few years, I had similar experiences in Tahiti, Paris, and to a lesser extent, London. It’s as if no one has told these people in the fashion capitals of the world and beyond that fashion can, and in white peoples’ worlds does, define you. White people around the world revel in their fashion extravagance. The Wall Street hustler knows that any suit costing less that $2000 communicates to his compatriots that he’s not the self-obsessed vanity whore that is required of all good brokers. The white trash professional muskrat hunter knows that the only kind of pants for him must have a door in the back so he doesn’t have to stop hunting just to take a dump. Soccer moms far and wide don their Ann Taylor blouses and sensible Payless shoes every day, knowing that to do otherwise would mean no less than failure as a person at the PTA bake sale. And all my white college friends know that the true measure of a person’s character can only be expressed in a pithy T-shirt message like “Sex Instructor: First lesson free” or “Free Mumia.” White people simply can’t imagine going to their drawers or closets and lifting out the first thing they see, putting it on, and waltzing out into the world without a second thought. Seriously, bloody encounters can begin with a quarrel about whether a person should wear Levis or Calvin Kleins. And more than one person has suffered serious consequences for wearing their leather Fubu hoodies with their banana yellow Cross Colors jean shorts. To some extent the world is catching on, but it can’t happen fast enough for whitey, because as long as people use fashion willy-nilly, whitey will have a hard time gauging the political and philosophical leanings of the other 90 percent of the world’s population. Until everyone has a “I’m Txtually Active” t-shirt, white people will continue to hate clothing that doesn’t say anything about the person wearing it.