(the) American (Novel of)

Take Clothes, For Example
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the beholder. Under special circumstances, it represents, in fact, a conscious
artistic production, whether in a film or at a wedding. Even on
the everyday level, clothes may be a minor but enriching pleasure, just
as one may experience a genuine joy facing a natural sunset, one that
is on a lesser scale but still commensurable to the response evoked by
a Turner.
Clothes are a self-presentation, and it is in this aspect that we find
their imbrication with the rules of etiquette to be most evident. Here
also we see, quintessentially, the interaction of the duo, conformity and
distinction. My choice of dress is decided by the kind of image I want
to be mirrored in the appraising looks of others—of particular others
or of any others I may happen to meet. (Which others is one of the
factors involved in my choice.) Unless my intention is to defy convention,
I will move freely between certain limits of expectation. I will not wear
a bikini to a funeral or a clown costume at an academic meeting. Nor
anywhere, outside a costume party, the dress an ancestress wore in the
1920s. But beyond this minimum, the acceptable possibilities are infinite.
One person may seek conformity to prevailing style so ardently as to
try to be mirrored solely as one of the crowd, taking to the absurd the
counsel of Alexander Pope, “Be not the first by whom the new are
tried, / Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.” 4 Someone else will try
to excel by ushering in what is expected to become standard. Some
want above all to find clothes that set off advantageously their particular
figures and coloring; others are content that the garment looks good
on the rack. There are those who prefer clothes that clearly proclaim
what they cost. And so on forever.
The vagaries of fashion stand at the opposite extreme from ethics.
The latter traditionally is required to ground itself on what is taken to
be unshakable principles. The ethical person acts and judges by what
the person authentically—that is, inwardly—believes to be true or right
objectively, or as close to objectively as is humanly possible. The etiquette
of clothes embraces transience and is based squarely on the
importance of eliciting a desired response in others. But before dismissing
it as trivial, unnecessary, as something we would be better off
without, we should look more closely. As one form of socializing the
self, the etiquette of clothes is more than a restriction and regulation
of our spontaneous impulses. It is, to be sure, a means by which the
collective inscribes its beliefs and values. It provides, too, a way by