Revolt into Style

In an age of terror and impending global catastrophe, there is nothing for it but irony, indifference, and insouciance. What we really don't need right now is a greater degree of earnestness. For fanaticism is always marked by its moral sincerity and is, as Wilde pointed out, the world's original sin: 'If only the caveman had known how to laugh, history might have been different'.

The central argument of any philosophy on the catwalk must surely be that what matters most is that we look good, live dangerously, and love fate; pouring scorn upon all those who fail to recognise their own dullness. D. H. Lawrence provides us with our manifesto:

"It is time we treated life as a joke again, as they did in the really great periods like the Renaissance. Then the young men swaggered down the street with one leg bright red, one leg bright yellow, doublet of puce velvet, and yellow feather in silk cap. 

      Now that is the line to take. Start with externals, and proceed to internals, and treat life as a good joke. If a dozen men would stroll down the Strand and Piccadilly tomorrow, wearing tight scarlet trousers fitting the leg, gay little orange-brown jackets and bright green hats, then the revolution against dullness which we need so much would have begun. ... But it takes a lot of courage to sail gaily, in brave feathers, in the teeth of a dreary convention."  

                                        - 'Red Trousers', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (CUP, 2004), p. 138.

This sailing gaily in brave feathers and the refusal to care is what I understand by the phrase 'revolt into style' - a transpolitical revolt that teaches us to become superficial out of profundity and to appreciate how both society and self are ultimately founded upon cloth, not nature.

Fashion, above all else, is a passion for artifice. This, coupled to its love of empty signs and cycles, is what most alarms the puritan in his grey suit and sensible shoes and not so much its overtly erotic element. For in our culture, tethered as it is to a principle of utility and meaning, the fact that fashion is futile and pointless - and prides itself on such - means that those who like to dress up and mess up are always going to be branded immoral. 

Thus the young man cruising through Soho in brightly coloured clothes for no reason in the middle of the afternoon may well be sexually disconcerting to some people, but this is secondary in comparison to the outrage he causes because of his perceived flippancy, flamboyance, and aristocratic disdain for the world of work.

Ah Sebastian, I miss you!