Lay off JFK

People keep blaming John F. Kennedy for "killing" the hat in popular fashion. This is either slanderous or libelous (depending on the medium), because the hat was already in decline in the 1930s (I've seen hat sellers' publications from that decade that had suggestions for convincing people to wear hats again), so I tend to blame Cary Grant more than anybody else. He was charm itself, but didn't look that good in hats, so he didn't wear them much, thus beginning the decline of the dress hat. This opinion is, of course, no better researched than the one I'm discrediting, but at least it's believable. Cary Grant did look a little silly in hats, and there were definitely fewer hats (at least in the movies) in the 1950s already, well before J.F. Kennedy's time in the White House.

JFK definitely wore a top hat to his inauguration, too. So don't believe that ugly rumor either.

"Classic" style

I'm tired of men's style blogs talking about classic style and how wonderful it is. They seem to think that because the suits they wear now might have looked normal in the 1960s, they would look normal in any decade since the modern suit came into fashion. The writers of these blogs are fooling themselves.

I believe I've written before that we're in a time of backward-looking fashion (call it retro if it makes you feel better), and that fashion has looked backward more than forward these fifty years. This doesn't mean that men's style is timeless--today's suits would look silly in any past decade except the sixties--but rather that the drivers of men's fashion have been paying more attention to their rear view mirrors than the road ahead.

These praisers of "timeless" men's style often throw in references to the quite different world of women's fashion, which they see as trend-driven and mindlessly obsessed with the latest thing, whether that thing be figure-flattering or fugly. The worst of these wander into vaguely misogynistic suppositions about the nature of women themselves considering this propensity for following the herd.

What they fail to realize is that they themselves are following the current fashion in menswear: wearing sixties-inspired suits and calling them timeless. The sixties silhouette would not have looked timeless in the seventies or the eighties or the nineties; it would have looked ten or twenty or thirty years out of fashion. The icons of classic cool (Steve McQueen, Marlon Brando, Fred Astaire, Cary Grant) were not concerned with posterity but with the moment, and the only reason they still look good now is that they were so successful at blending what was current and what looked good on them.

Name games

I'm tired of my name. My last name is good and I like it. Sometimes I wish it were still spelled with the extra n the way it was before my ancestors came to America, but it really is a noble name.

No, my problem is with my first name. Most places on the internet, I spell it "Dschonn" in an effort to make it unusual, but it's really just my real name, John, filtered through German phonetic orthography. John is not a bad name in and of itself, and I know its complex history, but it's such a very common name and its meaning does nothing to tell me who I should be, since so many diverse people have borne it. It comes ultimately from a Hebrew name, commonly transliterated Yehochanan, which means something like "Yahweh having given graciously" or "Yahweh's gracious gift". This was shortened to Yochanan (it was against the rules to say Yahweh's name, and so I suppose eventually people realized that making it part of a name given to a person might cause it to be spoken at some point), then transliterated into Greek as Ἰωάννης, whence Latin derived Iohannes (My theory is that the Greek name still had an h sound in there, although they couldn't write it because of their alphabet's lack of a letter for that sound, but Latin did have such a letter and they used it. This is based on almost no evidence at all.). This then was spread to the Germanic tongues, who eventually spelled the name with a J, and after a number of generations shortened further in English to John, most likely because of the influence from the Norman French form Jean. The fact that it doesn't start with that y sound anymore is probably also the fault of those crazy Normans.

John has been the name of many, many people. King John signed the Magna Carta (this document was a big deal for England because it gave power to the nobility that had previously been concentrated in the office of the King), but was otherwise such a bastard that since his time nobody who has had the slightest chance of becoming the king of England has been named John (as I recall he only signed it under duress and this duress was necessary because he'd been abusing his power like nobody's business as well as spending too much time trying to catch Robin Hood when anyone could see that Mr Hood was actually the good guy). John Lennon was a musician in a little band called The Beatles. He wrote and co-wrote some pretty catchy tunes. John Smith was an explorer who went to America looking for a way to India and found Pocahontas instead, and if we can believe the movie he looked quite a bit like Colin Farrell. Johnny Depp is an actor with incredible cheekbones and an enviable ability to attract people rather than repel them with his extreme eccentricity. The list goes on.

So I've been considering changing it. I could simply go by Jack (this came from John + -kin, a diminutive suffix, and it evolved through Jankin and Jackin to become Jack), which would be fairly easy to explain, or I could make up a completely different and preferably unique nickname and pretend to new acquaintances that it's what people call me, and hope that the nickname sticks. The problem with this second plan is that such a name is really best given by someone else rather than chosen for oneself, since it should indicate who I am to others rather than who I want to believe I am.

I have played around with Germanic roots to see if I can come up with something with the same etymological meaning as John, but so far I've had no luck. I mean I can put roots together, but I haven't made anything that sounds like anything I'd want to be called.

Anyway, I am pretty sure that the reason I've spent so much time thinking about this is that my situation is so uncertain. I'm unsure about most everything to do with my life, and somewhere in my mind I believe that having a truly unique name will tell me who I am supposed to be. The rest of me tends to doubt that it would work that way, but alternative ideas are in short supply.

G.K. Chesterton on perception

I found a page of G.K. Chesterton quotations on the internet while looking for a George Bernard Shaw quotation, and they all seemed quite pithy, but I was struck by one because it seems to describe one way in which I differ from most people in my life.

"An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered."

Sometimes I feel like I'd have a lot more adventures if the people around me didn't insist on considering them inconveniences.

Vintage overload

I have decided that the vintage fad has to stop. That may sound odd coming from one who routinely wears clothing hundreds of years out of style, but I stand by my declaration.

Blogs like Permanent Style and A Suitable Wardrobe often post fashion plates from the 30s, 40s and 50s as inspiration for correct modern business dress. This, to me, is ridiculous. In 1910, any man caught wearing even twenty-year-old fashions would have been laughed at, and yet now it is the height of cool to wear a suit that looks like it could have been made half a century ago. The kicker for me is that the 1960s was itself a retro-styled decade. They called it Neo-Edwardian, because the fashionable silhouettes were borrowed from the Edwardian era fifty years or so before. Which means that when I make and wear a jacket based on late Victorian/early Edwardian (i.e. hundred-year-old) style, nobody really gives it a second glance. Fashion in the fourteenth century had more innovation.

Now, I like old stuff. I make some of my own clothes, and I draw inspiration almost exclusively from the distant past or from fantasy films (which are also inspired by the past, but in a way that's different from retro fashion). I like learning about old languages that nobody speaks anymore. I like having the kind of facial hair not seen in public office or the financial sector for over a century. I have been told that I was born anywhere from a few decades to a few centuries too late. BUT. I like these things for their novelty. My homemade clothing is based on costume. I don't really want those times to come back; I just like the look of parts of them. And I certainly never wanted all the cool people to be wearing what I want to wear.

I sound even to myself like a whiny hipster complaining about mainstream society ruining what was once cool (see my previous post for my views on hipsterdom), but the real root of my problem with this whole thing occurred to me on Halloween: if all I wear is costume-type stuff, then whenever I want to wear a costume, it feels no different from wearing my normal clothes. I have always loved Halloween because it allowed me to dress up like and pretend to be someone I'm not. I've always been slightly uncomfortable in my own skin, and so being someone else for a day was incredibly exciting. Now, though, despite having all this crazy stuff to wear, it's not exciting because I wear it all the time. So it turns out that I have ruined Halloween for myself.

When I started sewing, I never intended to wear what I made day-to-day; I intended it to be costume. I'm not saying I won't keep dressing oddly; I'm a hipster and a nerd and that works for me. I just don't believe the cool people should like the same strange and esoteric things I do. Fifty years of retrospective fashion is long enough. It's time for a change.

I think I may be a hipster

This is a response of sorts to this blog post by a friend of mine.

I was talking to a guy from California about Portland before I came here (well, before living here; I had visited before), and he described Portland as pretty hip, but too aware of its own hipness ("Keep Portland Weird" bumper stickers, for example) to be as hip as somewhere more unassuming, like Minneapolis (which is, incidentally, where the conversation took place). Now that I'm here, I agree, to a certain extent. The same is true of hipsters in general, I find. They are too aware of how unusual or ironic or meta they are, and don't realize that in order to be taken seriously, they have to find something, anything, to take seriously themselves.

If being cool is about not caring, then the stereotypical hipsters rule. But if it's about not sweating the small stuff, they are inexpressibly lame, because small stuff is all they ever seem to talk about.

As I understand it, the ideal for a hipster is to listen to certain music and wear certain fashions and do certain things not because commercial television and other media say they're popular, but because of the appeal of the music or clothing or activities in themselves. This is laudable. But so many more people are impressed by this idea than can actually fully understand it or put it into real practice that this ideal concept is tainted by the many people who are clearly only putting up a flimsy façade of counter-cultural quirkiness without any real sincerity or conviction. That, in fact, is the central irony of hipsterdom: the people who profess to dislike anything that has been discovered and thus ruined by mainstream society have themselves distorted their own hyper-individualist philosophy almost beyond recognition. They forget, or never bothered to learn, that unique things are still unique whether the rest of the world knows about them or not.

Whether they know it or not, I think this is why everybody loves poking fun at a hipster, even another hipster (who would of course never admit to being one). But I actually identify with the philosophy underneath all the cultural (or do I mean subcultural?) distortions, and I do have a fairly unusual set of interests and abilities, as well as a unique personal style, and am proud of this uniqueness, so even if a person might not peg me as one just to look at or talk to me (though for all I know they might do just that), I am about as hipster as I can be.

By the way, I have heard that one defining characteristic of a hipster is a refusal to admit to being one. What does it mean, then, that I claim the title as my own?

Hitler's handedness

I found this site making fun of Tea Party activists, and posted about it on the facebook. I picked the "Obama is right-handed just like Hitler; that's why I'm voting Tea Party" one as a thumbnail. People seemed not to quite get the joke, so I said something like "it's funny because Obama's a lefty", and somebody else said they thought Hitler was too, so I had to go looking. That's when I found this. It's an insightful analysis of the current political climate that uses a non-issue like handedness to illustrate the craziness of the most vocal far right. It is the same idea, but more detailed and with the other hand. But the fact remains that Obama doesn't write with the same hand Hitler did.

By the way, this post is not in the typeface I want it in, but the controls seems to have stopped working entirely. There goes my consistency.

Louis Armstrong was kind of a nerd

The New York Times on language

When I was reading the article I mentioned in my last post, I found a link in the sidebar of the New York Times website to a discussion of the way a person's language affects their world view. I forgot about it in my zeal to spread the "emerging adulthood" idea to my loyal readership (hi, you two!). It would have stayed forgotten, too, if my father hadn't reminded me of it by telling me about a radio program that dealt with the very same ideas. So you may thank my dad for your current ability to click on this link.

Also, while I was looking for that article (it wasn't as easy to find as the first time), I found a goodly number of other articles about language, mostly elucidating a gripe about modern trendy or erroneous terms or usage. On occasion, however, there is a book review that is really interesting beyond a superficial delight in pointing out the linguistic foibles of others. For example: this review of Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue makes it look like exactly the kind of book I've been yearning for. My interest in language was first sparked by an article about the history of the English language, and I've been wanting to learn more about the subject ever since. This book appears to offer "the untold history of English", which I hope means that it will tell me (when I inevitably obtain it) about those strange quirky corners of the language that have undeservedly gone unnoticed in the general excitement over Latin and Greek and Norman French. I'm pretty excited about it.

Twenty-somethings

As a person in my mid-twenties, I identify strongly with the group described in this New York Times article. I feel like I'm not a child anymore, nor even an adolescent, but I'm a long way from feeling like an adult. I'm in between. And I feel tremendous pressure to stop equivocating and grow up already, though nobody seems to want to tell me what that entails or how to do it.

I am reminded of Hobbits, who come of age at 33, and consider the decade or so before rather an awkward time. It seems we're all more hobbity than we knew.

New Coat

I received a coat for Christmas. There is some assembly required. All right, I admit it: my gift is five yards of coat-weight wool and eight of lining fabric. But it's exactly what I hoped I'd get. Now I just need to decide what kind of coat to make, and make it. Well, I do need interfacing and buttons and thread and things, but all that is less important and easier to come by than the beautiful fabric my aunts gave me.

To that end, I've been scouring the internet for inspiration and came across this blog: Making My Tennant Coat. It's the blog of a guy who's made a reproduction of the coat worn by David Tennant as Doctor Who. He seems to have gotten everything exactly right, every detail the same as the original, even the fabric is (probably) the same fabric used for the costume. Perhaps the coolest thing about him is that he's using a sewing machine made in 1903. 1903! He's using an antique!

He also has other blogs in the same vein, about his progress on other Doctor Who costumes. They are linked in his sidebar. Mostly those are less interesting to me, but the Tennant Suit blog is probably going to inspire me to make a suit (which I've been half intending to do for a while), and to learn how to draft my own patterns. It's daunting, but if a guy with a 106-year-old sewing machine can do it, by golly, so can I.

I doubt I'll replicate any specific coat with this level of accuracy for my coat, but rather draw inspiration from various disparate sources, only one of which will be the Tenth Doctor. This guy's dedication just kind of blew me away, so I thought I'd share.