Young Man: A Year Long Interview

Another picture-only post. Sorry. 5pm to 4am tonight. I get tomorrow off so I get to go to the Clemson-FSU night game. So excited. It will be the first game I'll be able to go to since sophomore year.



Conor

Young Man: A Year Long Interview

Sorry for the lack of posts and responses to comments. School and work are double teaming me right now so this is the best I can do. A picture and no commentary.





Conor

Old Man: Sunday Style

I officially love daylight savings time. An extra hour after gameday weekend makes all the difference. A lousy fifty bucks over the whole weekend (Halloween and homecoming? Should've made fifty Friday alone.)



Corbin/Kenneth Gordon (love the tab collar)/Resilio/Hanauer/AE Graysons



Conor

Old Man: Thrift Store Shopping (and my Grandfather's shirt)

First significant find in a while.



Two nice dress shirts from Kenneth Gordon. One with contrast collar (you know I'm going to rock this one hard with my collar pin), one with tab collar.

and...



This nice wool LL Bean shirt jac. Not sure what the "x" means, probably some outlet deal.



This is the shirt I was wearing. This was my paternal grandfather's shirt. He died when I was still pretty young so I don't have a lot of memories of him, but this is a great one. My absolute favorite shirt/item of clothing of all time. Also the softest shirt I've ever touched. He also gave me my middle name (Burke). Strong Irish/English name.




Conor

Old Man: Humphrey Bogart

Short post today as I'm in the process of writing an essay for film class on Casablanca. Can't help but love Bogart's ivory, shawl collared, double breasted dinner jacket here.



Conor

Young Man: A Year Long Interview

I taught a lesson comparing culture during Beowulf times, The Canterbury Tales, and modern times. I think it went pretty well.



Regent suit/BB shirt and tie/white silk/AE Graysons





Conor

Guest Post: The Cordial Churchman: The Semiotics of Style

Husband of the ever-talented ELS of bow-tie fame, and frequent poster/commentator The Cordial Churchman wrote this very thoughtful post. It is a fantastic post, following up on my previous post, "Trad Semiotics." His title is so much better.



I'm honored to have been invited to guest post on Conor's delightful blog. I've thought from the first time I navigated to it that the way he has chosen to frame his posts in a young man/old man scheme is perhaps the most clever blogging strategy I've run across.

I've enjoyed the recent discussion about the philosophical and sociological entailments of style, and specifically of the style Conor and I share. I've especially found it refreshing that a fellow young man without a born-and-bred instinct for this style has begun to weigh in on his approach to these entailments. It seems to me that there are generally two types of clothes blogs: the reflective, story-rich blogs of those who have grown up in contexts where there was no real conscious decision to adopt "the style"; and the not boring, but still relatively timid blogs of the somewhat recently converted. I'm glad Conor has opened up a line of thoughtful discussion that gives voice to those of us who know that we're the new kid on the block, and yet have been chewing on what this style means to us, all the while continuing to appreciate reading about what the style means to those who never knew anything different.

So I submit this guest post as a way to advance the present discussion, from one whose history with this style is more similar than not to Conor's.

Let me offer another way to possibly nuance Conor's interesting observations on "The Semiotics of Style."

I don't think that linguists' insistence that the sign/signified relationship is ultimately arbitrary is quite the same thing as the observation that a tweed jacket on a college kid leads different people to different assumptions about that tweeded student. The arbitrariness of sign/signified is about agreed-upon conventions or codes that we use to eliminate or reduce ambiguities in interpersonal communication. The indeterminacy of the tweed jacket-sign, on the other hand, is a result not of the arbitrariness of an agreed-upon sign/signified relationship of convenience, but a result of the very real postmodern condition in which we live.

Whatever you think about Derrida, et al., it's a brute fact that, like Conor says, everyone is costumed. It seems as though there used to be a time when people could wear clothes relatively un-self-consciously. There was a uniform for you, depending on what caste in society you were in. (Of course everyone tried to dress their best and the lower classes often approximated the upper classes, but I think the point is still valid).

But now-a-days it's impossible to wear, say, walk, drink, smoke, shop, parent, worship, or do anything else un-self-consciously. That's why when the J. Press guy or whomever it was in some interview I read recently said that for trad types, it's not about style, it's about clothes, I applauded in agreement, and then immediately deconstructed that nonsense. The about-clothes-not-style posture among trads is just that: it's a posture. It's adopted. It's a strut. It's a sensibility that's held not un-self-consciously.

Mistakes in basic alphabetic semiotics are not the same kinds of mistakes in interpretation that are involved when someone sees you wearing a tweed jacket on campus. The former is the result of clumsiness and inefficiency in diction or writing, or in the decoding of those communicative devices. The latter is the result of the cultural condition, which upon further reflection, perhaps is not postmodern. Perhaps it started with the sans culottes.