Part 1 of the "cultural games I don't want to participate in" series

Fashion

I'm a Fashion dullard. I'm not sure which stage of my life I was supposed to learn how to dress myself and look good, but if someone other than myself was responsible for teaching me the intricacies of style they didn't do a good job.

I guess I can have intuitions about other men or women's style. These intuitions will tell me when I think someone is wearing something that I think looks good on them. So I do have some kind of internal sensor which differentiates fashionable clothing and non-fashionable clothing. I don't know where this intuition came from. I suspect it has something to do with my experiences watching tv or going to events where people dress up. The problem is that this intuition is not really that well tuned with the rest of my fellow cultural participants'.

But I really think that what is fashionable is much too subjective to spend much time pondering about. For instance, the top notch fashion of the the 16th century is not acceptable in the 21st. I think doublets, jerkins, and codpieces look pretty cool and I would wear them if it was socially acceptable to do so (or if I found them on sale at Macy's). But that's not the case. In fact, we don't even have to go back 500 years to commit fashion faux pas. Wearing clothes from just a couple decades ago, for example, is only OK when the fashion elite deem it so.

So, I ask you, why should I invest even a minute of my day worrying about getting my style up to speed? As long as I'm not dressed in an obscene way (e.g. loin cloth, clown wig, and rain galoshes) I shouldn't be judged by my 6 pair of indistinguishable jeans, my dozens of plain t-shirts, and single pair of all-purpose shoes.