Letter from America
New Yorkers were once elegant – they now dress like children
Some 15 years ago, I went to Sofia to interview the monarch-turned-prime Minister, Simeon Saxe-coburg Gotha.
He was the one who’d been driven abroad, when he was Prince Regent, by the Communists just after the Second World War. He had been Bulgaria’s king-in-exile for some five decades before returning in triumph and entering politics, to the delight of massed crowds shouting, ‘We want our king.’
During the few days we spent together, we quickly became fast friends. He had the informal charm of astute royals, that knack of immediately winning you over by inviting you to laugh with them at the pomp and silliness around them.
He took me up to his restituted Habsburg palace in a hilltop suburb. There he showed me old photographs of his family, taken in his childhood, recounting the story of his last moments as a six-year-old boy-king, mounting the steps of the royal train that took him, along with his mother and sister, to the Turkish border to exile (his father had died during the war).
One image haunts me still: a newspaper cutting showing their arrival at Istanbul’s Sirkeci station. The family, suddenly stateless, were surrounded by photographers in suits and hats with flashing cameras. Simeon’s mother wore a white dress and white, arm-length gloves, and a large, floppy hat with gauzy veil over glamorous dark sunglasses, defiantly elegant. Simeon wore a precise little dark suit and black bow tie, a plucky lad squinting in the sunlight, facing history with formality and gravitas.
Imagine if he had been wearing a hoodie or a T-shirt. Gazing on that newspaper cutting, I realised something important about maintaining sartorial standards even – or especially – in the face of adversity or, these days, peer pressure. Doing so suggests a solidarity with the civilisation one chooses to uphold, rather like carrying a pennant.
Some years later, I found myself in Baghdad at the height of conflict, writing about war from a cultural angle. I lived in town, unlike most journos who stayed safely in the International Zone. I dressed rather shabbily and neglected to shave, in order to look anonymous.
I had to interview the Iraq Symphony Orchestra’s director. He arrived sporting a blue blazer and an impeccably starched shirt topped by an ascot, and driving a large white Range Rover.
Feeling put to shame, I ran back inside, shaved and donned a blazer and tie. We looked like two of the Three Tenors as we drove along, blasting Ride of the Valkyries through the windows. The checkpoint militias stared in disbelief and waved us on.
A native Baghdadi, educated partly in middle America, the 40-something director had a very strong sense of duty. This is how he went to work every day, dodging al-qa’eda bullets and car bombs, not knowing how many of his musicians would turn up to work alive. He even said to me at one point, ‘You have to maintain standards in the face of barbarism.’
It may sound pompous, if not grandiose, to impute so much ideological heft to dress codes, but that’s just what those who snub them are doing in reverse.
In Silicon Valley, you simply cannot arrive at a job interview wearing jacket and tie. Or normal shoes. They embrace the slogan of ‘disrupting’ over there, overthrowing all received forms, whose perpetuation they see as an assault on the freedom of people’s personal aesthetics.
I live in Williamsburg, the trendy part of Brooklyn; Williamsburg, where hipsters and models reside within a few blocks of Orthodox Jews. The latter pass a sense of heritage down the generations, simply by making their children dress like grown-ups. Exactly the opposite happens in warm weather among the fashionistas. Grown-ups dress like children, taking pride in shedding cultural memory as they shed clothing.
It was not so when I first moved from London to New York. The Brideshead Revisited television series in 1981, The
Official Preppy Handbook (1980) and all the epiphenomena of ‘retro’ held sway.
After the ghastly levelling experiments of previous decades, tradition and elegance were re-embraced across the land. Cary Grant was the ideal. My good friend Charles, a dead ringer for F Scott Fitzgerald, had somehow acquired the entire wardrobe of Walter Pidgeon, the Oscar-winning actor in Mrs Miniver (1942), and embodied the zeitgeist dashingly. We fully understood that elegant garb meant elegance of conduct and elevated our manners accordingly. We were reinvoking a golden age, one that still hung over our parents’ and grandparents’ generations, which had instinctively upheld its standards.
Even the nouveau riche of old knew the sartorial code to emulate, to preserve continuity. And there’s the rub. That code is no longer continuous or coherent.
In Silicon Valley, the billionaires don’t feel the need to collect Old Masters. I once interviewed some of them on that topic. They all said, in effect, we don’t follow standards – we invent them.