Living in the modern world, clothed and muffled, forced to convey our sense of bodies in terms of remote symbols like walking-sticks and umbrellas and hand-bags, it is easy to lose sight of the immediacy of the human body plan. But when one lives among primitive peoples, where women wear only a pair of little grass aprons... and men wear only a very lightly fastened G-string of beaten bark . . . and small babies wear nothing at all, the basic communications between infant, child and adult that are conducted between bodies are very real.
-Margaret Mead, Male and Female
We have now had a comparative look at evolutionary themes and how they affect our appearance. How are our attitudes accordingly affected toward the common things in life which go beyond specific social organs B clothes, racial differences, our taboos about dirt and excrement?
One of the universal characteristics of the human animal is our propensity for adornment. Immersed in the midst of traditions and the immediate context of our culture it is difficult to visualize fully the evolutionary role of personal adornment. It is easy to think that clothes simply protect one from the elements and keep one's person clean - but this is not their major function. We use them chiefly as social devices to show station, mood, and class membership. Their chief function is to modify the signal of the natural social organs. As the principles governing the evolution of social ornamentation of other organisms carries through to human beings, so do the principles regulating our social organs carry through to our adornment patterns.
The manual dexterity that got us our big brains also provided the potential for altering our social image. In essence, this ability to dress and decorate ourselves has allowed our cultural evolution to accelerate rapidly, for what we have done with dress on a limited time span would have taken many thousands of years to evolve naturally. We can crop back blatant signals of status by whacking off beards or covering up intimidating parts and redoing them in more subtle hues - or we can exaggerate sexual signals, such as erect lifted breasts, or status clues, such as shoulder pads.
The vagaries of voguery at first glance appear to be almost random, but only a preliminary analysis shows that we are not being as free as we think with the way we choose to dress and decorate ourselves. We still follow those ancient rules of social strategy and physical display. Let's look at some of the principles in detail. Our decoration and body alterations follow closely the principles already illustrated from our social organs B threat, sexual allure, apparent age changes, and the continuum of revealment and concealment. The first g-string tab of animal skin covered an important male threat organ and decreased the sexual invitation of females in a changing society which demanded a refinement in the coarser signals. From that point on, adornment began its complex course. Yet our body signal alterations still focus on the old vertebrate themes of color, texture, contour, and size.
Generally males are darker than females and adults darker than young. One theme which disrupts this pattern is the replacement of black by red - as on the hamadryas baboon face. Many primates use black skin as a clue to stature. Our feelings about color are carried through to our tastes in clothes. Black is concealed, defensive but dominant, mourning dress B Black Panthers' and Hell's Angels' dress - tuxedos, slinky evening gowns, and mink stoles. White is wedding dress, diapers, soft underwear, formal gloves, and bulging blouses. Black nighties are suggestively aggressive, white is naively virgin, as the currents between sex and status intermingle.
Contours are important clues to status, especially weapons and areas that wield the weaponry. We use clothes to pad and remodel our body contours to transform our social image. Shoulder padding is probably the best example. It was exaggerated in the zoot-suiter and de-emphasized somewhat in the round-shouldered, boyish ivy-league look. We use threat psychology in sports with shoulder padding. Football shoulder pads extend well out over the shoulder angle, unlike hip and knee pads that conform closely to the body contour. We remodel contours to modify sexual signals with breast harnesses and padding, waist tighteners, butt lifters and stiffeners, and belly flatteners.
Women are understandably concerned with the two main sexual attractant zones, the breast and buttocks. Males keep their hips trim with tight-fitting pants and encourage chest size with several layers of over garments, including vests. Epaulettes of military uniforms exaggerate shoulder angles and baroque cords; chest plates, medals and cross-straps call attention to the chest area.
In military and sporting outfits the arms and legs are generally emphasized by lateral stripes, circumferential stripes, or barring - one of the important trends in appendage ornamentation among birds and mammals. Appendage movement and position are important elements in most behavioral displays. Hair tufts or tassels are important, with lots of leather and shiny metallic material, many contrast lines, and especially a common identity character of class and team association which is easily recognizable from a distance. We roll the drums and bellow the horns as super-releasers derived from the cries of man-to-man intimidation. In many societies bodies and especially faces are painted in a ferocious design to exaggerate threat. Knights took advantage of many threat principles with their hideous face masks, giant plumes, and helmets adorned with the weaponry of familiar, fearsome beasts, and blue-black armor.
A major in full parade dress is awesome to males in an intimidating way, yet, like the guy in a football captain's uniform, he has considerable allure to females. So, like a strong chin or broad shoulders, threat gestures can be both intimidating or attractive, depending on the social state of the beholder.
Clothing changes seem to correspond to changes in the social zeitgeist - using, of course, the basic principles of threat ornamentation, with many added spices and renditions of the particular traditions and themes. "Inward" cultures, like the Athabascans, tend to dress in sombre, concealing colors and patterns, while more "open" cultures, like the Eskimos, prefer flamboyant colors and much ornamentation. Our own return to the "natural" adornment - soft, undone hair, nudity, and child-like clothes with short skirts and sloping shoulders - is consistent with the increased adulation of youth we are experiencing in the 20th century.
The first principle of fashion is the uniformity of class and caste adornment. Looking at the different eras in our own past or photos of other more exotic peoples, there is a definite homogeneity of clothing or adornment patterns underlying the superficial individual variations. Generally, the particular theme is not a matter of optimum utility but of social acceptance. The pressures of what to wear or how to decorate oneself are so strong that people end up wearing uniforms which characterize their status in much the same way that military uniforms are rank-specific.
One of the earmarks of feudalism is a strict clan hierarchy in land ownership, costumes, and personal property ownership. There are generally unwritten (sometimes written) edicts as to what a person of such and such station will wear, and how. These are known as sumptuary laws. In such a vertical hierarchy, people literally wore their wealth on their backs. But as laws governing clothing have a way of eroding, gradually there became three major classes in Europe; the aristocracy, the rulers; the middle classes, who did no hard physical labor; and the lower class, who worked with brawn.
As some of the middle class began to be wealthy through business and industry, they could afford to buy the finery of the aristocracy, which destroyed aristocratic dress patterns as symbols of station. At about this time democracy was on the increase and the functional aristocrat was on the decline. So instead of three major classes, two dress strata evolved that were symbols of laborers who engaged in manual toil, and the more leisured class.
The same trend occurred somewhat among women in Western society as it did among men. Women's clothes are moderately inexpensive from the garment factory and differ only subtly from those made up at the custom tailor's and designer's. So the sophisticate in the Rolls Royce wears only very simple jewelry and plain clothes, while the streetwalker and the waiter retain the anachronistic traditions of rouge and diamonds, or white dinner jackets, in an attempt to look "classy."
During the era when there was a distinct class break between gentlemen and commoners, the main signal of class was what J. Laver refers to as the anti-utility principle. It has shown up in many forms among numerous cultures and social situations. The long fingernails of the Chinese mandarin are an excellent example.
The major trend in the phenomenon of gentility is to show that one is good for nothing but leisure. This has resulted in leisure wear becoming standardized as formal wear - swallow tailed coats and big top hats were once fox-hunting attire, then bowlers, then the brimmed, creased top hat we wear formally today. Presently the European hunting outfit is what we wear in the United States as sport coat and tie, and to have European friends come hunting in that getup prompts one to ask, "But why are you dressing up?" when, in fact, it is we who wear hunting clothes to business meetings, church, and other stiff social occasions.
Every time a new sport becomes popular one can almost predict that it will contribute something to the styles of the day. Witness the polo or "T" shirt, tennis shoes, surfer shorts, three-quarter-sleeved football jerseys, high, tight-fitting riding boots, the visored baseball cap, the tennis or cheerleader miniskirt, yachting bellbottoms, safari bush jackets, etc. Laver proposed that at least men's wear follows an inevitable evolutionary pattern: "They are sport clothes, then ordinary town wear, then formal or evening wear, and finally servant's dress, after which they become mere historical curiosities." Notice how the service station attendant gets that classy look with a black bow-tie - something that once was common high class wear.
The henpeck order is nowhere more apparent than in the past history of women's wear. Though there are ways of increasing one's stature over, or attractiveness to men, it seems that women dress mainly for other women, as the old adage contends. It takes a subtle eye to catch the things women observe about one another which are usually missed by the menfolk. Even many fashion shifts are against the male tastes, yet women adhere to them rigorously - tightly cropped hair, flattened chests, and many others that have met with outspoken male criticism.
There have been two main related trends in clothing recently which deserve special attention, because they tell us something very important about our times. One is toward a classless, ideal society, and this takes form in fashion. It could be seen back in the forties with the sloppy bobby-soxer and the dirty white bucks, and in the blue jeans counterpart in the early fifties. The signal was "I don't really care how I look - you have to get to know me to find out something about me." But this was a minor movement at best. In the sixties the theme was carried even further to a "put-on" of established adornment signals - a blatant protest against clothes as status devices. Old army surplus clothes were worn, with beads and flowery materials - anything out of the ordinary. We began (superficially, anyhow) to get away from the clothing status game.
What we had done for centuries, if not for millennia, was to evolve a subtle masking of our natural social organs and a reordering of their signals. Threat signals were covered up (genitalia) and clipped back (hair). Sociosexual signals were modified by additions and coverings of all sorts - we were uniformed into gray flannel "joiners" wearing signals which said we succumbed to a common dogma.
What happened in the 1960's? History will tell us more someday from a distant perspective. It may be that the inevitable hypocrisy of every society came to the surface and the new initiates simply wouldn't buy it. Whether it was Viet Nam, or something more complex, the Western world became a hotbed of dissent with established lifestyles. The counterculture movement symbolized their sentiments in their attire - which has affected the fashions of the decade considerably. The themes of rebellion essentially reverted back to the basic threat theme from our biological ancestry. The "Handy Guide to the Well-dressed Mod Rebel" reads something like this:
Color: Black or bright, lots of black as in black motorcycle jackets or reds and blues with paisley prints and striped pants and beads and flowers.
Texture: rough, lots of leather, big belts, belt buckles, and watchbands, and high-topped jack boots with lots of chrome and brassy shine.
Hair: man, that's where it's at.
Nudity: Let it all hang out!
Eyes: big specs and tinted lenses.
Noise: the louder the better, especially the basses.
Cleanliness: What's that?
Movement: Be a swinger.
Design: military dress when available; Kaiser helmets, army blouses, and epaulets were real camp.
Styles: The noble savage, preferably Indian.
An Easy Rider's chopper motorcycle was a biological as well as a cultural phenomenon. There was something more behind the repugnance that sweeps town when the gaudy choppers roar down Shady Lane than mere cultural threat. It was another animal bedecked in every threat releaser we've ever known, the fearsome hordes we've suffered from since the Australopithecines, and here they come, roaring into River City.
What a sad, historical irony in a way: the new pacifistic, eco-religionist movement inadvertently took on the older threat signals by only having the option to go opposite soft white cotton and gray flannel neotenic. Under the roar of the electric guitar and scraggly hair there was supposed to be flowers and love. But we establishmentarians had already become so neotenized with our baby-powder skin, mouthwash, super-chrome-plated razor blades and Ivory soap ideal that becoming flower children in appearance was impossible: the niche was filled. The other mode signaled a frightening ghoul, a leather-and-fang troll, all the ogres from our hidden past.
This antiestablishment attire was one of fashion's passing flings and will go the way of the blue suede shoe - but what if it had been something more? Was it an expression of a system of values where individuality is crying to be re-expressed, and attempt to overthrow the tie-clasped Organization Man? I doubt if we could ever have removed the superficial signals of hierarchy and replaced them with inner ones - personal virtue, professional excellence, sincerity; but it would have been a noble experiment. I fear the Age of Aquarius, where love and sympathy abound, was perhaps the dream of older Zions and Utopias dressed in love beads and flowers. We are a hierarchical animal and somewhere in our values we have to have expressions of relative worth - exactly where and how is the problem. The real social stratagem, I suppose, is to have status accoutrements which do not result in physical or intellectual deprivation, but are "open" in the sense of not having any rigid restrictions on birthright. Whichever route we go, it should be traversed with a knowledge of our biological selves as well as our ideal ones.
Coming from the values of the 60's we can look at the biological significance of one of those vogueries in more detail: dirt.