Style as redundancy

In The Fashion System, Roland Barthes’s structuralist study of the rules and systems of meaning in female dress, it’s not the physical properties of clothes that give them their meaning, it’s the relation between properties. A skirt of a particular length isn’t inherently fashionable or unfashionable, daring or traditional; it’s defined in relation to all the other skirts of different lengths, this year and last year and twenty further back.

Consequently, fashion needs seasonal change in order to have meaning. Spread collars this year, cutaway collars next year, because the shuttling between them is what makes one fashionable and another not.

It’s easy to be cynical, and doubly easy in menswear, which often prides itself on being “classic” rather than cyclical. It’s obvious enough why The Rake starts lauding the club collar shirt just as it starts stocking the very same item in its online shop. And even “classic” menswear has its cyclical infatuations and marketing drives; turtlenecks and corduroy suits will likely fall from popularity as quickly as the next variations of the sweater and the casual suit arrive for A/W 2019.

(source: Marol for Parisian Gentleman)

At the same time, this kind of variation isn’t pure marketing. On Barthes’s account the meanings of clothes comes from the choices between versions of the same (knit tie or twill, plain shirt or striped). And you can’t have the choices to make without a level of redundancy. If there was only one way to tell a story, nobody would read novels. A novel narrates the plot; a beer is fermented grain; a suit is a jacket and a pair of trousers. Why would you need several of the same thing?

Much of the interest in any hobby—it seems to me—is in the small variations that you only start to see over time. In the picture below, Jake Grantham’s tie is a point of interest because while it’s a classic grey check, the pattern has a bit more contrast than the typical "wedding tie.“ It’s that variation on the absolute classic which makes the whole thing neither stand out as awkward nor fade away as boring (just as Jake’s tie length suggests a balancing act between uptight businesswear and outright dishevelment):

(source)

Likewise, Gerry Nelson makes brilliant casual tailoring choices by taking an expected formula and altering it in a couple of key ways: firstly, this colour combination reduces the standard dark suit-light shirt contrast, making the whole thing less formal. Secondly, collarless shirt gives a strikingly casual look, but it’s far more mature and coherent than the t-shirt-and-suit:

(source)

These choices, in other words, are meaningful because they deviate from expectation, but they deviate in fairly subtle ways; there’s still a logic to the whole outfit. As with a grey shirt in place of a white one, these are classics with a twist.

The problem with cyclical marketing and design isn’t redundancy, exactly, but depreciation: the suit with tiny lapels now looks worse than it did in the mid-2000s; the suit with huge lapels and a gorge so high that it’s behind your head will look bad soon enough.

But that’s not to say that there’s some perfect “classic” mean which is ideal. Deviations and differences are what make style something worth discussing, rather than a fixed hierarchy from best to worst. It’s individual quirks and decisions which make someone stylish rather than just correct, and these things don’t come in and out over a season. They accumulate over years of trying different versions of the same basic things. The right question is not “is this redundant?” but “is this a redundancy I’m interested in?”