A Shock of Aesthetic Pleasure

In the beginning of Jean-Pierre Melville’s film The Red Circle, a man jumps from his train to escape his police escort. Soon enough, he sprints through the woods, stumbling, tripping, falling, desperate to flee, until he reaches a stream. He pauses, strips his clothes, bundles them together—with efficiency, the viewer notices—and tosses them over the water. Police dogs bark in the distance while he trudges through the stream in underwear. It’s all very exciting, this gambit might work, it seems, but there’s a hiccup: rather than grabbing the bundle and scurrying away, as you expect, he, instead, takes the time to get dressed. He tucks in his shirt and straightens his suit, because it’s 1970 and rural France and to not wear a suit is conspicuous even if you’re in the woods and running from the police.

Watching this scene today, my assumption is that many viewers would conclude that he shuffles into his suit for a purpose, seeing his haste as part of the escape: the clothes come with an objective, it could be demonstrated, almost factually, in its utility. Perhaps the dark fabric works as camouflage. Or the jacket avoids suspicion in the nearest village. A tie will certainly be the custom. And maybe that’s partly true, as he will need, eventually, to slip into a crowd without looking disheveled, so I wouldn’t dismiss that as his strategy. Yet I would dismiss limiting his choices completely to utility, completely to a consideration of attire that’s limited to functionality, even though I suspect that’s how many viewers, in today’s world, would view his tucked shirt.

In many ways I find it remarkable that fashion isn’t studied more often by those who proclaim an interest in art, culture, or even history. For many people the subject appears limited to what’s practical, what’s essential, with the decision for clothing based on nothing more than the weather and comfort. But if you’re inquisitive about the world, keen to learn about how people live, it doesn’t take much to glance across the globe and discover a brilliant spectrum of norms and tastes and expectations for attire. You simply can’t watch someone carry an umbrella down the street without discerning a bit about their culture, regardless of whether it’s raining. To dismiss the importance of clothes, to overlook the perplexing, curious differences in how we wrap ourselves in fabric, is a peculiar choice if you’re fascinated by people.

At first glance, there are chasms: the differences between glittering, vivid wedding clothes in India and understated, muted formal dress in Northern Europe. But there are also subtler, almost hidden distinctions within groups, which aren’t merely based on utility, thankfully, as life is far too brief to be so dull. For an outsider, it’s like looking through a window: I remember realizing one afternoon how the teenage girls in Morocco—robed in black, difficult for me to distinguish—had elaborate, varying, and colored shoelaces, a minuscule mark of individuality that, once spotted, I couldn’t miss.

And I think it would be a mistake to sever those shoelaces into two categories: with the laces themselves as functional, necessary, serving a purpose that can be defined, and the color as superfluous, as having other meanings, distant from anything like utility. Yet many people insist on this artificial divide: a separation in the mind between style and substance. Either your clothing is ornate or it’s practical; either your furniture is stylish or it’s functional; either your language is elaborate or it’s clear.

It would be difficult for me to exaggerate how very silly I find this belief, this belief that you can, for instance, separate the way someone speaks from what they say, this belief that there’s a distinction between the way a sentence is constructed and what it means. How you do something is linked—it is fundamental, really—to what you do, whether you’re putting on a shirt or telling a story.

This false spectrum, with style on one side and substance on the other, seems to make some people suspicious about fashion. There’s something deep within us, it seems, that perceives a surface that’s brilliant, flashy, striking, to lack depth—in a way that’s almost hardwired to how we perceive the environment, so that what’s beautiful must be meretricious. Red flowers are pretty but fragile while yellow weeds are plain but sturdy. Hence the stereotype of the model who lights up a room but is somehow rather dim, or, from the other direction, of the shy man who is repulsive but intelligent. To dress too well reveals an obsession with surfaces, and such care for the external betrays a hollow internal life. And to speak too smoothly, too artfully, must, it seems, betray a lack of meaning underneath your words.

The paradox is that most people still want to dress well and speak with finesse but they don’t want to appear overly concerned about appearances. If it’s embarrassing to be out of fashion, it’s even worse to care. So this is a tricky bind, with the winners those who can locate the line where they’re perceived as stylish, as attuned to the latest fashions, without exerting too much effort. But a wardrobe without any flair or a speech without any artistry ought to be as unthinkable as a cathedral without any stained glass. A bit further: to assume that the stained glass in a cathedral is merely a stylish flourish and not fundamental to its substance ought to be just as unthinkable.

How dull, this sensibility of endpoints, efficiencies, expediences, this manner of living that demands the literal at the expense of the ironic. If the prose is ornate, flowery, baroque, then it’s probably wasteful, as it’s just for show, as goes this sensibility. Which leaves only prose that’s crisp and seamless and direct as capable of truth. So: the choice is between beauty and efficiency, between artfulness and clarity, according to the beliefs of those who have neither.