'iGent Myths Busted!' - Page 14

For Sator's next trick, he will dispel myths of evolution by posting more vintage illustrations:

I think Vox described this pretty well in his now defunct coherent combinations thread.

 

You have to figure out if what you want is harmony or discordance in the way you dress. If you want the first, then you're better off following the "rules", at least while you're a beginner. You will just look better. But if you want discordance you have to do it all the way, instead of trying to add "twists" to the conventional, which often result in poor ensembles. That's what LabelKing, TTO and barims do, and that's why they look good in their dandyish style.

Based on the recent string of this thread - everyone on MC except me knows the rules since almost every poster talks with authority about who follws them or who breaks them (though not how they are following them or breaking them). It's like fight club except in the MC world the first rule is everybody talks about rules but nobody actually lists them.

It would seem that I need to buy Manton's book as that seems the only place these rules are actually discussed. That's not a veiled request for you to share your intellectual capital Manton - seems like a very reasonable price to pay to get in the club.

This phrase is doing a lot of work. A LOT of work. You're giving yourself a ton of wiggle room rhetorically. The point that 'sworth is making is that LK is stylish even when he breaks the rules, and often color and pattern-matching are among the victims.

In the pic above, he is stylish, garish, and his tie is tonally too close to his shirt. No fucks were given.

 

I figured them out by taking note of what caused me to be ridiculed. Boy, that was a long process. Still ongoing it would seem.

Are you suggesting that clothing and styles don't change and evolve over time? But of course they do, otherwise we would still be wearing morning dress daily.

 

It is equally difficult to maintain meaningful discourse with those who refuse to acknowledge that someone might legitimately hold a different view as to what is aesthetically pleasing.  This tends to be a defining element of the 'rules rule!' element.  By definition, anyone with an aesthetic preference that is different from their own - and that of the inevitable cloister of like-minded blowhards - is inherently wrong.

I think you are overstating things quite a bit. In the context of SF and specifically MC, when people talk about "rules" they are talking about a specific style of dress developed in relatively recent memory that evolved in a small number of countries representing a fairly narrow cultural tradition practiced by a fraction of the world's population. There is nothing in these "rules" that says the following is "inherently wrong":



Nor this:



Nor this:



Different cultures have different traditions of dress. There are no objective "rules" that can tell a human being what "should" be worn - at their most basic level, clothes are technology that protect our fragile bodies from the sometimes harsh environments we have grown to populate. The first time our ancestors threw on an animal pelt it was to keep from freezing to death, not because it conveyed a cultural message. To convey a cultural message requires a cultural reference, and that is what the "rules" are about. Different culture, different traditions, different "rules".

Aesthetics are one thing and the "rules" are another. The "rules" are partly about aesthetics, but mostly about culture. You can have your own aesthetic preferences. You can prefer to wear all white or all black from head to toe, or you can prefer to walk around in a speedo. You can even look good doing it. But the "rules", to the extent they exist, are what they are, and they don't need to bend to accommodate your preferences anymore than you need to bend to accommodate them.

As someone (Foo?) said, it's like sports. If you prefer basketball to baseball, no problem. But just because you prefer basketball doesn't mean the rules of baseball are too rigid in their non-basketballness. You pick your sport, and you follow the rules of that sport.

They change but they don't "evolve" in the Darwinian sense.

Black tie didnt evolve from white tie?

It depends on what you mean by "evolve" and how strictly you want to take the Darwin analogy. In Darwinism, a key principle of life is random genetic mutation which is "selected for" through reproductive success. Clearly nothing like that is happening.

If you just mean "slow changes that arise, one to the next," then yes, sort of.

I was hoping there was a less lengthy/painful process. I was wrong.

Maybe you would, but my ancestors certainly weren't wearing morning dress... if clothing and styles didn't change I'd presumably inherit their tradition, not the tradition that your ancestors apparently followed, and I would be wearing homemade overalls or something similarly befitting of my family's working class roots.

Be careful not to over-estimate the past ubiquity of the clothing tradition you have chosen to follow.

I'm sure that Native Americans were stylish, with their headdresses and the like. I'm sure bikers and Hells Angels are stylish, even though this probably manifests itself through their motorcycle with its chrome plating and Von Dutch inspired paint work. I'm sure that African chiefs are/were stylish too and a whole range of indigenous people the world over are stylish as well.

But we are talking about what is stylish within the classic menswear canon.

If by "evolve" it is meant that the form specific garments take can be traced back to other specific garments that preceded them than yes. However garments do not survive and thrive because they are better adapted to their environments, it is more likely that their environment determines the evolution of the garments themselves (so a complete reversal) and even then it is not a given for most stylistic changes.

Or I guess +1, with some precisions.