Clothes Make the Man

This morning, the New York Times delights in reporting that clothing is a key factor in differentiating locals and tourists in vacation destinations--in this case, the Hamptons. Who is an impostor, and who really belongs?

Exclusivity, as much as sun and sand, is part of the gravitational pull of the Hamptons, where Them and Us divisions are as fastidiously tended as a billionaire’s privet hedge.

It’s not exactly news that clothes denote status, but in beachside communities...the signs of inclusion among local elites are more challenging to convey. And, while there is no formalized uniform to identify which group one belongs to, a lot can be read in an item that upon a time was worn as underclothes.

Okay, I get it. Vacationing in the Hamptons is an endless game of signaling group affiliations to others. That's not much different than any other getaway spot. Florida, and where one goes on vacation in Florida in relation to where one is from, is a prime example in my own experience. In large part it seems to be about choosing for or against one's own background: my parents, inexplicably, prefer to vacation among the Quebecois when in the Sunshine State, despite having no ties to La Belle Province. Meanwhile, my in-laws prefer a certain city on the Gulf Coast where other escapees from their hometown are plentiful.

And sure, I am aware that mentioning Florida--as opposed to the Turks & Caicos, say, or Cinque-Terre--does carry with it a certain amount of information about me and the taste cultures of my relatives. Choosing where to travel is an autobiographical act, a consumer choice. It's fairly obvious, but is rarely taken seriously, as the tone of the article indicates.

In fact, it is interesting to regard the extent to which the activity of leisure travel is really a yearning and searching for placeness and belonging elsewhere, and how that exists in tension with one's identity. You become more yourself, while also stepping into someone else's shoes. That can be quite magical: travel is of course a vehicle for seeing the world, but also seeing oneself in relation to that world. This is me, slathered in SPF 45, as a beachgoer; this is me, changing trains at Chatelet, as a Parisian.

I got a whopping dose of this thinking as an exchange student in high school, where symbols of difference and belonging are perhaps the most closely scrutinized. As it happens, this awareness of the connections between people and place lends itself naturally to a career in architecture and design.

Back to clothing though, and specifically t-shirts, that broadcast status:

It signals localism, but a “friendly localism,” said Ms. Adams....It suggests that the wearer is in on something, has the key to what Tracy Feith, the surfer and designer who operates a shop at the Surf Lodge in Montauk, called “the authenticity everyone’s trying to find in the marketplace.”

Wearing that t-shirt ("Ithaca is Gorges," for example), a person becomes a walking billboard for a place, and all its attendant connotations, at relatively little cost. As pointed out earlier, that's actually quite powerful--it reinforces both the identity of the individual wearing the shirt as well as that of the destination in question. And as is obvious, this hunt for synthesis with place, for belonging, only expands in a networked world, making actual travel to the place in question almost unnecessary. A person can be, and often is, of many places simultaneously.

Here's a studio project that I'd like to see, one that starts with a t-shirt: design the stuff of a place--the slogan, the souvenirs, the apparel--and then go about designing the place itself. Who is your audience, and what is their back story? What will they do when they arrive? How will your souvenirs be displayed, worn, used? How does the souvenir play on or interact with the physical aspects of the place you're designing?  Is your project a boutique hotel in a global city, or a resort in an exotic location? Is it a coffee shop in a college town, or a nightclub on the beach? What is the most authentic thing about your place, and how did it become so? How would you keep the appeal fresh, even after your inevitable success?

(Related.)

Comments

[Chester]

So I have two obnoxious examples from New England to contribute:

First are "Black Dog" Bakery T-shirts from Martha's Vineyard that were very popular in the 1990s. What distinguished this shirt was that each summer would have the year printed on the shirt. Credibility points went to those with older dates on their Black Dog shirt. Someone with a "Black Dog 1988" shirt carried a certain level of legitimacy that a person with a "Black Dog 2003" shirt did not. Or so it went.

Second are the obnoxious Cambridge (MA) parking permit stickers. These distinctive small rectangular stickers would be a subtle way for someone to signal just how long they have lived in this erudite, desirable, exclusive city. Each year, residents are sent a new sticker. A practical individual would remove the old one and replace it with the new. But not Cambridge residents, who place the new one next to the old one. It was not uncommon to see Volvos driving around with half of the rear window filled with parking permit stickers dating back to the eighties (not to mention stickers bearing the blocky names of prestigious elementary schools, high schools, and colleges). On more than one occasion, I remember seeing a late-model car with more stickers than years on the car, meaning the owner TRANSFERED their old stickers to their new car. Once again, the legitimizing message is, "I've been here longer than you."

[Chris]

Thanks for those, Chester--I know the second one pretty well. I think that the prestigious school stickers are universal, perhaps even more pronounced in parts of the world where there are fewer universities than New England.

Anyone else have other examples of this? There was a piece in the NYT a couple of years ago about area code envy--people with 415 and 212 cell phones seeing themselves as part of an elite club--"authentic" San Franciscans and New Yorkers, respectively.

[myra manning]

Whether it's the Hamptons or Hawaii, is it really all that different? Just economies of scale if you ask me. I walked around Honolulu for days wearing a shirt that loudly read "Hawaii '85." We all judge those around us by what they wear to a degree. At a certain point, maybe it's nothing more than good old fashioned human nature.