Charlie Rose

REMant  02/22/2010 10:49 PM Report

Black is historically the color of Puritanism and the like, and tho it may indicate an humble turn, an uptick may have less to do with saving money than with saving face. Shortly after Reagan was swept into office, I recall, bell-bottoms and platform shoes were quickly replaced by chinos and penny loafers, only seen on Ivy League campuses for the preceding decade or so, where they never entirely went out of style. That's when J Crew started I believe, and L L Bean and Eddie Bauer emerged from the world of hunting boots and down jackets to garb what the French term the bourgeois bohemian (which I suspect Brooks lifted). The apparel is not different from the well-worn sort the upper-classes affect, tho in this case it is newly minted, often processed to look old, and the catalog models wear a certain diffidence. As with them display is carefully circumscribed, yet if you have to ask how much it is, you can't afford it. But where it might be seen in the first case as a continuation of noblesse oblige, Tory Democracy, and a recognition of decline of old money, in the latter it bears the hallmark of political correctness and I think the type traces back to Progressivism, and hypocritical Whig reformers of the sort Mandeville ridiculed, tho still firmly Weberian. They do no evil, but they do no good. Someone described it for The Urban Dictionary: "Yuppies or dinks who live as is they weren't, love to differentiate themselves by visiting foreign countries before the herd of ordinary tourists flock after them (Croatia a few years ago, now the Baltic states), eat alternative/fair trade/organic food such as 'bio fair trade Miso soup.' They tend to live in mixed neighbourhoods to be near the poor, but they send their children to private schools to avoid too close a contact with the natives and they price all the poor out of the neighbourhoods they gentrify. Of course they concentrate in some parts of Paris and never could live in 'la province.' They often vote for the Communists or the Greens but take the fullest advantage of the tax gifts offered by right-wing governments." In other words they're all for "Gemeinschaft," but without the "Gesellschaft" there would be no market for the products of these retailers.