A Brief History of Style and Staying True to The Land We Till

I took a fashion theory class in college because I needed some advanced elective credits, and really, how hard could something like that be. It was the first and only time in my sixteen-year education that I received a ‘C’, and I still respect and revere the feisty New Yorker with glasses who earned that title. She taught us about the history of clothing trends and the social psychology behind our appearances, our outward expressions that tell a good deal. She lectured on about subculture groups and body piercings and female foot binding in Asia. All the cute girls who showed up on day one in stilettos and fur were in for a rude awakening here, but I digress.

I sat near the back with tattoos and slim denim, soaking in from a faraway projector screen this hundred-year evolution regarding women’s style and the strange, cyclical nature of it all. We’ve stammered on for ages about how history repeats itself and often cross our fingers that it won’t, but it was stunning to study the precept so acutely in this one area and for no other reason than just to learn about its trueness. Let me show you.

In the 1910’s, we move from the Edwardian corset – intended to accentuate the breasts and hips and every other curve – to the 20’s right after the Woman’s Suffrage movement. Such provocative, ankle-showing form was forsaken and replaced with modest pieces like the straight-cut and flat-chested flapper dress. The Great War had ended and there was no greater feeling than simplicity. In the 30’s, we see the feminine and sinuous shape return in spite of the Depression, and by the 40’s, women were in the workplace and – for another time – sought function over fashion (as seen in the utility dress).

The 1950’s marked the end of war-time rationing, so materials were used liberally and for the masses, producing in droves your poodle skirts and your frilly socks and every neck scarf in the world. Accessories like pearls and pillbox hats that were once reserved for upper class citizens were now less expensive and married together this dichotomy of class and fun for all statuses of women to enjoy. In the 60’s, we see a swift transition advocating for youthfulness and modernity but unwilling to let go of a scandalous silhouette. We finally reach 1970, and ten years is time enough for a people to feel tied down, choked by politics and an existing state of affairs. And as with any newfound freedom that involves giving the bird, we’ve glimpsed a rare thing on the horizon and want anything to do with it. So it’s no surprise that in the decade of social change there was a generation littered with tiny tops and daisy dukes with nothing but naval and leg to look at. Charlie’s Angels came to be, and Farrah Fawcett, and then Woodstock.

And we have bell-bottoms and billowing skirts, which turn again to pegged pants and shorter skirts, ones that round the waist tightly. Everything will be larger and there will be more of it until suddenly everything is smaller and there is less of it. Star-studded statements eventually must die to the likes of their opposite – a muted palette, looser fits, popular androgyny. If you’re reading this, you know that it was only fair for Fresh Prince to happen before our favorite 2006 Olsen twins could. This has been the pattern, unambiguously.

This is still the pattern, only steeped in ambiguity, because we can’t, of course, see a pattern emerge from all the way down here. Down here, right now, we can see black lives trying to matter and a bent towards minimalism and a president unfit for his time and consistently warmer temperatures. We see alternate forms of medicine and unspeakable tragedies and a lot of people made of opinions. Ones that let us know when we should marry and how not to parent and what’s causing cancer in our foods. Now, read all that over again. Did you? None of it is new. Not one of them special or unprecedented or wild enough for a previous world or the next. The evolution of the garments we wear only mirrors a bigger story which tells of a whole earth built upon existence, death, decay, rebirth, and again.

Here’s a for instance that the Internet’s pregnant with recently. Well, real life, too, but more loudly the Internet: What if progressive Christianity has gone too far? What if we’ve swung too wide, included too many, repented too little. The radical wave that rejected its evangelical upbringing in pursuit of a new narrative, what if by abandoning certain doctrine we’ve abandoned the faith in its entirety? Is it time that we crawl our ways back to a sure set of fundamental theology, or is the mere idea of a universal truth too much a mystery for even that?

In just twenty-four years alive, I’ve already borne witness to three major shifts in which American Christianity hangs in the balance. Not personal shifts, necessarily (albeit some), but cultural ones. We were, at first, too close-minded and then we became “burned out” on the rigidity once we realized that the majority of people were offended by us, and now – after we’ve adopted some science and attended a few protests and advocated for one too many same-sex couples – we’ve lost sight of judgment. Someone tweeted the other day that “progressive Christians like to pretend they are welcoming, inclusive, enlightened, and all those nasty conservatives are hateful, oppressive ogres. But many progressive Christians have become what they claim to dislike so much.” And I think this is what I’m inarticulately getting at.

1) That this is not the first time religion has divided itself in search for the rightest way and 2) That as long as we’re here, we’ll go round and round, too much and not enough, back and forth trying to reclaim the very same thing – what is true. Each of us scrambling for truth and fairness and a soft middle ground to land, none of which will be reconciled this side of Heaven. Since a pattern is only a pattern from up top, we can hardly see that all of this has happened before and cyclically must continue, but be sure, it has and it will. Only it’s not our lot to find an end or a way that is right but just to search for it faithfully.  

Wendell Berry says this: “We cannot know the whole truth, which belongs to God alone, but our task nevertheless is to seek to know what is true. And if we offend gravely enough against what we know to be true, as by failing badly enough to deal affectionately and responsibly with our land and our neighbors, truth will retaliate with ugliness, poverty, and disease. The crisis of this line of thought is the realization that we are at once limited and unendingly responsible for what we know and do.”

And so it goes – ten steps forward and triple the steps back as we taste whispers of the truth and consequently let it down. This side of Heaven will know badness because we’ve known goodness, poverty because we’ve known prosperity, and ugliness because we’ve known beauty. But at least we’ve known at all, right?

Our bodies are designed to live in step with the seasons, archetypal and divine, but we were also marked with an indelible longing for something not here, something finished and whole. And though the Lord made it and called it good, as long as creation is on its feet, it will be moving and changing, living and dying, retaliating against the truth. Some might think it cruel to start us off spinning, chasing a fruit that may never come to bear in this world, but I don’t think so. Because being faithful right now to what is true inevitably lends its efforts to the whole and single truth, coming to bear the fruit of Goodness without badness, Prosperity without poverty, Beauty that cannot also be ugly. I want to know that.

It is quite easy and natural to either separate ourselves from the process entirely or to become so deeply immersed in the change that it sinks us. But I wonder if seeking to know what is true actually involves a holy concentration in both pulling back – recognizing our place on an arbitrary scale – and pressing in, tending affectionately and responsibly to our land and our neighbors while we wait. I’d like to bide my time here in such a way that what I know to be true is offended one degree less in Winter than in the Spring before.

. . .

As is the generation of leaves, so is that of humanity.
The wind scatters the leaves on the ground, but the live timber
Burgeons with leaves again in the season of spring returning.
So one generation of men will grow while another dies.

- Homer, The Illiad, Book Six