Fashion as a Social Language: A Conversation with Derek Guy
Why do we wear what we wear? The answer, at its simplest, is obvious: we wear what we want, because it looks good. As subjective and diverse as each of our independent tastes are, we still ascribe to certain principles of dress. Many of these are rooted in art, but many more are a product of historical social norms. Why are navy and charcoal suits more common than brown for office workers? Why do leather jackets go with black skinny jeans? Historical precedents inform the “rules” of dress we abide by— and sometimes break— in the modern day, and we use them to communicate our identity to others. In other words, these rules make up the fabric of the social language known as “dress”, but over time, they seem to be fraying at the edges. This is a central thesis to Derek Guy’s beliefs, and one he builds much of his educational platform on.
Derek Guy—better known as “the menswear guy”—is one of the biggest fashion influencers on Twitter, with over 1.2 million followers. His feed hosts a menagerie of Ralph Lauren memes, clothing recommendations, and lengthy threads on fashion theory. In addition, Guy also runs a blog by the name of "Die, Workwear!". Before he became one of the most viral people on the internet, he frequented old-school fashion forums in the 2000’s. In considering how the landscape has shifted over the last few decades, Guy says, “[Back then], to get into this kind of space you had to have some interest in clothing, and then you'd have to go and seek out these kinds of communities… And that required a lot of active participation on your part.” This stands in stark contrast to how we consume content in the modern age; “the algorithm” delivers content to us, and users are relieved of the need to search. For Guy, this is a double edged sword. On the upside, it has given him much greater reach than before possible. Using his newfound platform and popularity in the past couple of years, he has helped countless individuals discover the world of fashion, create their sense of style, and overall educate people about what it means to dress.
The Ralph Lauren Polo Bear, a historic icon that exemplifies Guy’s emphasis on the cultural history of style.
And the downside? A lot of hate, since the nature of his virality means his content is delivered to those who dislike it as much as those who do. Of his critics, the majority come as conservatives irked by Guy's left-wing politics. It doesn’t help that he frequently uses images of Republicans to highlight clothing errors, which he says is less about political digs and more out of consideration for making an example, as clothing is a very personal and intimate thing.
“One’s clothing is deeply tied to their identity; it's the way they present themselves to the world, and it's the layer that sits literally on our skin. Therefore, whenever you criticize someone's attire, you have to put certain sensitivities that may not be there for other areas of culture.”
The criticism Guy receives is just one facet of a larger problem in the current space: the conversations we are having, especially on Twitter, are increasingly shallow and derivative.
“[There were] a lot of people on the forums that were extremely knowledgeable… technicians, tailors, bespoke shoemakers, [and] you had professional pattern makers. Those are people with not only technical skills, but they're some of the best in the world.” Even beyond that, the content being discussed came from personal experiences, books, and the resulting discourse benefited from it. In comparison, the conversations today are often about discourse more than the topics itself. The result? Discourse becomes increasingly homogenous as it eventually detracts from its original purpose. Another factor Guy attributes to this is the overemphasis on the consumerist nature of fashion. Due to the nature of where conversations are held online, discourse is limited to “on the very base level, ‘what size should I take?’ Or, the worst discourse is, ‘Is this brand's cultural cachet rising or falling? Is this hot? Is this less hot?’” There is increasingly less space to hold more nuanced conversations, and in many ways Guy’s viral tweets are a product of this trend. However, through all his various tweets and threads he maintains one central philosophy, and he covers in-depth in this conversation— the function of dress as a social language. But what does that really mean?
“I think it's actually very intuitive— I think it's actually how most people interact with clothes. If you [are] interested in any kind of subcultural movement— punk, surf, skate, or, hardcore music— whatever it was, you understood that there was a certain uniform for that group. Even if it wasn't told to you as a rule book, you pick up on [it]. And I think that's true even today— you know that if you're going to a funeral, you don't show up in shorts. We all understand that there are social messages in clothes, there are certain uniforms that associate you with the group and also identify you as an individual within the group because you may modify the group's uniform in specific ways to say, not only am I part of the group, I'm also an individual within this group.”
Lo Life culture, originating from Brooklyn and centered around Ralph Lauren and hip-hop, was Guy’s first foray into dress.
What Guy says, I think, is true in the broadest sense— how a person dresses is dependent on their cultural background, socioeconomic status, and social affiliations. Inevitably, the combination of those factors sorts them into a specific group, and signalling ingroup membership through dress is an effective means of communication. That begs the question: if dress is to function as a language, how is it that this language first takes root; how does a group of people agree on a common tongue? To that, Guy answers,
“We are often relying on the historical language that existed as part of a social milieu as part of a social practice. Why do black Oxfords go with navy suits? Well, there's no other reason besides that's how that was a uniform for men of a certain social class when they did business in London. And why is it that brown brogues work well with whipcord trousers and tweeds? Well, that's simply because those same men would wear those clothes when they went to the countryside. And so when you think of dress as a social language in the way that there are many languages, each with their own grammatical rules, it becomes very easy to answer any kind of aesthetic question.”
In other words, historical precedents provide a set of rules, as it were, upon which we communicate to others of an ingroup. But at the same time, the nature of languages begs for rules to be bent and broken over time. For example, take this 2022 blog post by Derek Guy on bookstore fashion— “bookcore”, he calls it. In the post, Guy speaks of patrons dressed in the very same tweeds and brogues one might find in the countryside, but no one would mistake them for businessmen on vacation. In The Last Bookstore in DTLA, or City Lights Publishers in San Francisco, you would find an equally eclectic mix of outfits, seemingly divorced from their historical significance, but bound by the common thread of the context it's worn in. So, to me, the historical language is an important consideration, but so is the current context— and Guy seems to agree.
“A very obvious and famous example is the way that Ivystyle landed in Japan. A lot of young Japanese guys in the 1960s and 1970s were copying what they thought the average American college student dressed like. Do they understand the feeder school system that went into Ivy League colleges and the history of WASP culture and inequality in America? I don't know. But what mattered for them is that they got the look correct and their culture; they're now operating in a separate culture, [that being] Japanese Ivy. They're not necessarily trying to look like, they're not trying to be the most authentic white WASP. They're trying to get cred with their other Japanese friends who are in this dress subculture.”
The US presence in Japan post-WWII saw their exposure to— and widespread popularity of—“Ivy-style” and the subsequent Japanese interpretations.
In different circumstances, this could be rightfully seen as appropriation, but I think overall not just being aware of the historical context, but being able to subvert what that means in terms of the rules it sets, is a good thing. Historically, those rules have been set by the upper class: the nobility in Europe, then politicians, then businessmen. However, in the United States we have come to dress increasingly less formally over time, and as a result the rules have become increasingly set by not the elite, but the masses. As such, the barrier of entry into the clothing that would have been historically reserved for the elite continues to lower. This gradual process of the democratization of dress, to Guy, is a double edged sword.
“In the early 20th century, men's dress was governed by time, place, and occasion. If you had a certain social standing, and you had to do a certain thing like go to work or go to a summer wedding, you knew exactly how you're expected to dress, and if you deviate too far from that, you'd be harshly judged for it. People would judge you as being immoral, criminal, a low person, incompetent, whatever. I think those judgments are bad. I don't think you should ever judge a person's deeper, more important qualities based on their attire, so it's good that the world has shifted away from such superficial judgments.”
The other thing that Guy notes is, in my opinion, of greater importance. While we, as a society, still tend to copy the elite, we emulate a much wider range of people now. Workers, artists, musicians, subcultures, countercultures, all inextricably linked to the societal shift towards the middle class. As the middle class gained financial power, they in turn gained social status. As the 20th century progressed, they sought not to emulate the upper class, but the polities of African-Americans, gays, counterculturalists. These groups possessed not financial capital, but cultural capital, whose metaphorical purchasing power is inextricable from the preceding changes in political and social trends.
“You can't have those fashion changes without the social changes and vice versa. So whatever I think of fashion changes, I prefer to live in that world where we include more people into our social, political, and economic ideas of who's allowed to have those rights— that is separate from what I think of fashion.”
If we think of each tradition of dress as its own social language, then the world we live in is profoundly multilingual. Businessmen on their commute walk alongside hippies, truant teenagers in streetwear, Y2K revivalists, and the like. While this freedom of expression is great for those already within the fashion space, it comes as a daunting wall for newcomers who are confronted with thousands of aesthetic languages, each with their own rules, words, and idiosyncrasies. How could they know where to start? Nor do many companies themselves speak a particular language; consumers are instead forced to cobble together an assemblage of articles from various brands in the hopes that it produces something coherent. To Guy, this is a process still in motion.
“To make matters worse, in the last 10 years, we've seen more customization options in fashion… that, to me, is like asking somebody to create a new alphabet, to create a new language that the rest of us can understand. That to me is not a great system, because you're partly assuming that the consumer is better at designing clothes than the designer.”
We can assume this trend to continue in the years to come, in part driven by the financial incentives behind breaking from the traditional inventory system. No more shortage, no more overflow— no more lost profits. For the customer, however, this burden of choice is more debilitating than it is beneficial.
“The consumer is best served if they choose a store that can help guide them to build a sensible wardrobe. And that's very difficult to find nowadays; it's very difficult to go back to that original model where you went to a store, you formed a relationship with a sales associate, and they helped you put together not only an outfit, but a wardrobe. That support system is deteriorating because so much shopping is online and not in physical spaces anymore.”
As we learn to navigate the ever-evolving linguistics of the modern fashion industry, we too must become familiar with the trends of the times— in other words, slang. A recurring theme among both cases is that just as quickly as they come into vogue, they fall out of favour, forgotten in a closet along with the rest of last year’s S/S collection. As the world moves faster and faster, we prevent trends from sticking, vernacular from turning into vocabulary. To this, Guy references David Marx’s Status and Culture.
“You could go back in history and find a certain look associated with every decade, the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and so forth. And after that, a lot of stuff starts to stagnate because things get sucked into the zeitgeist very fast and then leave just as quickly because other things are getting sucked into the zeitgeist. And so nothing sticks around long enough.”
Somewhat paradoxically, precisely because we are moving through trends so fast, we end up in a strange limbo, a no man’s land full of style but utterly devoid of identity. What makes a generation? What makes an era? These are questions that we answer in a hundred different ways, in a thousand different languages; to the observer that is posterity, we are cacophonous and incoherent. The question we must first answer is, how can we become capable of defining an era? To Guy, it all comes back to culture.
“It has to be associated with something outside of fashion— it has to be connected to some subcultural group. A lot of fashion trends stay within the fashion space, and I don't think that has staying power because fashion is constantly encouraging people to consume and it's almost just built on consumerism. It's a cultural thing, the things that have staying power tend to exist outside of fashion, [they] have to be associated with some group that has cultural capital.”
Conversely, the culture itself, however kaleidoscopic and fragmented, must subsume some coherent identity long enough for it to stick, rather than churning through endless iterations of various aesthetics. But maybe we don’t need to be defined; maybe definitions are simply part of the social constraints we have managed to break through. Maybe defying definitions is infinitely more meaningful. Whatever the case, I think Guy’s message still stands— now, perhaps more than ever, it is important to be cognizant of what and how we communicate through the clothes we choose to wear. This freedom of choice is a burden, a responsibility, and a privilege; it is something that necessitates borrowing from the past to build a future.
