Unit Text Clothes Make the Man【DOC精选】.docVIP

Clothes Make the Man—Uneasy Anne Hollander1 What kind of clothes do you like to wear? Is it important what a person wears, especially in public? What role do you think men’s clothes play in social communication? (Abridged) The last decade has made a large number of men more uneasy about what to wear than they ever have believed possible. The idea that one might agonize over whether to grow sideburns or wear trousers of a radically different shape had never occurred to a whole generation. Before the mid’60s whether to wear a tie was the most dramatic sartorial problem: everything else was a subtle matter of surface variation. Women have been so accustomed to dealing with extreme fashion for so long that they automatically brace themselves for whatever is coming next, including their own willingness to resist or conform and all the problem masculine response. Men in modern times have only lately felt any pressure to pay that kind of attention. All the delicate shade of significance expressed by the small range of possible alternatives used to be absorbing enough: Double-or single-breasted cut2? Sports jacket and slacks3 or a suit? Shoes with plain or wing tip4? The choices men had had to make never looked very momentous to a feminine eye accustomed to a huge range of personally acceptable possibilities, but they always had an absolute and enormous meaning in the world of men, an identifying stamp usually incomprehensible to female judgment5. A hat with a tiny bit of nearly invisible feather was separated as by an ocean from a hat with none, and white-on-white shirts6, almost imperceptibly complex in weave, were totally shunned by those men who favored white oxford-cloth shirts. Women might remain mystified by the ferocity with which men felt and supported these tiny differences, and perhaps they might pity such narrow sartorial vision attaching so much importance to haft an inch of padding in the shoulders or an in