Your Look Has Got to Go

I think I’ve stumbled on an insight based on the experience of thumbing through a recent copy of Men’s Vogue (I didn’t buy it… I feel it is very important to make this distinction). As you might expect, there are articles in amongst the many glossy advertisements offering products which promise to make you look, smell and feel glamorous. . These articles are about people who have said or done important things and they often begin with a picture. There’s nothing anomalous in all of that (so far). But what I find interesting is that each of these photos contains a small package of text, off by itself, often down by the bottom corner of the picture which describes in great detail what this special person is wearing. Presumably so you could go off and find these clothes for yourself.

Once you train yourself to notice it, it get’s annoying… As though their clothes are an important enough life attribute that it deserves it’s own package of text separate from all the rest… I mean, of all the things we could seek to emulate from the lives of these interesting people, is dressing like them really significant? It’s as if the magazine is saying, “Here’s a person who’s done something special (advanced the cause of AIDS or some such thing). Jacket by Banana Republic, socks by Calvin Klein Sport, shirt by Abercrombie & Fitch, etc…” I don’t know how to put it down to a sentence, but something about it seems a bit ‘off’. Are those two ‘bit’s’ even related? Does the fact of what they’ve done have anything to do with ‘jacket by Banana Republic’?

It’s nothing new to recognize that our culture over-appreciates image. But it’s worth thinking about more deeply when these text-captions have gotten to the place where they not only no longer annoy us, but they blend right into our experience without so much as a thought. Jeans by Seven, sweater by Gap. When it comes to so-called ‘interesting’ people, is it really the case that we’ll settle for the look?

Image creates an impression. Authenticity is the word we use when image is smoothly and directly connected to identity (ie someone does not choose a set of jeans to look interesting, rather, someone is interesting for other reasons and then chooses a set of jeans in order to avoid being naked). What’s the net effect? ‘Image’ and the ‘impression’ are natural appendages of the person you really are. But our culture seems obsessed with completely ignoring identity. It’s cumbersome, time intensive and costly. So we’ll settle for simply creating the ‘effect’ of an interesting identity. That means the real focus of Men’s Vogue is about creating a ‘look’ that creates an ‘impression’. In other words: the magazine says, “Here’s how interesting people look… Do you want to look interesting?... Jacket by Club Monaco, shirt by Guess.

Ancient Christianity is about a whole other kind of story. It’s not about creating an impression by changing your ‘look’, it’s about having a whole new starting point on the inside. In short, it’s about transformation. It’s not about looking interesting, it’s about being transformed. Image over promises and under-delivers (someone can look interesting, but then we find out it’s only a look – pants by Brook’s Brothers). Transformation under-promises and over delivers because it’s all about the part that clothing can’t tell us. Transformation is all about the fact of having made different choices about who you are, not just how you look.

In a world that has been reduced to the 2 dimensions of our ‘look’, perhaps rediscovering that third dimension (substance and identity) will draw people into a whole new kind of living… (Glasses by Dolche & Gabbana not withstanding).

Just a thought…

I hope you have a great weekend,

Chris