There are two stylized images of life in Southern California. One is an exotic fantasy that was first communicated through surf films such as Gidget (1959) and Beach Party (1964), where the entire Golden State was distilled to the few beach towns that radiate up and down the coast. In these wholesome coming-of-age-stories, there’s always a group of athletic teens with sun-bleached hair that laugh and smile as they get into freewheeling antics at some late-night beach party. Sometimes there’s a romantic misunderstanding or a rivalry with a vicious, but hilariously stupid, group of bullies, but their lives are otherwise uncomplicated. As the endpoint of westward expansion in the United States, California is the geographical and symbolic opposite of the East Coast. Whereas New England’s gloomy weather inspires a kind of pensiveness, California is a place where you can live without a care, sometimes not even a thought, in the world.

The other representation of Southern California is darker, grittier, and more dystopian. In his book City of Quartz, historian Mike Davis paints a picture full of Dickensian extremes. Downtown Los Angeles has a monumental architecture glacis that segregates the rich from the poor. Wealthy neighborhoods in the canyons and hillsides are isolated behind guarded walls and electronic surveillance systems, while homeless people sleep on the street in a district known as Skid Row. In Hollywood, celebrity architect Frank Gehry apotheosized the siege look with a library that resembles a military compound.

Over in Watts, there is a series of shopping centers modeled on panopticon architectural systems, which English philosopher Jeremy Bentham surmised would help institutions control large groups of people with minimal resources. Seven-foot-high, wrought iron fences surround the largest shopping center while a private security force patrols the perimeter, and an LAPD substation is located inside the central surveillance tower. (Developer Alexander Haagen defended his design by saying the fence is inspired by a similar barrier that surrounds the USC campus, which separates students from community residents. That barrier has since only grown with new ID checks, fingerprint scanners, license plate readers, and surveillance cameras). This is a picture of a city girded by fear, and, as William Whyte observed of social life in cities, fear invariably ends up proving itself. In his chapter titled “Fortress LA,” Davis writes:

With spring officially a month away, new collections of airy polos, linen popovers, and loose-fitting safari jackets are just starting to hit stores, ready to be tried-on, coveted, and perhaps even purchased. For the next three months, brands will try to convince us that we need specialized outerwear to deal with the heat. “Get something unlined!” goes the mantra. This is mostly true until about June, when the sweltering swamp that is summer weather brings nothing but pain and regret. And yet, we’ll continue to wear those lightweight jackets because we bought them. Plus, we look better in outerwear.

For the time being, it’s still cold enough for the kind of clothes that generally excite people: warm scarves, chunky cable knits, Melton outerwear, and the occasional tweed. Friends of mine at StyleForum are already talking about what they plan to buy and wear this coming season, but I’ve only been thinking about how much I still enjoy my cold-weather gear. If you, like me, are still stuck in a fall/winter mindset, here are some things I’ve been excited to wear, and what I’m looking forward to wearing later this year.

COVERT CLOTH SUITS

Every two months at The Economist, you can find Adrian Wooldridge opining about the modern world through his column, The Bagehot. Nearly all of his articles follow the same formula. He bemoans the lack of etiquette and grace in today’s society, and then ends with a heavy-hearted sigh. He hates how the young, who are the most educated generation in history, are more likely to model their style after the urban underclass, rather than yesterday’s educated elite. As a committed pogonophobe, he thinks beards represents the mainstreaming of male vanity. He snarks on athleisure. Predictably, he also hates seeing tattoos, piercings, and, most of all, bare male ankles. He wishes we still had the respectability of the fedora. You can almost hear the smugness in his voice when he writes: “These days, hat-wearing is a snub to authority rather than a sign of respect. The most popular hats are the ugliest: baseball hats that look like giant duck-bills, plastered with an inane slogan, and beanies that could double as tea cozies.”

In an October/ November 2018 column, Wooldridge laments the collapse of manners. According to him, 16th century Europeans behaved like barbarians. They reveled in torture and public hangings; they stank to high heaven. “It took centuries of painstaking effort –- sermons, etiquette manuals, and stern lectures –- to convert them into civilized human beings,” he says. Now, however, after nearly 500 years of the civilizing process, all has been undone in just a few decades. People eat food on trains, and public bathrooms are a mess. San Francisco, a boomtown for tech-driven growth, is littered with feces, syringes, and garbage. The people who were supposed to guard high culture, such as academics, have collectively turned against it. At the end of his essay, he admits to almost serial-killer-level behavior, which he excuses as his way of just trying to keep up with a de-civilized world.

I don’t think I’ll ever give in to the fashion for beards and tattoos, let alone turning up to meetings naked. But I’ve noticed that I increasingly circumvent the normal rules of politeness in a desperate attempt to keep going. I carry a pair of headphones with me at all times to insulate myself from the noise of my neighbors. I sprint ahead if I see any possible competitors approaching the queue for coffee. And I’ve graduated from putting my bag on the seat next to me on a train to a more cunning technique: I leave a copy of Jack Rosewood’s “The Big Book of Serial Killers” on the chair and smile maniacally at anyone who comes anywhere near. So far, the serial-killer strategy has worked remarkably well.

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Those who heard Harry Hosier speak found him hard to forget. During the American Revolutionary War, Hosier, who’s better known as Black Harry, was a newly freed slave and an illiterate exhorter. In 1780, he met one of America’s founding bishops, Francis Asbury, who was traveling through the states to convert people to Methodism. At the time, Asbury needed someone to help drive his carriage, so Asbury hired Hosier, then a freedman, to travel with him. However, when Asbury noticed that his illiterate guide could recite long passages verbatim, he trained him to be a preacher in his own right.

At first, Hosier was supposed to just help bring black audiences to Asbury’s Methodist sermons. In his journal, Asbury wrote: “If I had Harry to go with me and meet the colored people, it would be attended with a blessing.” But in 1781, when Hosier gave his first sermon — “The Barren Fig Tree” — to a black audience in Virginia, his delivery was so effective and affective, even white audience members were moved to tears. Among the people in attendance that day was Benjamin Rush, a civic leader and one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. Rush determined it was one of the best sermons he had ever heard. “Making allowances for his illiteracy, [Hosier] was the greatest orator in America,” he later wrote.

Together, Asbury and Hosier helped spread Methodism throughout America, as well as set up what would become one of the oldest American traditions: the traveling tent ministry. In the early days of the United States, it didn’t make much sense for ministers to set up a church. The souls they wanted to save were on the move, and people were continually pushing westward. Boomtowns that sprung up overnight were just as likely to go bust the next day. So staunchly devout men of God packed whatever they could into saddlebags, and then traveled through the wilderness and into towns on horseback, preaching to whoever would listen. These saddlebag ministers, who were known as circuit riders, spoke about the Word of God from street corners and open fields, in courtrooms and people’s cabins. Circuit riders still exist today, but they’ve traded their covered wagons for motor homes. You’ll often see them on university campuses, shouting at students about eternal salvation.

The end of the year always brings some reflection on what’s happened. The closing of this year, however, is special because it marks the end of a decade. So, this past week, I’ve been thinking about what are some of the biggest changes in fashion in the last ten years. Is it about the rise of specific trends, the emergence of certain subcultures, or something else? The more I think about it, the more I think this decade will be remembered not for its looks, but the ways in which we engage with clothing. 

I often go back to this 2015 article by Cathy Horyn, where the then New York Times writer suggested that we may have entered a post-trend universe. That is, where fashion used to be cyclical — going from skinny jeans to baggy, and then back to skinny again — it’s now possible for many styles to coexist together. As she puts it, “there is no single trend that demands our attention, much less our allegiance, as so many options are available to us at once.” She credits this to social media, the ability of brands to create their own universe, and a greater acceptance for diversity in dress in general. An excerpt:

Throughout the 20th century, the way women dressed was governed by trends — from the hobble skirt of the 1910s, a Paris invention that spread to small cities and was ultimately sold by Sears, to Dior’s radical New Look of 1947, to the ’60s miniskirt. But for lots of reasons, mostly to do with economics and, inevitably, the Internet, the industry has moved away from that model. The last big trend that I can recall, one that started on the runway and exploded among mainstream manufacturers, was the hospital-green cargo pants that Nicolas Ghesquière made for Balenciaga. That was more than a decade ago. 

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