The Town Style Forgot It’s our very own Washington, where women wear “neutral” and men dress like Secret Service agents.
By Henry Allen September 14, 1986 The Washington Post
This is the City of Drab. This is the town where the clothes that fit are the clothes that fit in, where you want to look right, not good; a town where the men look like Secret Service agents and the women have to hide their fur coats from envious eyes back home, lest Mr. and Mrs. Front Porch U.S.A. slouch off to the ballot box and vote them out of office.
Here’s how bad it gets.
“Loafers?” asks a partner in a Connecticut Avenue law firm, a tic of alarm rippling across his forehead like wind across a lawn. He is sitting in a Connecticut Avenue restaurant eating a fish for lunch. He is not wearing loafers, he is wearing black lace-up shoes. He is also wearing a blue suit tailor-made by Geoffrey Lewis Ltd., which might seem risky in the City of Drab, except that he had it custom-cut to look just like it was off-the-rack, if you overlook the cuff buttons that actually unbutton. Besides, his fellow partners buy suits at the same place. He says it saves them time, time being crucial to shopping in Washington, as if people were getting mufflers replaced, not buying clothes.
“Loafers? You can’t wear slip-on shoes to the office, except perhaps in summertime. Or if you’re in corporate real estate.” Why corporate real estate?
“Because you have clients in investment banking and clients who are real estate developers.”
So?
“I suppose they dress more informally,” he says.
The point is that he will actually slice it this fine, will worry about such nuances, will dress this scared.
“Nothing is trendy here,” says Chrystine Hanley, an Alcott & Andrews sales “associate.” She says this proudly, even brightly. It’s lunch hour in her store on Pennsylvania Avenue and the upwardly but anxiously mobile Washington women are buying up the silk ties, dirndl skirts, man-tailored suits and silk blouses, all of them cut in a style that’s like what you’d wear to the funeral if a Volvo station wagon died.
“We get women who come in and buy four suits in 45 minutes,” Hanley says as she starts slapping together outfits — mix it, match it, you can’t go wrong, because everything in this section of the store is the same color, a color Hanley calls “neutral,” like the color of ceiling tile, or a sidewalk.
Wham! “That’s our stitch-down pleat.”
Wham! “That’s our silk twill dress.”
Wham! “That’s our scarf.”
Alcott & Andrews hit Washington after its research showed that while this marketing area has 1.8 percent of all American women, it has 2.2 percent of the ones who are working. And as these women move into a man’s world, they need a clothing store where everything is taken care of, where they can find shelter from the unspoken clothing anxieties that hound men for their entire lives.
Contrary to popular belief, men worry about their clothes, fretting with theological gravity over the tiniest details, like the difference between pants with cuffs or no cuffs, between broadcloth and oxford-cloth shirts, between blucher- and balmoral-cut shoes.
Like sinners in the hands of an angry God, or maybe just a fusty One, Washington men have traditionally sought redemption from old-line haberdashers like Arthur Adler, Jos. Bank or the Georgetown University Shop. (Those who like to flirt with apostasy, suppressed-waist jackets and that kind of thing go to Britches.)
The Mother Church, of course, is Brooks Brothers.
And what a town Washington is for old Brooks, for both men and women. (The men’s area is the one with the boxer shorts.)
“The whole Brooks Brothers concept means being appropriately suited,” says Kenneth Lowe, manager of the store on L Street. The whole Washington concept means that “a much greater percentage of people fall into the conservative style here. It’s an attempt to fit in. It’s much more oriented to power. You want to equate yourself to power.”
Fitting in means getting the details right from someone with authority, and there are few people in the world with more authority than a Brooks salesman surrounded by hunting-scene prints and the reverent worsted hush, a hush you’d think they’d package and sell for Christmas presents, like pet rocks.
“The question most frequently asked is: cuffs or no cuffs?” says one salesman who comes equipped with a London accent. “The answer is yes, cuffs. It is befitting a well-dressed man.”
“I go into Brooks with my husband sometimes — those salesmen are really intimidating,” says Crista Martin, 45, head of investor relations at the Federal Home Loan Bank Board. “I do not know of a city more conservative. I got here from San Francisco and there were nothing but these different uniforms, modeled after men’s clothes. I had to trade in all my silver jewelry for gold. I couldn’t wear cotton blouses, I had to buy silk blouses. I couldn’t wear dresses, I had to wear suits. And the men here, my God, they look like undertakers.”
Of course, these are all people who are struggling for power. As for those who have it, they dress even worse, like they’re heading out for Las Vegas Night at the Owls Lodge instead of evenings in the most powerful city on earth. Look at President Reagan in his brown suits. Look at the Cabinet wives whooping around the party circuit in their caftans. Look at William Buckley and political consultant Roger Stone eschewing ruffles and studs to wear plain old white shirts with their tuxedos.
“This is a power town, that’s all that matters. If your husband is powerful, you’ll be invited out even if you wear a paper bag on your head,” says Jayne Ikard, wife of oil lobbyist Frank in a recent issue of W, the bimonthly auxiliary of Women’s Wear Daily.
As the dictum handed down by W puts it: “In frumpy Washington, frumpery is a badge of honor.”
This, by the way, is why the wives of the real estate developers and other non-power-game types raise such eyebrows. Deservedly or not, they’re known for violating all the rules of Washington fashion, dressing just as high-style as they please, doing the Bill Blass days at Neiman’s, letting their fingernails grow long, long, long and trimming them square, that kind of thing. And threatening to derail the gravy train by throwing around lots of money and alienating the voters. We may be the richest city in the country, but let’s not fling it in the face of the taxpayers, shall we?
Arguably, we should find a little relief in the civil service, where ordinary Washingtonians at least have the power of job security, and no obligation to look frumpy for the benefit of voters back home. Indeed, these bureaucrats, the GS-whatevers, aren’t like the lawyers and bankers who want to blend into the woodwork. They are the woodwork. Men and women alike, they tend to look as if their clothes were made out of melted-down patio furniture. Not all of them, or even most; maybe just a few, but it’s enough to set a tone.
Since the men have been doing it longer than the women, they’ve articulated the style better, shlepping down the corridors in crepe-soled shoes and plaid pants, wearing neckties that look as if they came from a remnant sale at Carpetland and those short-sleeved polyester shirts that are just transparent enough to show the sleeveless undershirt beneath. Let’s not forget those little chains that go into their shirt pockets and attach to ID cards, these cards being a major bureaucratic fashion accessory, like the beeping watches with the little metal calendars on the watchbands.
“We do seminars at some agencies where the people are so badly dressed that when the White House calls, they can’t find anybody who looks good enough to send over there,” says Brenda York, founder of the American Society of Fashion and Image Consultants in McLean. On the other hand, she says, the ones who try to dress well are “afraid to deviate from the preppy look, that old-guard East Coast look. The biggest fashion change in years is that yellow tie men wear, that they all have to have.”
She adds that “the most fashion-forward area in Washington is Rockville.”
Rockville? This is sad news indeed. Rockville is the town so deprived of fashion flair that when F. Scott Fitzgerald’s coffin was moved to St. Mary’s churchyard from the Rockville cemetery in 1975, the man who looked inside the coffin to make sure it was Fitzgerald commented on how nicely he was dressed.
Then there’s the pro bono brigade, the assistant prosecutor look, the guys who seem to have imprinted like ducklings on their favorite college political science professor, and they’ve been toddling along behind his image ever since: wing-tip shoes with soles as thick as a club sandwich, the tan suit with the pants cuffed an inch above the shoes, and every time the jacket is unbuttoned it lurches to the rear as if the guy is walking into a Force 9 gale. It’s an outfit that’s sturdy and thoughtful, sort of a Calvinist leisure suit. You get the feeling that Ralph Nader has a brand-new one in his closet in case he ever happens to die or get married.
Another arguable refuge for stylistic flair and individuality might be Congress. Once it was, but no longer.
Here and there Congress has a dude, like Rep. Ron Dellums or Sen. Lloyd Bentsen, who is said to have his suits tailor-made. Otherwise, fashion flair is limited to the occasional Eisenhower-era touch of spiffiness, like the red vests on Strom Thurmond and Robert Byrd, or idiosyncrasies like the tendency of Sen. Russell Long’s pants to sort of ride up on his socks and stick there while he’s speaking.
The last of Congress’ fashion greatness ended in the House in 1980, when Pennsylvania’s Daniel Flood resigned after a guilty plea involving campaign funds, and Texas’ Bob Eckhardt got turned out by the New Right.
Flood was magnificent in capes, slicked-back hair, Salvador Dali mustache and windsor-knotted tie-tacked neckties. He showed up for an arraignment on perjury charges in a suit that had lapels that not only were outlined in white stitching but ended about halfway across the breast pocket, which held a handkerchief that looked like a road-killed bird of paradise. You’d think he might have toned it down. In fact, he had tried to in the past — turning out now and then in narrow lapels and regimental-stripe tie — but all it did was make him look like George Bush. As for Eckhardt, we’re talking about the end of a tradition, which is to say the Southern Solon look that was doomed by the destruction of the Old South — a destruction caused not by civil rights, but by air conditioning. Once they got the temperature down, southerners fell apart and started dressing like Yankees. No more white linen, no more panama hats, no more Sen. Theodore G. Bilbo of Mississippi wandering around in huge, airy tent-cities of suits with cigars stuck in his breast pocket and his necktie tucked into his pants.
Now Eckhardt sits in a Capitol Hill cafe’ talking in slow, sad Texas tones about the end of a legislative style that once signaled men of the heartland, gentry with an earthy wisdom.
“I think it was in the early ’70s,” he says. “Members got to wearing . . . wine-colored coats.”
Ah, the horror. He is no doubt referring to Congress’ favorite fashion trend a decade ago, a burgundy polyester jacket that went with white plastic shoes and white plastic belt to constitute an outfit known as the “full Cleveland.” It is difficult to picture Congressman Eckhardt, whose family fought at the battle of San Jacinto, in a “full Cleveland.” He is a man whom the early ’70s touched not at all, not to mention the two or three decades before it. He is wearing a three-piece white gabardine suit that says land, lots of land; a magnificent and patriarchal panama hat; a floppy velvet bow tie in the 19th-century tradition; a gold watch chain matching a mouthful of gold-rimmed teeth; and a shaggy halo of gray hair that strays away from his head in conspicuous and leonine disdain for the horrible efficiencies of modern life.
“I used to have an old seersucker suit I inherited from my uncle Caesar Kleberg,” he says, referring to the Klebergs of the King Ranch. “I used to say I was wearing the cloak of Caesar. Seersucker. I like seersucker. The best seersucker comes from Godchaux’s in New Orleans. With linen, well, it’s almost impossible to find a linen suit nowadays. Of course, it’s hard to take care of when you do. Gets dirty. Wrinkles. Doesn’t last all that long either. This is gabardine. It’s hot, but it’ll last. My wife Celia makes my ties. I was up in New York with Celia, and I said to her, ‘Celia, why do people say, “Hello, Tex,” when they see me?’ ”
Sometimes we get relief from the drabness when foreign leaders come to town, especially if they aren’t confined by the strictures of democracy. One thinks of the Arabs who used to swirl around the Madison hotel in their robes, back when oil prices were higher, or Jonas Savimbi, the Angolan rebel leader who visited here in 1981 to be described as follows: “He achieves total Third World legitimacy with his clothes . . . a gray suit with pleated patch pockets on the jacket to give a hint of the military, the struggle. A collarless shirt evokes the proletariat. The black, zippered boots are modernity. The fat, multi-dial watch is science. The steel link bracelet is industry. The ring bearing a miniature African mask is nationalism and roots. And the thin black cane he always carries in public is authority.”
Of course, there’s the occasional outbreak of true style. Back in the ’60s, waiters at Clyde’s and Nathan’s in Georgetown started having suits made by Kunin the tailor on Wisconsin Avenue and lining them with Gucci scarfs, that kind of thing. Among churchgoing women, Sunday mornings present a magnificent effulgence of hats: shovel brims and cloches and broadbrims in velour and beaver trimmed with veils and lace and brocade, wonderful things that turned Vanilla Beane’s millinery out by Coolidge High School into a Washington institution.
And there are the renegades: After Charles Goodell left the Senate, he’d go to work in Bermuda shorts and knee socks, one fellow lawyer recalls. And William Lind, an aide to Sen. Gary Hart, likes to prowl around the Hill in an Inverness shooting cape.
And let’s not forget those young men, most of them black, who keep alive one of the great kid traditions of America, a thumbing of the nose at power and respectability by a simple turning sideways of a peaked cap. It drives their seniors crazy to see it, and it’s a look with chump written all over it, but there it is, all over Washington, on F Street NW, for instance, down by the record stores with the speakers on the sidewalks. Check out one Eddie Green, 17, jaywalking in a HEAD T-shirt and a Britches Great Outdoors Hat turned sideways, to the left.
Eddie Green hasn’t escaped the Washington fashion trap entirely — you can tell because he tries to claim that he wears his hat sideways because it’s practical.
“See, I’m into landscaping,” he says. “When the sun’s over here, I put the hat on this side. When the sun’s over there, I put it on that side.”
And when the sun is right in front of him? Does he ever wear the hat with the bill over his face? Would his neighbors out in Fairmont Heights, Md., even recognize him if he wore it the conventional way?
“No,” he says. “I guess you can say it’s my style.”
And how many other Washingtonians can look at their clothes and make such a claim?
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