The evolution of style since the dawn of humankind consists of a long, tortuous transition from garb of utility — the skins and furs that girded our ancestors against an unforgiving Ice Age and the often ferocious wildlife that inhabited the era — to dress meant primarily as decoration. The latter turn along the road of fashion can be traced with great accuracy back to the ancient Egyptians, who in 3000 B.C. and before adorned their bodies with sumptuous jewelry and painted their faces in a vast array of gaudy colors now reserved for stage plays and transvestites, but recent archaeological finds suggest these stylistic underpinnings, notably facial paint and primitive jewelry, may date back to the aforementioned era of utilitarianism perhaps even as far as the Neanderthal. If this assumption is indeed correct, the introductory sentence of my review may prove worthless, and worse, almost totally inaccurate. To begin such a piece with a potentially false assertion that narcissism and superfluity were somehow acquired during the ravages of our “advancement” as a species would be perilous when, in fact, all evidence suggests these traits to be not only well-established but innate.
It does one no good to have a beef with evolution, though. Evolution is sloppy and inconsistent, a hyperactive child with a menagerie of toxic finger paints at his command who manages after billions of years and almost by utter chance to concoct a masterpiece. If humans truly are programmed to covet oddities like neckties, bowler hats, hoop earrings, cuff links, necklaces, body piercings, styling mousse, or any other ilk of useless adornment, I defy the very foundation upon which this predilection was formed. Fie on evolution, and fie on Charles Darwin for having explained it so sufficiently (for his time). How could Nature, in her seemingly infinite wisdom, have made such a grave error in estimation? How could she have instilled in us such a fatal flaw? We were doomed all those millions of years ago when we broke from the tree, and we are doomed today as our psychological corruptions, once apparent, have now grown insurmountable.
Which brings me to Neil Gorman and his fashion blog entitled Attempted Style. The dubbing itself is mincingly affable, dishonest in the way so many hip technoratis and (in a perfect world) unemployable culture connoisseurs are when they wield their powerful and disarming affinity for self-deprecation to mask the magmatic pit of self importance and arrogance that seethes underneath. This sort of conceit may have played well to blog readers in 1999 when the format was still hobbling through its nascence, but in 2010, only a dementia patient could reasonably fall for what amounts to such an obvious lie. And that is to say nothing of the content.
I’ve never been a great fan of fashion, preferring instead to invest my quickly waning time on this earth in more useful endeavors such as hypochondria and hermetic solitude, but I am famously unwilling to condemn others for harboring divergent philosophies or interests. Everyone is entitled to his/her own stupid opinion unless they’re avid proponents of William Faulkner and the horrid dry rot some have the gumption to call writing.
But despite my cultural liberality, a quick leaf through Mr. Gorman’s inane scribblings leaves me scrambling desperately to find my trusty bottle of Metoclopramide, and I’m quite sure, had I taken the time to read all the archival material contained in his blog, the refluxing stomach acid would have burned straight through my esophagus and necessitated a grisly trip to the intensive care unit at the nearest hospital. It’s not that Mr. Gorman is especially ineloquent nor is it his strange propensity for wearing ladies’ hats that sets my mood toward such profound foulness but the vapidity of his musings.
Take, for instance, a post entitled “Bold Red Tie vs. Subdued Gray Tie” in which he espouses the increased attention he received in his workplace after switching out a drab gray rag of a necktie for a drab red rag of a necktie. He sets this up as an experiment with one data point, which he at least acknowledges is insufficient, and proceeds to mentally collect the compliments he receives for his red tie. Two pictures are included in the article, one that shows Mr. Gorman with his hair down, a serious visage, and looking rather dapper in his red tie while the second shows Mr. Gorman in a ponytail with the famished leer of a cannibal and a tie unfit for Crispin Glover’s character in Bartleby. The obvious lack of controls in his study should be enough to put him out of business; the callous disregard to compensate for observer bias (he was likely in a better mood with the red tie on) and his inability to control for physical differences (hair down vs. the ponytail) effectively nullifies any of Mr. Gorman’s conclusions about his so-called experiment and throws into doubt the reactions of his co-workers.
Further posts regarding particular outfits contain similarly inadequate musings about comfortable styles for summer weddings and an almost fanatical, possibly erotic, devotion to the stylistic sensibilities of Robert Sterling, a character from his favorite television show Mad Men, about which he, frankly, won’t shut up.
Perhaps the most galling aspect of Attempted Style is its author’s implicit anti-corporatism, most blatantly showcased in “Research Shows That Avoiding Logos = Success“, a post that relies exclusively upon two articles originally run in The New York Times from whom we’ve all come to expect unfettered leftist garbage parading around as real analysis. Apparently, their propagandistic bent extends into the Fashion section as well because what follows from our well-groomed author is a woeful parroting of the Times‘ pro-regulation, anti-capitalist ethos and an article that suggests true glitterati, the real high rollers, prefer subtler expressions of their stylistic superiority as opposed to overt displays of logos and other branded graphics. I can only assume Mr. Gorman lives in a Calcutta slum and has never encountered an employed person over the age of twelve. Otherwise, he would have little doubt in the whorish pretenses of today’s yuppie culture, iPhones in hand, expensive TAG Heuer watches glistening obscenely, Armani suits freshly pressed the night before by a beautiful Vietnamese girl who couldn’t rightly be considered a prostitute only because she isn’t paid for services rendered. Gorman’s shocking willingness to ignore the very real depravity inherent in the young and wealthy by substituting a legless fantasy of the existence of taste and nuance in the modern brain borders on insulting, and his mewling yet clear desire for a societal ascendance into the realm of the meta-human is at once worrisome and sad.
Only on the wide and largely untamed expanses of the web could a fashion writer such as Neil Gorman ply his haughty gibberish. Only in the early years of the 21st century could he afford to traffic such naiveté and vacuum of thought, and as we barrel forward into what is sure to be a bitter war between telecommunications companies and the FCC over Net Neutrality, I am left to wonder whether the dissolution of a free and open internet would be such a horrible thing if it resulted in our being spared such awful, un-evolved tripe as Attempted Style.
Share this with other foolish humans:
