Uniforms Why We Are What We Wear by Paul Fussell Houghton Mifflin, 204 pp., $22 "All my life I have had a thing about uniforms," writes Paul Fussell. He agrees with Thomas Carlyle that appearances matter ("Society, which the more I think of it astonishes me all the more, is founded upon cloth"). And in "Uniforms: Why We Are What We Wear," Fussell tries to sort out the secrets of the wardrobe closet. They're not big secrets, but they can be illuminating--for instance, why the Navy's enlisted personnel has refused to modernize their archaic sailor suits.
Fussell can be a refreshingly cheery social critic. His latest book is a ray of sunshine in a season of apocalyptic publishing. This seems like a paradoxical assessment in view of his famously mordant books on the two world wars, "The Great War and Modern Memory" and "Wartime." But Fussell's outstanding attraction is that he can't be pigeonholed. He is selectively "antiwar" without being "anti-violence" (his essay "Thank God for the Atom Bomb" is an outstanding contribution to devil's advocacy). Fussell identifies with H.L. Mencken, another unaffiliated troublemaker. In his memoir "Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic," he attributes his often dour critical outlook to his hitches in the Army and Harvard graduate school, both of which he detested. ("My presiding emotion was annoyance, often intensifying to virtually disabling anger.") After fifty years, Fussell's annoyance is undimmed.
"Uniforms" is a once-over lightly on the motivations behind contemporary costuming. Fussell claims his ideas on dress were influenced by Erving Goffman's classic book "The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life." Goffman theorizes that there is a dichotomy between appearance and inner reality, and that individuals play a "role" that can eventually be subsumed into their personality. Life is, in large part, a "performance."
Fussell assembles an intriguing batch of performance analyses. One of these comes out of an exchange between a reporter and Swami Prabhudbada, founder of the Hare Krishnas. The reporter asked why the Hare Krishnas dressed differently. "It's because we are different" was the answer. Next question.
Another revelation seeks to explain why the Sisters of Mercy have been exchanging the traditional nuns' habit for mufti. Fussell speculates that it may arise from "generalized anger at anything that looks 'official.'" This changeover can be interpreted as a symptom of cultural decline if you accept Jacques Barzun's credible verdict (in "From Dawn to Decadence") that decadence results from the dissolution of authority.
A large number of Fussell's reflections are amiably innocuous, such as why chefs wear white and why UPS drivers dress in brown. And some of his notions are purely idiosyncratic. To wit: "Who can behold a symphony orchestra all in white tie and tails without sensing something a bit funny in that anomalous spectacle?" I never sensed amusement at the Philharmonic, unless the orchestra programmed John Cage.
The author is also inclined toward unqualified absolutes, such as stating that Walt Whitman is "America's greatest poet" and Barbara Cartland is "a pulp fiction writer." Robert Frost, among many others, would give Whitman competition. And Barbara Cartland may have cranked out romance fiction unlimited, but not in the butcher paper medium that gave us Dashiell Hammett.
WHENEVER FUSSELL approaches the subject of the military, he loses his head. He quotes a passage from a book by Anthony Powell that describes the get-up of a retired British major who likes to relax wearing an evening dress and a picture hat. But this cross-dressing interlude appears in "From a View to A Death"--a work of fiction. Fussell also describes "olive drab" uniforms as being "the color of vomit or even excrement." You can't argue with what is really a matter of taste. I spent four and a half years in uniform without getting a scatological impression.
SOME SARTORIAL ATTITUDES are unpredictable. When Admiral Zumwalt enacted a uniform change in the Navy of the early 1970s, he ignited a firestorm of resistance. You would think that sailors would have happily exchanged their bell bottoms (with a thirteen-buttoned "broad fall front") for trousers with a zippered fly. No way. Mastering the front flap was "a matter of nautical pride." One sailor summed it up thusly: "The classic bell bottoms, jumper, and white hat is, in my humble opinion, the sharpest dress uniform around." The bell bottoms stayed on.
Pride has been the motive behind many small details of military snobbery. The leather flight jacket was issued exclusively to flight crews, who frowned upon their being worn by ground soldiers; likewise, the visored garrison cap with "the fifty mission crush." (The grommet was removed from the crown to accommodate earphones.)
Unauthorized jackets and floppy headgear could lead to confrontations. Then there was the recent attempt by the Joint Chiefs to cheapen the Army Rangers' exclusive black berets by issuing them to the entire Army. The Rangers protested strongly--and won. (The rest of the Army got tan berets instead.)
The ultimate uniform-lover was General George Patton, whose dandified regalia, including his famous pearl-handled revolver, is given much amused coverage. Shortly after World War I, Patton designed for his U.S. Tank Brigade a gaudy get-up topped by a glorified football helmet. When he wore it, he resembled "a football player dressed as a bellboy." So says Fussell, quoting Carlo D'Este, Patton's biographer. But the book's subtitle is "A Genius for War," which D'Este found more central than the general's preference for fancy dress.
D'ESTE QUOTES EISENHOWER as saying that Patton was "a problem child." Ike favored the prudent but slow-moving Omar Bradley--the "G.I. General," who was no sharp dresser. But when the Germans began their final counterattack during the Battle of the Bulge, it was Patton that Eisenhower called upon to save the day. He did so because, as military historian Gerald Astor put it in his book on the Ardennes battle, Patton could be counted on to "get the show on the road."
The point of all this is that we aren't always "what we wear." It can be the other way round. Patton's "performance" in battle proved that Goffman's theory about appearance becoming reality is reversible.
Martin Levin is a writer living in New York.