“The problem is not merely absence of self-respect, it is active hostility to self-respect, replaced entirely by self-esteem.”

Slobbery as Snobbery

by Theodore Dalrymple

Walking through Amsterdam recently, a paradox that I had long noticed in an inchoate way formulated itself clearly in my mind. It was this: A century ago, there would have been one clothes shop for every hundred well-dressed people. Nowadays there is one well-dressed person (if that) for every hundred clothes shops. What accounts for this strange reversal of ratios?

Beyond the fact that clothes are now mass-produced rather than made individually, there is an act of will involved. Practically everyone now dresses not merely in a casual way, but with studied slovenliness for fear of being thought elegant, as elegance is a metonym for undemocratic sentiment or belief. You can dress as expensively as you like, indeed expensive scruffiness is a form of chic, but on no account must you dress with taste and discrimination. To do so might be to draw hostile attention to yourself. Who on Earth do you think you are to dress like that?

“The problem is not merely absence of self-respect, it is active hostility to self-respect, replaced entirely by self-esteem.”

While seized of the paradox in Amsterdam, I looked in the windows of many clothes shops in search of elegance; I found it in not one. The décor of the shops in many cases was in good enough taste, but their wares, cheap or expensive, were uniformly tatty, in some cases literally so, for the vogue for pricey torn jeans has not yet entirely passed. Is it not odd that in an age when more people have a large discretionary income than ever before, and are prepared to pay thousands for such adornments as tattooing (some one in five American adults are now tattooed), almost everyone should look as if he or she had just rolled out of bed and picked up a pile of clothes from the night before that was lying crumpled on the floor?

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