I am walking down Oxford St., having difficulty shopping. As usual, it is dense with already well dressed young people carrying shopping bags of clothes. They bomb along. The threat of all the people, and a flashback, of walking through the restaurant at Belfield (University College, Dublin) aged eighteen, overpowered by the scale of it, and the number of students.
Unable to buy anything, fearing disintegration, I reach for something abstract. I think of Simmel and of one of his essays on fashion ('Zur Psychologie der Mode'), and this steadies me.
The numbers on the street. Why, I ask myself, do people in cities dress better than people in the country? The larger the city, the better they seem to dress, and the more important it is to dress well.
There are, of course, exceptions to this. It is easy to think of smaller
cities where people dress better than in larger ones. Think of any city you know in
France smaller than Dublin (population one million) and people dress there better than in Dublin. (Take it from me if you do not know Dublin!) In Milan or Vienna they dress better than in larger London. But there is something, even so, in the rule. Differences of national culture aside, and all other things being equal, the larger the city,the better we dress. The less badly I dress.
The larger the city, the more abstract is the experience of its inhabitants. The larger the city, the more removed we are from the person sitting beside us in the underground, the less we know our neighbour living in the flat underneath. There are again, of course, exceptions to this, as many as you want! But the bigger the city, the more likely is this to be the case.
The city is a place of specialisation. Its inhabitants have specialised jobs. They tend to know people in a specialised circle and live in that world. The more specialised a line of work is, the more it is formalised, which has an impact on the life-world of those whose living it is. Formalisation is a type of abstraction. Functions, relations, interdependeces, out of these a concrete sub-culture and style grow. But the moment of abstraction seems to me primary.
The bigger the city, the more specialised the jobs, the more abstract the form of life.
With a level of abstraction comes a corresponding degree of definition of
self through it, in many areas, including shopping and clothing. One looks at colours, shapes, textiles, styles from the perspectve of one's own particular, specialised, world into which gradations and distinctions are already built. Finding one's style against this background, within its limits, involves making further, finer, grades of distinction. The result is that the larger the city, the more fine-tuned is the sense of dress ... everything else still bring equal!
I don't think that Simmel has these thoughts anywhere but they are built out of elements of his thought.They are potted Simmel. The focus in his essay 'Zur Psychologie der Mode' is more on understanding fashion as this always delicate, shifting, balance between two conflicting needs, to be of the group and to be individual.
I think that I am using these ideas in part to rationalise a shortcoming! I am trying to explain why other people on Oxford St. appear to have in the main less difficulty overall in shopping. Yes, I have returned recently to this metropolis and I am not yet working so not that inserted in the life of the city, and, yes, this may make it that bit more difficult for me to choose a shirt but it is not the main reason for my difficulty.
What is it? I do not know exactly but it has more to do the play between group and the individual in Simmel's essay than it has to do with my ideas above about the impact of the relative scale of cities on their inhabitants' dress sense. Both moments, the throng of students in Belfield, the throng of people on Oxford St., have to do with some difficulty in defining myself over against the group, with a fierce desire to do this and an inability to. Shopping for clothes exposes some older wound, a problem perhaps of 'ego development', God knows what. Shopping goes deep. Thinking and writing used to hide this wound, I think, or be balm for it, or act as compensation, but, now, a few thoughts like these touch this place as well. Perhaps this is good!
Any comments would be welcome in this vague place!
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