The New Yorker Radio Hour - The Post-Pandemic Dress Code, Plus Hilton Als on Alice Neel

Episode Date: May 11, 2021

When a very long year of doing business from home—in sweatshirts and pajamas and slippers—is over, how much effort will people be willing to expend on dressing for the office? Richard Thompson Ford, a law professor and the author of “Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History,” tackles that question along with the New Yorker editor Henry Finder. Clothing, he says, has mostly been used to maintain social hierarchies, but it has also occasionally helped to overthrow them. Dressing up, he says, can be a form of transgression: historically, in Black communities, refined dress has been used to demand dignity and resist white supremacy. Plus, the celebrated critic Als on the work of Alice Neel, who painted her neighbors, friends, and colleagues in a multicultural New York. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Now, over the past year, during the long pandemic, your relationship with your clothes closet has probably changed a little bit. And sweatpants and flip-flops. I mean, come on. I've only worn clothes that can go in the washer dryer. I believe that I described my clothing. choices to my employer as sackware. In addition to the already current face mask, I am adding a more

design-friendly second face mask, and one of those, in particular, is this Jurassic Park, Samuel L. Jackson, one that has him saying, hold on to your butts. I like to dress up. Ever since the pandemic happened, I have personally found myself dressing in a more formal way. I put on jeans. In the morning, it just makes me feel like still a citizen of the world. But now those of us are working at home, and that's more than half of working Americans, at least part-time, we're starting to think about what going back to the office will be like. What exactly is it going to be? And we're thinking about all this with a measure of trepidation.

I'm reluctantly going to retire my outdoor slippers, which differ from my indoor slippers. Dresses, I don't know if I'm down with them anymore. I really don't. I don't think I'm going to miss anything about my pre-pandemic wardrobe. I think I'm one of the strange ones who enjoyed wearing a face mask everywhere. You know, I enjoyed looking like an old-time band in at the grocery store and even at the bank. I have these beautiful dresses. They're really sweet.

I'm in my closet right now, and there's this polka-dot dress that I love and this other dress that has like vine patterns. I want to wear those again. I am so tired of trying to put on a pair of skinny jeans that I cannot bend my knees in. Heart pants just are really out. And also, can we talk about the fact that high heels are really uncomfortable? So, no more heels. Yeah, so why did we ever bother with high heels or ties or belts or hard shoes with laces when Delcrow does the trick just fine? After this year, how much effort are we going to be willing to expend on the symbolic value of dressing for the office?

One person who's thought a lot about that question is Richard Thompson Ford. Ford is a professor of law at Stanford, and his new book is called Dress Codes. It's about how clothing has maintained social hierarchies throughout history and occasionally upended them. Ford himself, it's worth noting, is no slouch in this department. He once made the semifinals in a best-dressed real man contest hosted by Esquire magazine. The New Yorker's Henry Finder called up Richard Thompson Ford to talk about fashion. So, Rich, what are you wearing right now? So I'm wearing one of my favorite jackets.

It's almost like a donical tweed, but it's blue with a light blue. So it kind of comes off also as almost slightly denimish and a blue shirt. Now, your background is in civil rights and anti-discrimination law. Why did you want to write a book about clothes? So there are two reasons. One's personal and one's professional. And the personal reason is I like clothes. I'm a little bit of a clothes horse.

And more than that, my father was trained as a tailor, actually. And this was at a time when African Americans in black colleges were often trained in a trade as well as a profession in case racial barriers prevented them from pursuing their profession. And I picked up from him the importance of clothing for him as a black professional navigating some tricky racial dynamics where there weren't very many African Americans. And so clothing and attire became an important way for him to navigate these racial boundaries. So that's the personal set of reasons. The professional said is that it was surprising to a lot of people the number of legal disputes that involve dress codes, either in employment discrimination, workplace dress codes that require women to wear makeup, or forbid hairstyles that are typically worn by African Americans, or that ban religious garb and therefore challenged as discriminatory.

But I always thought the courts didn't really capture what was most important or at stake in these cases because they tended to treat dress as trivial. And I always thought that was wrong and missed a lot of the point. So I wanted to dig into it more to get a sense of what was really at stake in all of these disputes about dress codes. When I'm thinking about dress codes and apparel today, I mean, there's a great quote in your book. It's from the journal Taylor and Cutter from 1931. And it goes, A loosening of bonds will gradually impel mankind to sag and droop bodily and spiritually. If laces are unfastened, ties loosened, buttons banished,

the whole structure of modern dress will come undone. Society will fall to pieces. Now, that seems very relevant right now. Yes. And so that quote comes from a time when there was a debate around dress reform. In the book, I talk a lot about these moments of dress reform movements where some group of people will say, you know, these conventions are ridiculous.

And this was a point where men were rebelling against starched collars and neckties and all of the other things that men at that time needed to wear. And certainly we're seeing, you know, a real acceleration of that mentality today where, A lot of people would say, you know, dress doesn't matter, fashion doesn't matter. People should just wear whatever is comfortable. I am skeptical the people will ever stop caring entirely about what other people are wearing. And, you know, we are struggling with what comes next. On the one hand, it seems a little silly and, let's say, inauthentic to dress up too much to be on Zoom. Everyone knows you're in your living room.

And yet, the desire to express oneself through fashion remains, you get very subtly expressive forms of athelisian. This year has also been one of significant political upheaval from last summer's protests against police brutality, deeply divisive election, the riot of the Capitol in January. how do you see clothes functioning politically at these events? Yeah, it's interesting that in the earliest Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, it seemed that everyone was wearing, you know, just whatever. You didn't see much of a coordination. You know, in a sense, that sent a message as well of an outpouring of humanity, an outpouring of outrage and concerns over the question of,

spontaneity, yes. But as the protests continued, you started to see dress codes. You saw, for instance, in Brooklyn, transgender people protesting police violence all wearing suffragette white. You had African-American men in Harlem dressed in suits and ties in order to show their respect for the victims of police violence. And then you had a protest in South Carolina, where, the organizers actually said, we asked people to come in their Sunday best. And they were quite explicit that they wanted to make reference to the civil rights movement of the early 1960s where people wore their Sunday best to desegregate lunch counters or in the barch on Washington, for instance. So they made a very deliberate statement with attire.

One of the most fascinating things about the book for me and the most illuminating is the discussion of what we always now disparage as respectability politics, which turns out to be more complicated than we might have thought. Yes, well, the early, the civil rights movement in the 60s, it's a great example where, from today's perspective, I think a lot of people describe this as respectability politics in the very negative sense that it's about trying to impress the powerful or to, you know, ingratiate oneself with the powerful by wearing this clothing. One person actually in responding to the South Carolina protest said,

it's going to take more than a necktie to get the news from around our necks. But that's not what was going on in the early civil rights movement. In fact, if you put it in historical context, black people wearing refined clothing had been a challenge to white supremacy for generations. For instance, in South Carolina, there was a law called the Negro Act, which prohibited slaves from wearing clothing that was considered to be above their condition. And this expectation that African Americans would dress in shabby clothing continued well-past emancipation. Black people wearing their Sunday best, particularly on any day other than Sunday, were attacked by racist mobs.

Black people in refined clothing were mocked in newspaper cartoons. And so it was understood at the time that a black person in this refined clothing was making a demand in some sense for dignified treatment. They were saying, I deserve the status that this attire signifies in our society. And so in that context, the Sunday best civil rights activism wasn't just a way to kind of suck up to white people, but quite the opposite. It was a demand for dignity. That's so fascinating. So it's it's a transgressive act. Yes. And a strategic one. What would you like to see come back in dress codes after the pandemic? After this slovenly year for many, what would you be fine with losing? I would like to see a little more refinement and decorum come back, particularly in environments that are, I, either professional or celebratory.

You know, I mean, honestly, I think there's nothing that's more depressing than going out for a big celebration, you know, a fine restaurant, and somebody shows up in, you know, sweats. So I think people have something of a social responsibility to make an effort in certain environments. And what would I like to see left behind? The dress codes that are heavily regulatory of women, I think the one thing I talk about in the book, and it's really quite breathtaking, is just how relentless and just how

punishing dress expectations have been for women, and how contradictory. So women are expected to be decorative, but also to be modest. And they're constantly judged and evaluated on their attire. It's very debilitating. It's sexist. It's wrong. Those kind of dress codes I'd love to see go. Dress codes that prohibit hairstyles often worn by.

African-Americans, and again, particularly women, you know, I've come to believe are quite destructive of self-esteem and unjust barriers to advancement. I'd love to see those go. So now there's something called the Crown Act, which is designed to prohibit that kind of dress code. I think that's a great thing, and I hope it passes. After a year of kind of minimalism and the emphasis on comfort heard in small details. What's the chance that we just go extreme with our fashions in the post-pendemic years? I think we might see some of that. I mean, for instance, in the part of history that I describe as the birth of fashion in the book, a lot of this is coming off of waves of the plague. And as the plague wanes, you have this explosion of very expressive fashions that are being

used both by elites in order to shore up their elite status, but also by, you know, emergent, prosperous classes. You know, another example, after the end of the Spanish flu, you get the roaring 20s and flapper styles, which were a dramatic departure from earlier women's clothing. But I think that, you know, now you've got this tension where, on the one hand, people want to be unassuming and authentic, and that leads you to more and more casual clothing that's, you know, at least looks practical. But at the same time, people want to be expressive. And being stuck inside on Zoom has denied everyone the opportunity to just go out and kind of

see and be seen, as we used to put it. So you've got the popularity of, you know, TV shows that have a, like Bridgerton, and now everyone's talking about Regency Fashions or the Queen's Gambit or the Crown, and people are talking about, you know, fashions in the 1950s and 1960s. And I think there are a lot of people who can't wait to try some of those out for themselves, or at least to try something that is flamboyant, you know, that says, here I am, now that we're finally out of quarantine. That's so interesting.

And you make a good point. Like some of the most successful Netflix shows this year, like Bridgeton, Queens Gambit, even Emily and Paris, they're very fashion-centered. They're all about... apparel. And I wonder whether there is that kind of fantasy, this a sense of a lockdown country yearning for that kind of display. I think there is. I even heard about a group of people who would dress up to take out the trash. You know, they were so, and it turned into like a cocktail party thing, you know, across the street with the trash can. So someone brought out a bottle of wine.

And before you know it, there are these neighbors who come out with their trash cans. And then, you know, and dressed up, and there's an Instagram page about it. So if people will do that, you know, I think we're ready to cut loose. Richard Thompson Ford is the author of Dress Codes. How the Laws of Fashion made history. He's a professor at Stanford Law School. And Henry Finder is the editorial director of The New Yorker, and a guy who is never, please trust me on this,

he is never going to wear sweatpants to the office. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Asian Americans often describe a feeling of not belonging in America, of being made to feel somehow like outsiders,

of being in different ways vulnerable. Four Asian American and Pacific Island writers got together recently for the new episode of our poetry podcast, and they spoke about how America's complicated ethnic politics. politics informs who they are and how they write. Here is Kimiko Hahn, whose collection from last year was called Foreign Bodies. I've thought of this question, actually, over the decades, it is not across the board, of course, because we are different generations, different

generations immigrant. I'm mixed, so part Japanese-American. Okay, so there's all that. But I would say that there is very often a psychological vulnerability with language, whether it's English, and English is my first language, or whether it's Japanese, which I don't speak fluently at all. So I feel very, very vulnerable when it comes to speaking and writing, as if I'm not ever going to get it right. And I think that's partly me. And, you know, a girl growing up in the 50s and 60s and so on. But I also think it really is received, to use Monica's word again, that I'm not going to be able to express myself as well as someone else,

someone more mainstream, white, if you will. I always think that Asian American writers have taught me that it's okay to be a little bit illegible. You know, I think a lot of Asian Americans are always racialized as for, ever foreigner, even if your families have been here for a really long time, and that that's something that, you know, within that illegibility or that as Ocean Vong puts up that unfathomability, one has to find other kinds of methods to feel like you have some sort of connection to your homeland, even if your homelands feel really theoretical, right, depending on when your family

came here. And I always think about Mina Alexander, who wrote in the beginning of one of her poems, She said in the absence of reliable ghosts, I made an aria. And I love that. In the absence of something that is figurative or spectral, you know, I made a song. And I think about that in terms of, you know, what I can reach to. I can always reach to sort of this sonic place, this kind of hallucinatory place, this sort of surreal place, this multidimensional place where there might be an absence of a real time and space in which I feel like I have to have some sort of archive or history or connection to. And, you know, just to come up a point, my mother's side is third generation East African.

They're part of this large Indian diaspora that, you know, was in Tanzania, and they grew up speaking Swahili. And so often when I'm in spaces where I'm trying to sort of make myself intelligible as Asian American, I also have to find a little bit of comfort in the idea that most of us, I don't think grew up learning, had like an Indian ocean diaspora history class. And so, you know, where I learned a lot of my politics of resilience was actually from a lot of black writers, right? And I think that that's also an important thing to say is the way that black and Asian and South Asian solidarity sort of come together has been an important way of making myself intelligible reading June Jordan just as well as reading mean Alexander. That's Megan Fernandez. Kimiko Hahn spoke before her and they appear with Paul Tron and Monica Ewan this month on the New Yorker's Poetry Party. which is hosted by our poetry editor, Kevin Young. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

Now, as vaccination numbers go up, some of us who've been playing it cautiously for so long are finally starting to get out in the world. For Hilton All's, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and critic at the New Yorker, once he got that second shot, he headed straight to the Metropolitan Museum for a press opening. Yeah, so Thursday was the day that I was like, woo-hoo, like, party, orgy is like.

And by way of greeting, you tell people how much you've been vaccinated, and if you had two, then you could hug and all of that stuff. So I think that's going to be the social language for a while. Was the month the first museum we went to? I don't think I've been above 23rd Street, you know? Hilton was at the Met along with producer, Emily, Boteen to see the exhibit called Alice Neal, People Come First. Alice Neal was a portrait painter.

Her subjects were her neighbors, her acquaintances, friends, and other artists. And in her generation, the art world was dominated for a long time by abstraction, by such male contemporaries as Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock, painting people in that time. Neil was way off to the side of things, and she was unknown for many years. then the Times finally caught up with her and at the age of 74 Alice Neal had her first major museum show a retrospective at the Whitney

Hilton Lawles writes that Alice Neal painted a new diverse America populated by men of color single mothers sitting on stoops and children in repose there is no other in her unsatirical pointedly political work just us without tears What floor?

Is it two? Yeah. Thank you, sir. Thank you. Alice Neal was a woman who was born at the turn of the last century who wanted to be an artist. And she wanted to be an artist at a time when the world said no, or you paint plates or you make silhouettes. This shows a testament to saying yes to yourself. She painted the world that she knew,

so that was in Greenwich Village and but largely in Harlem and the Upper West Side, and the world that she was interested in was very different than the world she was supposed to represent, which was supposed to be genteel, Pennsylvania. She was interested in worlds that were not deemed acceptable. So when you first encountered Alice Neal, Was it more her paintings about...

It was everything, really. I love this section. I call it the queer corner of the exhibition because a lot of these subjects are gay men. So, for instance, Ravi Tillotson, who was painted in 73, I love his socks in particular. They're a particular kind of silk sock that men wear with evening pumps generally.

This is a portrait of Henry Geltzaller, who was the first curator of contemporary art at the mat. In 1967, he would of course been very aware of Alice, who was starting to be discovered. I like particularly the hands. There's a way in which he's sort of shooing her away. Jackie Curtis was a drag queen. And one of the more extraordinary things about this painting is the whole and Jackie's stockings, the toe peeking out there. How many of these feel sort of like old friends to you?

I think when I was in college in 1981, I first came across her, and I immediately went to the library because there was no such thing then as a, There was no queer studies or African-American studies or anything, and she was this person who was doing all of that in her work. And you were young, 20. 20, yeah. So I've been loving her a long time. I'm old now.

One of the things that happened to me on Monday when we came was that I had to kind of keep leaving this space because the spirits were so powerful of the sitters, these works are true collaborations. You can't do this kind of painting without wanting to understand what you're looking at and who you're looking at, and also the sitter giving of themselves. Oh, this is a great room. So this is the mother of them, all are famous Warhol portrait, and he had been shot in 1968 and always had to wear girdles to helped keep his insides inside and it's a measure of his trust in her that he took his shirt off

to do it. It's also a measure of her understanding of what it meant to be wounded. I love her for that and for many things including her ability to see who we are. This is a work that I had never seen before it's called Marxist girl and it shows a girl Sitting on a purple chair and she's wearing sailor pants, which was a style back then. But what I love too is that her underarm hair is very important. And also the sort of relaxation and odalesque quality of it. I had never seen this work before and I was blown away. Alice keeps surprising me.

I was reading some of the stuff you wrote about her. You wrote, Neil has the power to make us all feel less lonely in what is. ever roles nature and society has given us. Yes. I agree. I have nothing to add to that. I agree. Completely. Wow, look at the line. I'd say easily there were about 300 people waiting to get in. She'd be thrilled. I think she would have been here every day, sort of happy to talk to people after so many years of obscurity, you know? It's thrilling.

You can find Hilton Alsie's writing about Alice Neal, people come from, first at New Yorker.com. And the show, an astonishing one, is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art well into the summer. I'm David Remnick, and that's our program for today. Thanks for listening. And I hope you'll join us next time

because we've got a story about how a tragic moment in American history got one aspiring young artist to create a new rap scene in Tulsa, Oklahoma. My friends had a studio, and I would leave football practice to record with them. It was like, how the fuck am I supposed to make it

and rap in Oklahoma? And people from outside the cities will tell us, like, don't say you from here. Don't nobody want to hear nobody from here. You know what I'm saying? That's next time on The New Yorker Radio Hour. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbis of Tune Yards, with additional music. by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Riannon Corby, Calilea, David Krasnow, Gauphin and Putubuele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, Annabelle Bacon, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Alison McAdam, Monfei Chen, and Emily Mann. And we had additional help from Harrison Keith Lyne.

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