Miscellany #7: Rowing Blazers, Irony, and Class in America (Or, Are You A Preppie Now, Mr. Krabs?)

Corduroy dad hat from Rowing Blazers.

Q: Do you feel like traditional men’s style has an image problem?

Jack Carlson: Well, that depends on what you mean by "traditional men's style." The Trad Police... which can be found spewing thinly disguised racism on message boards and in the Ivy-Style comments section - a load of Archie Bunkers in blue blazers - don't do themselves any favors. More broadly, "traditional men's style" has an image problem in that those purveying it usually present it poorly. It isn't marketed well, and how else can one define "an image problem"?(1)

Sometimes a Dad Hat Is Just a Dad Hat (but Not When It's From J. Press)

The other day, Rowing Blazers - the clothing company founded by Dr. Jack Carlson, PhD (why does no one ever call him this?), former United States rowing medalist, author of the book Rowing Blazers, and Person Who Attended Oxford - shared this Medium post, titled "J.Crew, Rowing Blazers, and The Decline of Prep...," by a guy named Clayton Chambers, on their Instagram. Now, my point in discussing Chambers's post is not to rip him, or it, apart. I don't know who he is, even. However, I disagree with Chambers's main argument, and I think that his argument, and my disagreement with it, unearths something interesting about Rowing Blazers and its place in the current (eternal) debate over preppy clothing and its place in American culture.

First, some quick background on preppy clothing (for best results, read the next paragraph very fast). Preppy clothing has its roots in the boxy, loose-fitting No. 1 Sack Suit, the striped repp tie, the odd jacket with a rolled-over top button, the oxford-cloth button down shirt, and the Weejun penny loafer. The foundational codifiers and marketers, in the 1920s and 1930s, of what was eventually known as the "Ivy" style, for its popularity on Ivy League campuses and among Ivy League graduates - Brooks Brothers in New York, J. Press in New Haven, G.H. Bass and L.L. Bean in Maine, et. al. - were themselves codified into establishment style in the 1960s, as Ivy-styled clothes were marketed in magazines like Playboy, written about in magazines like Esquire, and seen in movies starring the likes of Tony Randall, Tab Hunter, Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Anthony Perkins, Steve McQueen, Cary Grant, and so on. This establishment style fell out of favor in the late 1960s and early 1970s as college kids grew out their hair and rebelled against the Wall Street fathers who were paying for them to go to Kent State. It was then finally resurrected as a tongue-in-cheek, ironic aspirational elite style by Lisa Birnbach in The Official Preppy Handbook, first published in 1980. The Handbook, along with a slew of what I call "douchebags at private school" movies, revitalized Ivy style, now embodied by navy blazers, bow ties, pink Lacoste polos, boat shoes, and pants with things embroidered on them, as three things: first, clothes for rich assholes (see: Breaking Away); second, clothes for people who very much wanted to be rich assholes (see: Izod); and third, people who thought the rich assholes and the people who wanted to be them were hilarious. Get all that? Good. (Oh, and you can stop reading fast.)

I believe that Rowing Blazers was founded in a spirit of deep sincerity and earnestness. Carlson, as mentioned earlier, is a former United States rowing medalist and Person Who Attended Oxford. In 2014, he combined these two passions into the book Rowing Blazers, an exhaustive look at the history of the rowing blazer, i.e. the original navy blazer. Carlson came by this project through an earnest interest in the history and traditions of the sport he loves, and through serious scholarship as a PhD student studying anthropology (I think) archaeology. From this book and its huge popularity, the brand Rowing Blazers was born. The foundational garment of Rowing Blazers is, of course, the rowing blazer - own one for only $1,000! - but they also sell a wide variety of other preppy-cum-streetwear-cum-Wes Anderson apparel: madras jackets and trousers, replica Brooks Brothers-style fun shirts monogrammed F.U.N., pink corduroy jackets, vintage watches, a collaboration with Sperry, t-shirts that say "Quarantine University." Many of the items on their website feature blurbs that read like The Journal of Critical J. Peterman Studies(2):

Our FW19 collection is inspired by the desire to cling to youth and the inevitability of "growing up," whatever that means: early adulthood’s mix of melancholy and excitement in all its nostalgic forms - Yuppie culture, identity crises, and a longing to go “back to school.” Films like St. Elmo's Fire - which takes place at RB founder Jack Carlson's alma mater, Georgetown - and series like Friends (shout out to "The One With All The Rugby") capture this spirit, as well as the zeitgeist of a seemingly simpler time, when the stakes were low and the world was young.

The collection - drawing on these '80s and '90s cultural moments in both attitude and style - is not just post-Ivy in the sense that it reflects a post-collegiate or post-graduation ethos, however. Post Ivy is also a play on Take Ivy - the (contrived, idealized) Japanese anthropological study of American campus culture in the late ‘50s that many since then have taken as a style bible. But in 2019, we believe that classic American collegiate style transcends narrow, and in any case artificial, categorizations like "Ivy style," and beyond the baggage that comes with these constructs and labels. Collegiate, by definition, is the intersection of traditional and youthful - and youth culture - a youthful sense of irony and irreverence - is as important an inspiration to this collection as the staged photos in books like Take Ivy.

I'm going to come back to this blurb later, so bear with me. But before I move on, I want to emphasize that I like Rowing Blazers. I own several things from them, and am happy to support a brand that is putting out a younger, fresher, more inclusive picture of clothes that have been almost totally reserved for the white elite, or the aspiring white elite, for pretty much their entire history (find a person of color in The Official Preppy Handbook. I'll wait[3]). In 2018, New York Times music and culture critic Jon Caramanica wrote of J. Press that its store windows "reminded [him] largely of wealth I didn’t have, rooms I would never be allowed into. Rooms I had to convince myself weren’t worth craving.... I’d pop into J. Press mostly to look, little doses of class tourism." Caramanica doesn't end up buying an oxford shirt or a pair of Aldens - instead, he chooses "a corduroy baseball cap":

It was floppy and unstructured, a dad hat made for actual dads. The way it sagged suggested wealth around long enough to have heated, and then settled, like the earth itself. I was trying on the green one when the clerk informed me there was a pink one as well. I couldn’t decide between the two, so I got both.

Dad hats! Called such by cool young people who wear ugly and dorky "dad hats" and "dad sneakers" ironically, making them cool in the process. A humble cap that, made by J. Press in soft corduroy (the most dadly of fabrics?), also symbolizes wealth (and old wealth, the most elite kind of wealth). Caramanica rejects the clubby, square world of Ivy and preppy style, but he buys pink and green caps, the colors championed by the Official Preppy Handbook ("the wearing of the pink and the green is the surest and quickest way to group identification within the Prep set") and many a "douchebags at private school" movie in the 1980s, or in other words, the most canonical preppy colors you can find. The J. Press dad cap Caramanica likes both upends and reinforces the class system he finds uncomfortable. In other words, he would love Rowing Blazers.(4)

There Are Only Two Known Cures for The Prep Disease: Reincarnation or Bankruptcy

So. To come back to Clayton Chambers and the Medium post that started this whole thing. The article's main purpose is to address the bankruptcy of J. Crew - if you actually want to learn about this and what could be done about it, click here to read Michael Williams's thoughts at A Continuous Lean - but Chambers spends most of his time extolling the virtues of Rowing Blazers, which he positions as a symbol of the vitality of "prep as an ideal" in contrast to the death of "prep as a signal of wealth." Now, there are some obvious issues with this position. First, Rowing Blazers is an expensive brand, all things considered. A flagship blazer costs around $1,000, their Bishop madras jacket costs nearly $700, and even a blazer with less frills, like their terry cloth beach blazer, is $325; their ties, which are made in England or New York, are between $80 and $150 dollars; that Quarantine University t-shirt is $42. You can easily argue, then, that Rowing Blazers is just as much "prep as a signal of wealth" as Brooks Brothers or J. Press. It's more complicated than that, though, because Chambers is talking about an "ideal," something to be aspired to. Let's put our quibbles over cost to one side, and say that Chambers is essentially arguing that the value of Rowing Blazers as an ideal of prep transcends the value of Rowing Blazers as prep as a signal of wealth when thinking about its place in American culture, circa July 28th, 2020 ("Behind the financial struggles of brands like J. Crew and Brooks Brothers, there’s something we can all learn about the cultural shifts driving" the "decline of prep"). To quote Chambers more fully:

Rowing Blazers can repurpose prep + ivy style as an act of rebellion against wasp-culture, classism — legacy wealth in America.... Younger audiences crave this sense of identity in their style.... And it’s not the first time we’ve seen this happen with the old guard of American fashion. Hip-hop culture has long used Ralph Lauren as a center piece in their work, highlighting the irony + disparity of American classism.... Polo wasn’t meant for hip-hop culture. So they took it and made it their own. As an act of rebellion to the American dream. The same applies to J. Crew and Rowing Blazers. Both are aspirational. One is ironic. The other is not.

Let's break this argument down a bit:

1. The establishment is ripe for ironic repurposing. For example, Ralph Lauren repurposed the Brooks Brothers establishment in the 1980s, and when it became establishment was itself repurposed by hip-hop culture. 
2. This repurposing highlights the irony and the disparity of American classism. It serves as an act of rebellion against the American dream, an aspirational ideal that excludes many; its repurposing presents that ideal ironically, reducing its exclusionary power,(5) and it claims the original power for those who were excluded. 

When Chambers writes, "Prep style as a signal of wealth... in America is fading.... As an ideal [however], prep is alive, and Rowing Blazers proves this," he is saying that the establishment of prep is no longer valid in the more inclusive America of 2020, which explains the struggles of J. Crew (I actually made this same argument about Brooks Brothers here), but he is also saying that Rowing Blazers is not merely ironically deconstructing prep like a hipster vulture, but that it is performing the same appropriation and inversion of power he describes with Polo and hip-hop. The establishment, in this case, is not only the WASP culture embodied by Brooks Brothers(6), but also "classism" and "legacy wealth in America" - i.e., the class system passed down through generations which allows the wealthy elite to exist and take advantage of the lower classes. Chambers writes that "Polo wasn’t meant for hip-hop culture. So they took it and made it their own. As an act of rebellion to the American dream." J. Crew, then, is the birthright brand, the one which simply reinforces prep as a signal of wealth; Rowing Blazers is the rebel, the brand which, by adding a dash of irony and pinch of inclusion to the stew, represents the ideal of prep. (It's worth noting that Rowing Blazers explicitly connects itself with irony, as well as hip-hop culture and streetwear, on the "About" page on its website.)

I was really happy to read this. Not because I agree - as I said at the start of this post, I don't - but because I finally realized that I might have an opportunity to talk about something I've wanted to talk about for a while, but haven't known how to. I'm talking about Rowing Blazers's many versions of the famous 1979 "Are You A Preppie?" poster. (Rowing Blazers actually sells this original poster for $10,000, if you're looking for a way to get rid of all that loose change you found the last time you cleaned the sheepskin seat covers in your Volvo 240DL.)

The 1979 poster, from the Rowing Blazers website. Click for larger.

The poster is a straightforward parody of preppies, one year before the Official Preppy Handbook, which cribbed the format for its own breakdowns of preppy style through the decades ("round tortoise-shell glasses, 20/20 vision"; "hands in pockets, just like Dad"). Where the OPH was tongue-in-cheek, it was also affectionate, written by an insider. The "Are You A Preppie?" poster is a bit meaner, highlighting the preppie's "Richie Cunningham" collar, "heaven-ward nose," "smirk," eye damage from drinking, and "flood level pants." It asks a series of questions for anyone wondering if they be preppy: "Do you dress in a manner which attracts women - to other men?" "If Moses had seen the way you dress would there be another commandment?" "If you had your life to live over again, would you still fall in love with yourself?" The poster is an excellent example of Chambers's description of the ironic, rebellious repurposing of the establishment: it takes the rich, powerful kid and makes him someone the poor, powerless kids can laugh at. It bankrupts him.

Of course, the genius of the OPH, which pulled back the curtain on elite culture, was to reincarnate the powerless kid as the powerful one, to recast the establishment as the private club - not something to be hated or protested, but rather something to be infiltrated and crashed. And the crashers aren't the establishment - they're the underdogs. They're the poor, powerless kids who wear flood level pants to show the rich, powerful kids that they don't have a monopoly on the uniform of power. They aren't the preppy Rob Lowe in Class, they're the fish-out-of-water Andrew McCarthy. They're Philip Weiss at the Bohemian Grove. Of course, as far as anyone at the Bohemian Grove knew, Philip Weiss was supposed to be there. And at the end of Class, Andrew McCarthy has sex with Rob Lowe's mom. Ironic, outsider prep has a way of becoming sincere, insider prep. As Brian Roche writes about the mustache that Malcolm, Jack Black's character in Noah Baumbach's Margot at the Wedding, insists is "meant to be funny," "an ironic mustache is still a mustache." Ironic prep is still prep, after all.

What Sort of Man Wears Rowing Blazers?

Now, I can't refute Chambers's argument by defining what he calls the "ideal of prep," because that could mean many things to many people, and because Chambers doesn't define it in his post, I don't know what it means to him. However, as I described earlier, Chambers does discuss what he feels like Rowing Blazers does stand for. By representing prep ironically and irreverently, Chambers argues, Rowing Blazers highlights the issues of class in America, such as "legacy wealth" and exclusion. By being "ironic prep," Rowing Blazers repurposes prep as a signal of wealth, and gives it to... to....

Uh-oh. Who does Rowing Blazers give this repurposed prep to? This is obviously very important. To return to Chambers's Polo example - one could argue that Polo wasn't meant for Wall Street finance guys, but if they'd taken it and made it their own, would it have had the same effect as it being worn by the hip-hop community? Obviously not. Punching down isn't subversive, only punching up is. By "punching up" at Polo's depiction of Americana, prep included, hip-hop made that depiction cool. By "punching up" at dorky dad style, centennials make it cool. So who punches in Rowing Blazers, and in which direction? All Chambers says about Rowing Blazers's demographic is that it's "younger audiences." So where can we turn to find out about who is wearing this "ironic prep," and why?

Well, we can find out from Rowing Blazers itself. Chambers accurately describes Rowing Blazers as "aspirational," and every aspirational brand has to show its customers what they should be aspiring to be. Chambers describes Rowing Blazers as being aspirational in the sense of providing a sense of identity, one that punches up using irony - punching up at legacy wealth, classism, etc. In essence, Rowing Blazers is for the person who loves elite style, but who for any number of reasons - historical disenfranchisement, liberal politics, etc. - doesn't want the moral ickiness of elite wealth status. Does Rowing Blazers itself confirm this reading of its "ironic prep"?

There are so many aspects of the Rowing Blazers brand that could be used to help answer this question - from Jack Carlson's own Instagram profile (bio: "♣️ @rowingblazers founder / 🇺🇸 us national team alum / 🥉 world champs bronze medalist / 🎓 phd oxford / 🐶 hoyas /🏺archaeologist / 🍟 vegetarian") to @rbmoodboard, essentially an official brand identity account (recent posts include Slim Aarons, Babar, Princess Diana, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and Jay-Z). However, I want to focus on one piece of their marketing in particular.

The Rowing Blazers "Are You A Preppie?" Gimberly poster. Click for larger.

I am obsessed with these posters - there's a whole series of them. For while @rbmoodboard or @rowingblazers, the Rowing Blazers website, the many features on Jack Carlson and the brand, and even Jack Carlson's personal Instagram page, are all representations of the brand itself (or what the brand hopes to evoke in the buyer's imagination, like the luxurious easy life of a Slim Aarons photograph or Ferris Bueller's proto-Wes Anderson wink at the audience), these posters are the brand's representation of their buyer - like the old "What sort of man reads Playboy?" pages the magazine used to run in the 1960s, the Rowing Blazers posters don't give the consumer a purely aspirational bar to reach (that's already being done by other arms of the brand), but rather seek to convince the consumer that they are already a Rowing Blazers customer, and that the aspirational bar being set by that $695 price tag is actually within easy reach.(7) Of course, this is a tongue-in-cheek, ironic ideal of a Rowing Blazers customer! (All together now: an ironic ideal is still an ideal.) So, let's take a look at who's wearing Rowing Blazers.(8) Who are "you," after all?

1. Hasn't Spilled Anything on Pants (Ever)

Model Camille Opp in a Rowing Blazers poster. From Instagram.

Model Curtis Fuhrmann in a Rowing Blazers poster. From Instagram.

First, you're relatable. These two posters are both heavy on relatability, real or aspirational. In other words, they aren't about what the Rowing Blazers customer consumes, but rather about who they are - their taste, let's say. Cami Opp's fun shirt-wearing young woman goes to the Natural History Museum, has lost an airpod, and tends to spill things on herself. This establishes her as someone who at least visits New York City, and as absent-minded and a bit klutzy (this last point will be important later, so hold on to it). Curtis Fuhrmann's moody Francophile listens to obscure French hip-hop and American indie rock, and "had a crush on Mireille," the nipply blonde in Pierre Capretz's French in Action language-learning series (this will also be important later). All of this Francophilia is a bit pretentious, though - and the poster knows it. Obscure French hip-hop can be found in dozens of compilations on YouTube, and I assume our young man's study of Mireille was in preparation for his only actual experience of France, his year abroad. We've all known that one friend who couldn't get over their "life-changing" semester in Paris, right?

In Opp's poised young woman and Curtis's somewhat bashful guy (this, also, will be important), we get a sense of two sides of the Rowing Blazers ideal customer: both are youthful and photogenic, but Opp's character is more human, more flawed, more relatable, with an imminent trouser-stain, an interest in museums, and a habit of losing things, while Curtis's character is a bit more full of himself, more stuffy, listening to hipster music and speaking French. In these characters, Rowing Blazers gives us a portrait of ourselves that we can laugh at and aspire to be - one we can envy secretly (when was the last time you went to a concert? Do you speak French? And what about that VW Harlequin, the fun shirt of cars?) while telling ourselves we're actually better (still talking about that year abroad? And who do you think you're fooling with that vitamin gummy?).

Remember when I said I'd come back to that blurb from the Rowing Blazers website? Let's bring it back for a moment:

Our FW19 collection is inspired by the desire to cling to youth and the inevitability of "growing up," whatever that means: early adulthood’s mix of melancholy and excitement in all its nostalgic forms - Yuppie culture, identity crises, and a longing to go “back to school.” 

In these two posters, we get this idea illustrated: youthfulness, even immaturity; nostalgia for college life, if only in the meme-ified way that the '80s and '90s are celebrated in the internet (French in Action premiered in 1987); the melancholy of a carefree life spilling food on expensive clothes and losing expensive airpods and spending money on concert tickets that most adults can't afford to indulge in.

2. American-Made Madras Patchwork Dad Hat (Not Actually His Dad's)

Camille Opp. From Instagram. 

Gimberly Owusu in a Rowing Blazers poster. From Instagram.

Okay, I guess I did talk about what Opp and Fuhrmann's characters consumed a bit there. But "taste" and "consumerism" are pretty deeply connected, so it's not surprising that another major focus on these posters is consumerism. And this is the perfect time for it - you're on Instagram, a platform designed to sell you something (a product, a sponsorship, a lifestyle) looking at @rowingblazers or @jackcarlson. What we consume has the power to make us who we are, or who we want to be. That the aspiration is wrapped up in a wink doesn't cancel out its power - remember, ironic aspiration is still aspiration. Let's look at what Opp and Owusu's characters stand for as consumers: bagels and cream cheese; the environment; arcade games and craft beer; Joe's Pizza; vintage watches; fancy cigars; retro, low-tech tech.

As with their taste in the earlier two posters, the Rowing Blazers character's consumer identity is presented in a way we can both look down on and look up to (and sometimes both); Barcade, for example, is "low culture" entertainment, but repackaged in a quirky, hipster way, in privileged hipster places, and it also stands (as do concert tickets or a museum map) for leisure time with friends; Joe's Pizza is a tourist draw in the Village, representing down-and-dirty, old (and by "old" I mean "1970's") New York, the New York that is mostly missed by people my age, people too young to have ever lived in it ("But it was so much more authentic"); 25 Montecristo cigars cost nearly $300, while the amount donated to the bees is unspecified, but noble. 

Maybe you have a rogue airpod or some money for nature conservancy in your pocket. Maybe you listen to indie rock or go to museums. But look at yourself. Let's be honest - unless you're Cami Opp, Curtis Fuhrmann, or Gimberly Owusu(9), you aren't the person you're looking at on your screen. They're relatable, sure. And they're consumers, just like you. So what's the difference? Well, the consumers in these posters aren't just buying concert tickets  - they're buying Rowing Blazers clothes, too. Wouldn't your receipt from the local House of Pizza feel a lot more youthful and irreverent if it was in the pocket of a Rowing Blazers jacket? Wouldn't your memories of your semester abroad in Prague feel a lot more meaningful, in a Wes Anderson kind of way, if they were housed in a Rowing Blazers dad hat? These posters say they would be. And these clothes are pretty irresistible - not only are they cute and cool, but they're made in America, they're ironic and irreverent, they're youthful! Wearing these clothes says that you stand for good things, like the vitality of "prep as an ideal" as opposed to "prep as a signal of wealth."(10)

By juxtaposing the taste, the consumerism, and the clothes, the posters make an explicit argument, the oldest one in the book: buy Rowing Blazers and you can be one of these (constructed) people, have their (made-up) taste, live their (imaginary) lives. The addition to that normal capitalist message is that these people, these tastes, these lives, mean something more than a paycheck for Jack Carlson and his marketing team - they mean that you're doing something real in the world, you're standing for something. Buying a Lands' End windbreaker doesn't have to be consumerism - it can be you attaining a more meaningful, substantive, real life. Except, of course, you can't attain it, because these people are models, and you aren't. I told you to remember some things earlier, so let's unpack them now:

1. Cami Opp's VW driver is absent-minded and klutzy. Take a quick look back at Opp, who is a professional fashion model. She is blonde, thin, and tall, with a symmetrical face and clear skin, fitting the beauty standard of the fashion world pretty well.(11) Her character is awkward and a bit dorky, with her weird VW and her museum map, but she also stands confidently, staring you in the eyes, wearing the heck out of her clothes. She is an example of imperfect perfection, or perfect imperfection - either an unattainable ideal wrapped in the veneer of attainability, or an attainable reality, the idealization of which places it out of our reach. Sure, Opp's fun shirt woman is human, but in a "the stars are just like us" kind of way. In the end, the relatable humanity of these characters is a reinforcement of the old ideals - wealth, privilege - rather than the new ones - inclusivity, rebellion - Chambers celebrates in his post.
2. Curtis Fuhrmann's Francophile is bashful and had a crush on Mireille. Now, I'm not making an argument that this was intentional on Rowing Blazers's part, so disclaimer that I'm going out on a bit of a limb here, but Curtis stands with his head down. The juxtaposition of these two posters is interesting when you think about their gaze, and ours - Opp looks us in the eyes, not able to hide anything from us, while Curtis looks down, not challenging us with his masculinity, even allowing us to potentially replace his face with our own. But plenty of the male posters feature the models looking up - so draw your own conclusions. The Mireille thing is a bit more solid. French in Action's depiction of Mireille has been criticized as overly sexualized, with the camera lingering on her braless breasts or her bare legs; the accompanying exercise in one episode is to pick up a "pretty girl" in a park. A product of its time and place for sure, but still a time and place for which this poster is evoking some nostalgia. Opp is blonde; so is almost every woman wearing Rowing Blazers on their Instagram account (oh, look, there's Mireille!). I'm not saying Rowing Blazers is reinforcing sexism, misogyny, or exclusionary beauty standards on purpose. But they aren't not doing it on purpose either, and that kind of lazy falling into the same old same old can be troubling in ways I'll get into in the next section.

These posters present a complex package: reality and the aspiration to an unreality, taste and its execution in consumerism, irony and irreverence next to reinforcement of the establishment (the Rowing Blazers website blurb I've been quoting talks about how "the intersection of traditional and youthful - and youth culture - a youthful sense of irony and irreverence - is as important an inspiration to this collection as the staged photos in books like Take Ivy"; but of course, all of Rowing Blazers's photos are staged too, something they know, and know we know). And it's almost all under the surface - the way one element supports another, and how they all serve the end-goal, which is getting you to buy a $700 jacket a few minutes ago you didn't want, but that, now, you need.

Now, you may say that this is just branding and marketing, and that it's unfair to pick it apart like this. I'd say that, well, you're right - not only is it just branding and marketing, something every company has to do to succeed, but lots of companies are doing way worse things in the name of simple advertising. Aren't they? Well, I'm not sure. Think about Patagonia for a moment: Patagonia puts a ton of resources and marketing towards supporting sustainability and the environment, so many that the former director of the Bureau of Land Management under Obama describes the company as "a group of avid environmentalists who just happen to sell coats.” It's a great cause, and Patagonia has stood by its environmental message for decades as other companies have paid lip service to sustainability. However, as Sapna Maheshwari wrote earlier this year for the New York Times, "The privately held brand sells roughly $1 billion in soft fleeces and camping gear every year while decrying rampant consumerism." In a way, and despite the fact that the world would be a better place if every company cared as much about our environment as Patagonia, or about social justice as much as Ben & Jerry's, any company which uses these appeals to something greater and nobler as a way to sell product is deserving of some suspicion. Like Patagonia's or Ben & Jerrys's conflict between their mission as a business and their message as a brand, what makes the Rowing Blazers posters worth examining to me is the way that it complicates, and even undercuts, the brand's commendable messaging on core principles like inclusion or clothing sustainability and quality.

The Real Thing

Chambers doesn't admire ironic prep just for irony's sake - he admires it because it does something real in reclaiming and repurposing a style in a way that speaks to our social and ethical concerns. All of these positions I've described - irreverence and rebellion against the establishment, a commitment to high-quality domestic manufacturing, inclusivity and social justice - are the sincere underpinnings of their ironic prep aesthetic. Rowing Blazers identifies itself with this marriage of irony and sincerity on the "About" page of its website: "At Rowing Blazers, we believe in the classics. But our approach to the classics is anything but stuffy; it’s youthful, inclusive, irreverent - and a little ironic. We can’t stand pretentiousness, but we do love being authentic and genuine."

In an email exchange in early 2019, Carlson told me,

At the end of the day, Rowing Blazers is a brand dedicated to the classics. But while for most people, classic has connotations of stuffiness and buttoned-up exclusivity, for me it means youthful, cool, evergreen, even rebellious. Sometimes there is a backlash against certain things we do, usually from people who don't understand us, or even understand what exactly they are complaining out, in the first place.

The ironic prep aesthetic allows Rowing Blazers to cut through the phoniness of the establishment and show you the youthful, inclusive, irreverent reality of prep today. And this has been the party line on Rowing Blazers - that Rowing Blazers is saving prep by making it youthful, inclusive, and irreverent. "Preppy clothing should have reached its apogee with the #menswear movement, when men embraced pleated trousers, 3-roll-2 sport coats, and penny loafers," Samuel Hine wrote in a GQ piece on Carlson in 2018. "But as soon as 'Ivy Style' began to feel like costume again, prep only got stronger by ditching the tie and adapting to the current youth-led streetwear moment," an adaptation exemplified by Rowing Blazers. Ultimately, Hine writes, "Rowing Blazers’ inclusive vision feels more genuine than [just] its diverse lookbooks" - as Rowing Blazers's Instagram bio says, it's "the real thing." But if Rowing Blazers positions itself as the younger, hipper Brooks Brothers, then what does it mean when they make a replica Brooks Brothers fun shirt? Can an irreverent take on the establishment look exactly like the establishment itself? Which is the real thing?

Rowing Blazers also positions itself as a brand that cares about making clothes in America, something that establishment companies like Brooks Brothers have moved away from. In 2018, for example, Carlson said of the origins of the company,

Well, how can we bring the blazer back to its origins? How can we tell that story, not just through the book, but also through clothing? Through actually making blazers the way they’re supposed to be made?... And it was very sad for me to see that a lot of these rowing clubs that used to have their blazers made in a very traditional way are now buying jackets from China.

Remember that Bishop madras jacket I mentioned earlier, the one that retails for $695? The product notes say it's 100% Indian cotton madras. I own it, and the label confirms that it's Indian madras. The jacket itself? Made in China, something not indicated anywhere on the product page. Made where in China? By whom? By being a bit disingenuous about the provenance of their products (without even noting that the jacket is "imported," a common code-word for clothes made in China), Rowing Blazers raises more questions about the ethics of their overseas manufacturing. Rowing Blazers does make a lot of products in New York, but they tend to be marquee items like the original blazers - in this way, they echo Brooks Brothers, which sets aside certain heritage pieces, like repp ties and traditional oxford-cloth button-down shirts, to be made in America while outsourcing the rest of their catalog.

Rowing Blazers positions itself as more inclusive, too. That GQ profile tells us that Carlson "proudly relays a story from when Rowing Blazers first released rugby shirts last year, and Chicago rapper Vic Mensa was among the customers waiting in line to get into the pop-up space. 'That’s when I realized what I wanted was happening,' Carlson says." He's spoken at length about the way that Rowing Blazers has embraced female customers rather being being just a men's brand. Their lookbooks have always highlighted models of color. And in recent weeks, as the United States has been roiled by protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd, Rowing Blazers and Jack Carlson have both spoken out about social justice causes. But I believe the messaging from Rowing Blazers on inclusivity is undercut by the ways the company reinforces some problematic aspects of the fashion industry, as described in the previous section.

In that same email exchange with Carlson, I asked him about the "ideology of Rowing Blazers" - how would he describe it? He wrote, "At the end of the day, Rowing Blazers is a brand dedicated to the classics. But while for most people, classic has connotations of stuffiness and buttoned-up exclusivity, for me it means youthful, cool, evergreen, even rebellious." I think that at its core, Rowing Blazers is a brand that's doing some cool things, things I support. But that thoughtful core is wrapped in an idea of "ironic prep" that I think actually undoes some of that other, cool stuff by selling the establishment, with a lot of its problematic baggage intact, as a rebellion. I followed up my ideology question by asking if there had been any ideological backlash against the brand. Carlson wrote:

A whole gang of humorless curmudgeons took to their keyboards to complain about our collaboration with J. Press and how it was a violation of their previous "Ivy style." The irony, of course, is that most of these trolls didn't attend an Ivy league college or anything like it; many of them wear Chinese-made pants; and it is entirely lost on all of them that what they call "Ivy style" was rebelliously casual, colorful, youthful, and irreverent when it began.  But in all cases, it is usually the interlopers, rattled by their own insecurities, who are the most vocal and reactionary. It's like in Downton Abbey: the servants are the most radically conservative, usually about the things that really matter the least.

No brand in the Ivy/prep sphere has been so successful as Rowing Blazers at turning their COVID-19 masks into must-wear items (you don't need it, you want it). They sell out repeatedly, and I see them all over Instagram. In fact, Lisa Birnbach recently shouted out Rowing Blazers while wearing one of their masks (she has at least three). Birnbach's Official Preppy Handbook taught looked-down-upon servants how to dress in Lord and Lady Grantham's clothes, and then got them to look down their own noses at the other, less pink and green servants. Carlson is making a fair point - his brand has come in for a huge amount of unfounded, reactionary criticism, often because of its commitment to inclusion, which, while problematic, is still real and valuable. But it's worth noting that he phrases that point in terms of looking down his nose - at people he deems humorless, people who didn't go to an Ivy League and so can't have a say in the style, people who buy clothes made in China (though he doesn't mean the ones sold by Rowing Blazers, I suspect). At the servants, who he casts as conservative and consumed with petty details, unlike the uber-privileged Granthams, who have the leisure and resources to look fabulous and, say, work for the Red Cross instead of dying in some mud. Carlson is right to champion youth, rebellion, irony, and irreverence in his effort to help the style he loves survive. It's just too bad that so much of how he does it looks like the exact opposite. On Instagram, Birnbach wrote, "Thank you @jackcarlson of @rowingblazers for my collection of crisp, cool, and lightweight masks! They go with everything I wear. (Obviously)." Well, yes, obviously. Perhaps, in the end, an insider recognizes another insider. Perhaps, in the end, punches hurt no matter in which direction they're thrown.

NOTES

(1)Interview by the author. A real, sincere thank you to Jack Carlson for taking the time to candidly answer some nobody on the internet. I hope you read to the part where I say I like Rowing Blazers a lot, Jack!
(2)Not a real journal. Yet.
(3)He's on page 163. There's Waldo!
(4) In a 2019 email to me, Carlson wrote about the challenges of wearing preppy clothing in a world that views them as signs of conservatism:

Well, there are always going to be people who see what they want to see, feel how they want to feel. And a lot of people want some excuse to feel angry, so they can look at our clothing, or at any 'traditional men's clothing," and see privilege, power, white America, etc. But in general, I find that's not what people see when they see our clothing, and the more informed someone is, the less likely they are to think that way. The rugby shirt, the blazer, the dad hat - the categories for which we are most well known, most of which are "classic" - all have a rich histories in hip-hop, streetwear, punk, normcore, and a whole variety of other cultural movements.

(5)When your centennial daughter wears a dad hat or dad sneakers, she is making fun of you, her literal dad, but she is also becoming Dad™️, a stylized representation of patriarchal power. She undermines that power by reframing it ironically, but that doesn't mean it isn't also still literal power -  it's just inverted it so that she can hold it over you.
(6)And, most likely, J. Press and Polo, at this point. However, both of these companies were started by Jews who managed to observe WASP culture from the inside, Jacobi Press in New Haven and Ralph Lauren at Brooks Brothers, which is huge when you think about the cultural meaning of these clothes.
(7)There's a fairly neat parallel here with the concept of "parasocial relationships," a term coined by anthropologist Donald Horton and sociologist R. Richard Wohl in 1956 to describe a "seeming face-to-face relationship between spectator and performer." While Horton and Wohl were describing these relationships in the context of television, the concept has been revisited recently due to the popularity of YouTube vloggers and Instagram personalities who use their cameras to build deep relationships with their viewers, which they then leverage to sell stuff to those viewers. Instead of convincing a viewer that the performer is their friend, however, the Rowing Blazers posters are convincing a customer that the performer is the customer herself.
(8)I want to emphasize quickly that Rowing Blazers uses more models than the ones in these posters, specifically on their website and in their lookbooks. However, I am focusing on these posters, as I said, because they are representations of you, the Rowing Blazers customer, rather than simply being models in a catalog or an online shop.
(9)Not to get too deep into this, but Opp, who has an Instagram account, is tagged in her posters that appear on the @rowingblazers and @jackcarlson accounts. Gimberly Owusu, the Black male model in the posters, is never identified in tags or captions (he does not have an active/public Instagram presence). However, it's important to note that the flagship poster featuring Owusu is called the "Gimberly" poster on the Rowing Blazers website.
(10) How slippery what "prep as an ideal" really stands for is is illustrated by the fact that I was just able to describe it as simply standing for the fact that it stands for something, and I bet you didn't even notice until you read this footnote. Isn't this fun?
(11)Cami Opp is not evil for having clear skin and a symmetrical face! If anyone is evil, it's Rowing Blazers, for hiring her (and, to be clear, I'm not saying that either - just that the brand, for all its obvious commitment to inclusion, still falls into some problematic habits of the fashion world in a way that can't help undermining that same commitment). And as a vocal, out member of the LGBTQ+ community and someone who has pushed back against some toxic aspects of modeling, she stands for good things. But her appearance is still relevant to my analysis, because, like it or not, it plays into some stuff about marketing. Sorry, Cami - it's not personal!

Miscellany #6: Living in the Movies, the Official Preppy Obituary, and the Athleticism of Art

1. Two great movie apartments: Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) and Alice (Woody Allen, 1990)

While preparing my upcoming Gentlemen Prefer Brunettes post on Vertigo, I pulled these screenshots of one of my favorite movie apartments, Midge's San Francisco apartment. We see a lot of this apartment, but are never explicitly told if it's a studio (in the bedroom sense - it is an art studio) or a one-bedroom apartment. More to come on Vertigo in my next Gentlemen Prefer Brunettes post. For now, enjoy this incredible apartment in all its glory:

I'm probably not ever going to write a blog post about Woody Allen's 1990 film Alice, which Wikipedia somewhat passive-aggressively notes received "mildly positive reviews" (although it was Keye Luke's final film, and was originally called "The Magical Herbs of Dr. Yang," which makes me feel like there's a lot to unpack), but enjoy this fantastic apartment anyway.

2. Lisa Birnbach on Brooks Brothers's bankruptcy

The Brooks Man.

As Official Preppy Handbook author Lisa Birnbach recently wrote in the New York Times, Brooks Brothers provided "James Madison’s suits, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s wardrobe and the Union Army’s uniforms during the Civil War," as well as uniforms for Roosevelt's Rough Riders and coats for presidents including Abraham Lincoln.

I like Brooks Brothers - I own many Brooks Brothers ties, tweeds, suits, and button-down shirts. I am saddened to see news of its bankruptcy because I love the clothes from the company that I own. But I also understand two things: first, Brooks Brothers hasn't made those clothes in a very long time, and second, Brooks Brothers is an increasingly hard sell in a more inclusive world. While I am disappointed that Birnbach's article ignores Brooks's trend towards sweatshop-made mediocrity - when she exhorts her readers to buy Brooks Brothers button-down shirts, suits, and polos, she neglects to mention that after the imminent closing of the company's factories in Haverhill, MA, Queens, and Garland, South Carolina, none of these products will be made in the United States (so much for the Union Army!) - I am more disappointed that her article fails to address what I suspect is a deeper problem with the resuscitation of Brooks than COVID-19.

The problem I'm referring to was summed up beautifully by Daniel Penny when he wrote about his "fear that you can’t uncouple conservative aesthetics from conservative politics, that the man in the Brooks Brothers suit is usually The Man." While it makes sense that Wynton would wear Brooks Brothers, it doesn't help his image among young jazz fans, or an inclusive one for women (Brooks Brothers makes women's clothing, of course, but it is most famous for its clothes for men). And while James Madison, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt are all great examples of Brooks's place in the annals of American history, those examples also perpetuate myths about that history - namely, that it is completely white and completely male.

Contrast Birnbach's article with this op-ed written by Robert Hill for USA Today, where Hill describes his time as one of the very few Black employees. While he wore the Ivy League look - the natural-shouldered, button-down-collared, repp-tied look of which Brooks was the primary creator and exemplar - he ended up embittered by Brooks's discriminatory policies. When Hill writes, "By the time of my sophomore year in high school, I was one of those African American kids who affected the Ivy Jivey persona. But, that wasn't enough — I wanted to sell it," you can hear the disdain for his past self seeping through the type. He wanted to get in the door at Brooks to sell something he loved; when he got there, he ended up selling something he wasn't allowed to fully be a part of. Why doesn't Birnbach mention prominent Black wearers of Brooks Brothers in her pantheon of American history? One reason might be that many of the most famous Black Ivy icons avoided it. Miles Davis, to take just one example, shopped at jazz-lover Charlie Davidson's Andover Shop in the mid-1950s before he, like Hill, moved on from Ivy for bigger and better things. (She doesn't even mention Wynton Marsalis, though Brooks Brothers is the official outfitter of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and Marsalis has championed their suits for years.)

"Save Brooks Brothers!" Lisa Birnbach cries. Me? I love my clothes from Brooks Brothers, but I also understand that the Brooks of the past is gone, and that it won't be coming back no matter how they move forward from their bankruptcy. Part of me is sad - I'd love to see repp ties, button-down oxford shirts, and sack suits (made in America!) on the shelves at 346 Madison, and see people flocking in to buy them. But part of me also wishes Brooks would just go down with their mothership and leave some space for new labels to thrive, labels that have a deeper commitment to domestic manufacturing and inclusivity, without the weight of an exclusionary history on their shoulders: labels like Drake's in England, or Rowing Blazers here in America, or even J. Press, the historic Ivy clothier who has weathered several storms by streamlining their operation to focus on their relationships to the history of Ivy League style in general and to American manufacturing, and to bridging the gap between past and present, with a balance of baggy traditional fits and hip newer styles that somehow doesn't make the stick-in-the-muds who wear these clothes too angry.

Even if we save Brooks, we won't be saving the Brooks Birnbach wrote about in her (very white) Preppy Handbook; we won't be saving James Madison's Brooks, or Teddy Roosevelt's, or her own father's or even her own. But if we let it die, we might just be saving something else - the chance for the clothes Brooks ushered into American history to survive; to prove that the man in the navy blazer and repp tie doesn't always have to be The Man.

3. Art as Sports: Wynton Marsalis on Sports Look

In 1986, jazz trumpeter and educator Wynton Marsalis appeared on Sports Look (later renamed Up Close) with Roy Firestone on ESPN to discuss the intersections between jazz and sports. Marsalis was a superstar at this time - he won Grammys for Best Jazz Instrumental Solo in 1983, 1984, and 1985, and for Best jazz Instrumental Album in 1985, 1986, and 1987. 1985 also saw him engaging even more directly with the ways jazz amplifies an underrepresented Black voice with the release of Black Codes (From the Underground). Marsalis had a huge publicity machine, a huge audience, and critical acclaim. He was perfectly positioned to be an authority on jazz, and on its face it's very cool to see him featured on ESPN. Imagine seeing that today!

However, as I wrote about briefly here, Marsalis is a complicated figure. While he raised the profile of jazz hugely in the 1980s and 1990s, one could argue that he did so at the expense of established musicians working with fusion and avant-garde styles, some of whom had been making ends meet in the loft scene for years before Marsalis hit it big. Marsalis has always advanced a conservative view of jazz, prioritizing tradition and history and emphasizing the need for the blues and swing to be the foundation of any meaningful jazz expression. Sometimes, this conservative vision has had problematic real-world consequences beyond simple style disagreements - for example, the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra is almost completely male, and has been since its inception.

Sports, of course, has its own troubled history with inclusion and with managing a conservative image as times changed in America, and that history is perhaps no more important to consider than it is right now. So while it's cool to see Marsalis showing up on ESPN, it's also interesting to hear what he has to say because we have an intersection of two traditionally male-dominated modes of expression, and hearing what Marsalis (who, while he has unfairly become a meme of fuddy-duddiness in jazz, is also pretty clearly both a champion of the Jazz Tradition™️ and the most culturally visible jazz educator and standard-bearer in the last 40 years, whose influence, in one way or another, reshaped the jazz landscape in the 1980s and 1990s) has to say about them can perhaps help us understand the challenges jazz is wrestling with as it seeks to shed its overwhelming maleness.

Marsalis appeared on Sports Look in 1986 to discuss the question of "sports as art." Wynton does two noteworthy things early in the interview, as he and Firestone discuss basketball and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. First, he makes a strong argument for intelligence as the root of both jazz and basketball. This is hugely important because jazz and sports are two areas where the intelligence of Black creators has been discounted over and over again. Rhythm and athleticism are often used as racist tropes, with whites dismissing the work that Black artists and athletes put into their craft by claiming that these skills are inherent in Blacks, that they have a genetic predisposition to excel in these areas. This trope not only explains away the humiliation white supremacists feel when, for example, white athletes are bested by Black ones, but it also serves to damn Black artists and athletes with faint praise: if you’re inherently good at sports or music (rather than succeeding due to hard work and intelligence), this racist trope says, then you should stay playing music and sports, not trying to compete with whites intellectually. Wynton pushes back against this trope, emphasizing the intelligence of musicians and athletes. And he does it in a skillful way - while the style of, say, the Harlem Globetrotters might conceivably be open to accusations of minstrelsy, Wynton frames basketball style as specifically rooted in intelligence when he says that “style is an aesthetic proposition” - an intentional artistic statement, in other words - and that Kareem “uses his intelligence to develop the style of the game.”

However, Wynton then pivots to an interesting argument that's worth quoting more at length. Kareem, Wynton says,

reminds me of Monk. You know, you can’t get an angle on Kareem. And then when you think have the angle on him, he’ll do something - Like Monk will play a blues phrase, you know [Wynton sings the opening phrases of “Blues Five Spot”], that’s, like, the same phrase, people been playing that since the 1800s, but he’ll just play it a certain way, or he places it a certain way in the time, and you think, you know, ‘Oh, I know what this is,’ but you really don’t know what it is. That’s like Kareem will throw those, throw a shot on you, you know, it’ll look like the same thing but it won’t be the same thing. 

To me, the interesting part of this analogy is that, while Wynton is making an argument about the aesthetics and intelligence of jazz and basketball, which are directly comparable, there is one major difference between Abdul-Jabbar's playing and Monk's music, one that Wynton's description glosses over: Kareem is trying to win. When Kareem plays a shot that "look[s] like the same thing but it won't be the same thing," he is doing that to trick the opposing player into losing the game. When Monk plays a phrase that seems familiar but is made new and surprising by the way it sits in the time, no one loses, or is supposed to lose.

This brings us to the way that Wynton can frame jazz in an athletic, ultimately masculine and ultimately conservative way. Jazz hasn't been competitive in any meaningful way since the 1930s and 1940s, when "tenor battles" and "drum battles" were staged as publicity stunts. The sweaty histrionics of Buddy Rich were about winning, not about any "aesthetic proposition." Ethan Iverson speaks to this directly in his essay on Whiplash:

Back to the photos of Buddy, Tony, and Elvin at the top. These two photos don’t deserve the weight I’m going to give them now, but I just can’t resist. When I see those impeccably turned out devotional black masters posing with the sweating white athlete, my hackles begin to rise. It’s not just the drumming, it’s the whole relationship they were afforded to their work in the 20th century. Again, this is unfair. I’ve certainly seen Elvin Jones sweaty in a T-shirt with a towel around his neck after a gig! Still, my fear is that Whiplash slouches in as a sweaty white athlete and blocks our view from the devotional black masters.

Buddy Rich as the sweaty white athlete does block our view of the Black masters. However, the sweaty Black masters themselves can easily be twisted into a racist view of art as mere athleticism. A great example of this twisting can be found in Jack Kerouac's On the Road, a novel full of problematic depictions of non-white culture:

The tenorman jumped down from the platform and stood in the crowd, blowing around; his hat was over his eyes; somebody pushed it back for him. He just hauled back and stamped his foot and blew down a hoarse, laughing blast, and drew breath, and raised the horn and blew high, wide, and screaming in the air. Dean was directly in front of him with his face lowered to the bell of the horn, clapping his hands, pouring sweat on the man’s keys, and the man noticed and laughed in his horn a long quivering crazy laugh, and everybody else laughed and they rocked and rocked; and finally the tenorman decided to blow his top and crouched down and held a note in high C for a long time as everything else crashed along and the cries increased and I thought the cops would come swarming from the nearest precinct. Dean was in a trance. The tenorman’s eyes were fixed straight on him; he had a madman who not only understood but cared and wanted to understand more and much more than there was, and they began dueling for this; everything came out of the horn, no more phrases, just cries, cries, "Baugh" and down to "Beep!" and up to "EEEEE!" and down to clinkers and over to sideways-echoing horn-sounds. He tried everything, up, down, sideways, upside down, horizontal, thirty degrees, forty degrees, and finally he fell back in somebody’s arms and gave up and everybody pushed around and yelled, "Yes! Yes! He blowed that one!"(1)

This description calls to mind saxophonists like Illinois Jacquet, honking and screaming players who brought down the house with showstopper solos. Kerouac doesn't describe the music as intelligible, just as nonsense sounds employed in a "duel." The real-life Jacquet was an erudite musician who doubled on the bassoon(1), not simply a sweaty tenor machine. Jacquet speaks eloquently about the education of jazz musicians in Dizzy Gillespie's To Be or Not to Bop:

Working in bands, that was your college. If you played music, the big bands were your college.... And most of the people in the bands, the musicians, were college graduates or started out to be doctors and started playing music. But they were all educated musicians, mostly, in their fields. You got in a band, the discipline was there. The band itself was a school.... So when a youngster like me would join a band like Lionel Hampton or Basie, everybody was like professors.

Contrast this view of the jazz musician with Kerouac's! Likewise, the "cutting contest" of the type encouraged by promoters like Norman Granz is undercut by Sonny Rollins, who participated in one of the most famous tenor battles in jazz, Tenor Madness with John Coltrane in 1956. Interviewed earlier this year in the New York Times, Rollins said,

When I played with Coltrane, I had the impression — and back then it was true — that I was much more popular than him. I remember what Kamasi Washington said about “Tenor Madness”: “Sonny, you weren’t even really playing.” I wasn’t really playing. Coltrane was playing. I was only playing halfway, because I thought that I was the guy and that Coltrane was this young whippersnapper. That was my mind-set. It was immature.... I don’t want people to think that I’m saying, “Oh, wow, I could have played much better,” but that’s the story of “Tenor Madness.” My attitude on it wasn’t right.

For Rollins, the "tenor battle" or "cutting contest" mentality is "immature"; for him, competition and jockeying to win between artists is damaging to the art itself. (Tenor Madness was released in 1956. Tenor battles really only came back into vogue with the arrival of saxophonists like Joshua Redman, James Carter, and so on in the wake of Marsalis's fame in the 1990s, when the mid-1950s were back in vogue in the jazz world.)

To return to Marsalis's analysis of Monk and Abdul-Jabbar, then, we can see him working with two ideas that, historically, have been in opposition: first, that jazz and basketball are art forms created by intelligent artists; and second, that the goal of the artists in both forms is to compete and win, either with another artist or with the audience. In both views, the artist is unquestionably male.

For a (often unintentionally) revealing look at Marsalis's male world at its peak, check out Jazz in the Bittersweet Blues of Life, Carl Vigeland's awestruck account of Wynton's septet on tour, largely covering the period between 1989 and 1994, interspersed with passages by Marsalis himself. One passage calls to mind the Robert Glasper interview with Ethan Iverson that caused some controversy a couple of years ago. Speaking about women in the audience, Iverson said, "I guess that's one of the reasons to play, really." Glasper said, "I've seen what that does to the audience, playing that groove. I love making the audience feel that way. Getting back to women: women love that. They don't love a whole lot of soloing. When you hit that one groove and stay there, it's like musical clitoris. You're there, you stay on that groove, and the women's eyes close and they start to sway, going into a trance." Vigeland writes, "[E]verywhere you looked in that crowd there was another beautiful woman." Marsalis then writes:

And I'd be lying if I told you that beautiful women don't make you play better. Or try to play better.... Hell, we're from New Orleans. We understand picnics and parades. And sweet things. And the blues. And making love and the wangdang doodle dandy.... I like the tenderness of an uncertain kiss which innocently begins with a question mark but crescendos to an exclamation point.... Then. I am a man. I love the road. It's not an effort to play for people.... I want to go, every night, want to swing - hard - with the men in the band, with people. Willful participation with style and in the groove - that's swing. And once you feel it you got to get you some more.

I truly don't believe that when he said "I guess that's one of the reasons to play, really," Iverson was being intentionally misogynistic or sexist (Glasper is another matter). Rather, he was simply falling into a decades-old masculine, macho attitude about playing music. After all, the music is played to win - against an opponent, against an audience, against resistance from a woman. That's art as sport.

NOTES

(1) Kerouac describes the "sweaty white athlete," too, in the form of George Shearing:

And Shearing began to rock; a smile broke over his ecstatic face; he began to rock in the piano seat, back and forth, slowly at first, then the beat went up, and he began rocking fast, his left foot jumped up with every beat, his neck began to rock crookedly, he brought his face down to the keys, he pushed his hair back, his combed hair dissolved, he began to sweat. The music I picked up. The bass-player hunched over and socked it in, faster and faster, it seemed faster and faster, that’s all. Shearing began to play his chords; they rolled out of the piano in great rich showers, you’d think the man wouldn’t have time to line them up. They rolled and rolled like the sea. Folks yelled for him to "Go!" Dean was sweating; the sweat poured down his collar. "There he is! That’s him! Old God! Old God Shearing! Yes! Yes! Yes!" And Shearing was conscious of the madman behind him, he could hear every one of Dean’s gasps and imprecations, he could sense it though he couldn’t see. "That’s right!" Dean said. "Yes!" Shearing smiled; he rocked. Shearing rose from the piano, dripping with sweat; these were his great 1949 days before he became cool and commercial.

Gentlemen Prefer Brunettes #1: The Bakery Girl of Monceau

This is the first in a series of posts I'll be writing about John G. Cawelti's theory of the blonde/brunette dichotomy in the Western, and its application to various movies, TV shows, etc. The series's title comes from the titles of Anita Loos's two famous satirical novels: "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes," and "But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes." In Cawelti's theory, the formula is inverted - gentlemen prefer brunettes, but marry blondes.

Eric Rohmer was one of the great French directors to emerge from the 1960s and the Nouvelle Vague. Perhaps his most celebrated films are his six "moral tales," a set of films which all follow a common basic structure - "the story of a young man who meets up with a young girl or woman at a time when he's looking for another woman," to oversimplify using his own description of the first two tales in a 1971 interview in Film Quarterly. The first of the moral tales was La Boulangère de Monceau (1963), or The Bakery Girl of Monceau. The Criterion Collection provides a somewhat juicy blurb of the plot: "A law student... with a roving eye and a large appetite stuffs himself with sugary pastries daily in order to gain the affection of a pretty brunette who works in a quaint Paris bakery. But is he truly interested, or is she just a sweet diversion?" (Settle down, Criterion.)

In the same interview with Rohmer I quoted above, he says, "Contes Moraux doesn't really mean that there's a moral contained in them, even though... all the characters in these films act according to certain moral ideas that are fairly clearly worked out." Rohmer doesn't nail down what these moral ideas are. In fact, he says that "for all the characters... they [the ideas] are rather more vague, and morality is a very personal matter." However, by specifying that the characters in The Bakery Girl of Monceau are behaving in line with "certain moral ideas," but by not specifying what those ideas actually are, Rohmer invites us to try to figure out some of those ideas for ourselves.(1)

You may have noticed something in that Criterion blurb we read earlier - the word "brunette," which also appears in the title of this post. Well, this little analysis of The Bakery Girl of Monceau is the first of a series I'll be writing here examining an idea I'm really interested in - the blonde and brunette as signifiers of a specific view of morality. In The Six-Gun Mystique, a seminal work on the Western film, John G. Cawelti lays out "archetypical contrast between virginal blond and sexier but tainted brunette" thusly:

[There are] two different kinds of women in the Western. This dichotomy resembles the common nineteenth century novelistic dualism of blonde and brunette. The blonde, like Cooper's Alice in The Last of the Mohicans, represents genteel, pure femininity, while the brunette, like Cora in the same novel, symbolizes a more full-blooded, passionate and spontaneous nature, often slightly tainted by a mixture of blood or a dubious past. In the contemporary Western, this feminine duality shows up in the contrast between the schoolmarm and the dance-hall girl, or between the hero's Mexican or Indian mistress and the WASP girl he may ultimately marry. The dark girl is a feminine embodiment of the hero's savage, spontaneous side. She understands his deep passions, his savage code of honor and his need to use personal violence. The schoolmarm's civilized code of behavior rejects the passionate urges and the freedom of aggression which mark this side of the hero's character. When the hero becomes involved with the schoolmarm, the dark lady must be destroyed or abandoned, just as Cooper's Cora must die because her feelings are too passionate and spontaneous to be viable in the genteel world of Alice and Duncan Heyward.(2)

Linguist, philosopher and mustache delivery system Ferdinand de Saussure broke language up into three units: the sign, the signified, and the signifier. The signified is the abstract concept, represented by a word; the signifier is "the psychological imprint of the sound [of the word], the impression that it makes on our senses"; and the sign is the two together, the whole. In Cawelti's theory above, "blonde" is one concept, the signified; its signifiers are virginity, purity, gentility. "Brunette" is the other concept, the signified; its signifiers are savagery, spontaneity, danger, violence, sexuality.

With our signifiers clear, we can proceed with a consistent understanding of "blonde" and "brunette" as signs which we understand both as literal physical characteristics and as corresponding "psychological imprints" which carry (under the terms of the theory) moral weight.(3) It is this blonde/brunette dichotomy which, I feel, one can argue is one of the "moral ideas" underpinning The Bakery Girl of Monceau - both in the actions of its characters and the gaze of its director. I'll let Rohmer describe the plot of the film more fully (this is from the same 1971 interview):

[The Bakery Girl of Monceau] is about a boy who sees a girl in the street and falls in love with her but doesn't know how to become acquainted with her. He tries to follow her to find out where she lives, but loses track of her. So he makes up his mind to make a systematic search for her, and as he usually eats in a restaurant frequented by students he decides to go without dinner and use the time to look for her in the district round about. 

The young man who narrates the film, played by Barbet Schroeder, meets the blonde "girl in the street," Sylvie (Michèle Girardon), as she does her shopping. He is a law student, and she works in a gallery. They have never spoken - “I knew her only by sight,” he tells us. “Schmidt, my friend, urged me to act, but I was scared,” the young man says. Why? Because, he says, “[i]t wasn’t her style to get picked up in the street.” Sylvie performs routine adult tasks, like shopping, and walks to and from work with a purpose while the young man wanders aimlessly and agonizes over whether or not to talk to her.

How does Sylvie stack up against the blonde archetype outlined by Cawelti? In the young man's eyes, Sylvie, “carrying a basket, doing her shopping,” is a domestic, grown-up woman (despite his description of her as a "girl"). She is also a fantasy, an ideal - he knows nothing of her interests or goals, doesn't know where she lives, doesn't know anything about her background or her friends. All he knows is that she is pretty and she is grown up, holding a job, doing shopping, and having clear purpose and direction to her life. She is non-sexual, genteel, pure ("It wasn't her style to get picked up in the street").

The young man's immaturity in contrast to Sylvie is emphasized when, deciding impulsively to follow her, he suddenly and clumsily ducks behind a car to avoid her seeing him. The connotations of this childish game of hide and seek are then reinforced during their first actual conversation. In this interaction, following an accidental-or-not bump on the sidewalk, Sylvie is clearly in command, confidently responding to the young man, while the young man himself casts about wildly for what to say, seeming confused and timid. When he asks her for a date, she refuses, but says that they will undoubtedly bump into each other again.

Though the young man describes this as a "victory," he doesn't run into Sylvie again for three days, then a week. His initial optimism sprang from her open-ended refusal - in essence, no, not tonight, but ask me again next time. Sylvie's disappearance sets up a journey for our hero - the scenario implies that he is not ready to be with Sylvie yet, because he is still too immature. To attain the grown-up girlfriend, he has to grow up himself.

The brunette bakery girl Jacqueline (Claudine Soubrier) provides the young man with this opportunity. Let us return to Rohmer's plot summary (this will skip us ahead a bit here, but bear with me):

And as he gets hungry [on his patrols for Sylvie] he starts going into a baker's shop every day and buys some cakes to eat while he's exploring the area. He notices that the assistant in the shop is becoming interested in him, perhaps falling in love, and as he is getting a bit bored, he starts flirting with her. He gets caught up in the game he's playing with her and finally makes a date with her, just to see what will happen. 

At another point in this interview, Rohmer says that the characters in his moral tales "are not people who act without thinking about what they are doing. What matters is what they think about their behavior, rather than their behavior itself." However, the young man's relationship with Jacqueline is not an intellectual one. Rohmer's language above makes it clear that the young man is not interested in pursuing a serious relationship with the bakery girl - he is "bored," so he "gets caught up in the game he's playing with her." I would argue that the young man is not actually bored - instead, his ideal, Sylvie, is unattainable, so he looks for another way to express the desires that were previously directed towards Sylvie. Because the brunette Jacqueline is not the virginal ideal represented by the blonde Sylvie, however, the young man can express his desires in a less "civilized" and more dangerous way. To return to the Cawelti passage quoted earlier:

[T]he brunette... symbolizes a more full-blooded, passionate and spontaneous nature.... In the contemporary Western, this feminine duality shows up in the contrast between the schoolmarm and the dance-hall girl, or between the hero's Mexican or Indian mistress and the WASP girl he may ultimately marry. The dark girl is a feminine embodiment of the hero's savage, spontaneous side. She understands his deep passions, his savage code of honor and his need to use personal violence. The schoolmarm's civilized code of behavior rejects the passionate urges and the freedom of aggression which mark this side of the hero's character.

Let's unpack the pieces of Cawelti's theory that are especially applicable at this point in The Bakery Girl of Monceau. First, Cawelti reminds us of the signified in our brunette sign: "full-blooded, passionate and spontaneous." As we have seen, the young man's relationship with Sylvie and the characters of Sylvie and the young man themselves run counter to this - Sylvie is aloof, ironic, and detached, unwilling to break a prior plan to go on a date with the young man, while the young man himself agonizes over every move, second-guessing himself and hesitating endlessly.

Second, we have the "dark girl," in the person of Jacqueline, who is not only "spontaneous," but is the "embodiment of the hero's... spontaneous side" who "understands his deep passions." This aspect of Jacqueline's character is apparent from her first introduction, arguing with a man in a leather jacket who blows her a kiss as she says, "What an idiot!" This is no ironic, detached dance as in the young man's interaction with Sylvie on the sidewalk. When the young man asks for a cookie, Jacqueline walks up close to him, their hands grazing as she gets the cookie he indicates from the case. Unlike with Sylvie, who is either shown in a longer shot showing her head and torso or body, the camera lingers on Jacqueline's hands carrying the cookie, cutting off her head and emphasizing her breasts. Because the young man is in the bakery to purchase goods, and because Jacqueline is the one who will provide those goods, he does not agonize or dither over his choice of food or his request about taking it to go. The cookie itself is significant - rather than a relationship founded on a pure ideal, as with Sylvie, the young man's interactions with Jacqueline in the bakery live in the realm of the senses. We see this as their relationship develops - the glance of each often lingers on the other, they stand close together in the bakery, and when Jacqueline drops two cookies from the wrapping paper she holds her hand to her mouth, in surprise and dismay but also with a sexual, or at least sensual, undertone. When the young man pays for these two cookies, Rohmer shows us a close-up of his fingers counting the coins, and how his fingers touch Jacqueline's.

The young man's character development through this relationship with the bakery girl is the final piece of the theory we see here. In Cawelti's formulation, the dangerous relationship with the brunette does not keep the hero from having one with the blonde, but rather allows the hero to move on from the brunette to a successful relationship with the blonde ("the WASP girl he may ultimately marry") is possible. The young man is clear to us, if not Jacqueline, that the relationship in the bakery is a dead end. "It didn't take long to see the pretty bakery girl liked me," he says, "Call it vanity if you will, but the fact that a girl liked me seemed natural. And since she wasn't really my type, and Sylvie alone, so superior, held my thoughts - yes, it was because I was thinking of Sylvie that I accepted the advances... of the bakery girl." The young man has a confidence in his power over women we have not previously seen in his interactions with or monologues about Sylvie, and he makes it clear that despite his obvious flirtation with Jacqueline - despite his actual acceptance of her advances, in fact - he has reserved his "love," a more pure and "civilized" feeling, for Sylvie. His relationship with Jacqueline does not in the least affect his sense of himself as saving himself for Sylvie.

If, as Cawelti writes, "The schoolmarm's civilized code of behavior rejects the passionate urges and the freedom of aggression which mark this side of the hero's character," then it makes sense that the hero would need to get these traits out of his system, as it were, before embarking on a more lasting, "civilized" relationship. In The Bakery Girl of Monceau, this is established clearly when Sylvie rejects the young man's first advances. He is still too childish, too immature, too unsure of himself and too disconnected from his ability to act decisively. His relationship with Jacqueline is not only transactional about cookies - Jacqueline is also providing the young man with character development so that he can become more adult.

We see this sensual/sexual relationship with the bakery girl develop, first through one cookie, then two, then an entire armful of pastries. First he eats his cookies offscreen; then, in front of us; finally, with Jacqueline herself. At last, he makes the logical move (they are getting closer and close, after all) from pastries to Jacqueline. Running into her on the street, he pulls her into a side street and asks for a date. In contrast to the earlier scene where he asks Sylvie for a date - in the middle of a crowded sidewalk, in the light, surrounded by people and noise, with the young man unbalanced by his feelings and everything around him - this scene takes place in partial shadow, with no one else around. The camera angle places the young man above Jacqueline, and his hand is against the wall as he leans over her.

When the bakery girl is reluctant to agree on the date, he reaches out for her hand and holds it. His manner of speaking and his body language almost suggest that of a parent speaking with a shy or recalcitrant child. The young man does not see the bakery girl as a woman, certainly not as an object of his love like the professional and polished Sylvie. Instead, she is young, with a temporary job in a bakery - someone he can use to advance his own sense of self and then move on from. He almost literally strong-arms her into agreeing to the date. Photo #3 at the start of this post shows how he places both his hands firmly on her shoulders, close to her neck, appearing to lean his weight on her as he asks if she will go with him to the movies on Saturday; when she hesitates again, he caresses her neck, pinching her skin and telling her what time and where they will meet. When she asks if she needs to dress up, he says, "No, you're fine as you are." Jacqueline has no agency in this scene - she doesn't need to dress up, because she is not the reason the young man wants the date. "Call it vanity if you will" - I wouldn't call his pursuit of Jacqueline vanity, but it is completely self-absorbed and for his own benefit. He has already put aside his love for Sylvie; Jacqueline serves only to help him process the feelings and desires that have no place in those more genteel interactions to prepare him for that more pure and civilized relationship. And as Rohmer himself indicates, the young man makes his date with Jacqueline "just to see what will happen," describing it as a flippant gesture, one which never takes Jacqueline's feelings into account.

Ultimately, the date with the bakery girl never happens.(4) At the end of the film, the young man has traded his light-colored suit for a more professional, adult, dark one (see the last photo at the start of this post). Rohmer again:

[J]ust as he's going to meet [Jacqueline for their date], he comes across the first girl, the one he'd seen right at the beginning of the story, who lives just opposite the baker's but had sprained her ankle and couldn't go out, which is why he hadn't seen her. She had seen him go in there every day, but, thinking that he knew where she lived, she assumed that he just went in there so that she would notice him. She doesn't know anything about the girl in the bakery.

As we learn about Sylvie's injury, we see that the young man's leg is placed in front of his body, close to Sylvie. He is confident, collected. Now it is Sylvie who has been watching him, unable to act, wondering what he was thinking. They go on their own date, ready to embark on their relationship as hero and heroine, while the bakery girl disappears. When the young man and Sylvie go into the bakery together - to buy a baguette, not childish cookies - she is nowhere to be seen. She is erased. As Cawelti writes, "When the hero becomes involved with the schoolmarm, the dark lady must be destroyed or abandoned." In The Bakery Girl of Monceau, the "dark lady" is not only abandoned as a consequence of a relationship with the blonde - she is abandoned as a prerequisite to that relationship. Only by having and then abandoning his relationship with the dangerous, sexual Jacqueline can the young man be adequately prepared to begin a relationship with the genteel and pure Sylvie. 

In the 1971 interview, Rohmer concludes his description of The Bakery Girl of Monceau by saying, "It's a very slight story, an anecdote really." It is a very slight story, though a fairly nasty one. Dave Kehr noted in the New York Times that the film "display[s] an appreciation for male cruelty and female passive-aggression," but it doesn't, really - just male cruelty. Passive-aggression implies agency, and while Sylvie undoubtedly has more agency than the bakery girl, both are simply tools that the film uses to construct its hero, tools that have deep roots in our conception of the blonde and brunette, the dark and the light, and the good and the bad in love and lust.

Stay tuned for the next installment of Gentlemen Prefer Brunettes: Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 thriller Vertigo.

NOTES

(1) And here, to be safe, is the disclaimer I would put on any textual analysis - I plan to argue that my diagnosis and analysis of some of the moral ideas that might be underpinning this film are both valid, but I am not going to argue that they were intended by Rohmer or are exclusive of other interpretations.

(2) Cawelti, The Six-Gun Mystique, 75-76. I'm quoting Cawelti's description of this duality at length here because I will be returning to it in each subsequent edition of the Gentlemen Prefer Brunettes series.

(3) I am sure someone who understands Saussure better than I do could say that this breakdown of the sign, signified, and signifier is overly simplistic, or maybe even wrong. Seeing as how the biggest effect most of the critical theory I learned in grad school had on me was messing up my hair as it flew overhead, they'd probably be right. However, I think that Saussure's terms (as I've laid them out, at least - you can read Saussure's original explanation here) are incredibly useful for understanding what we do when we find, interpret, and explain motifs and symbols in texts, and by golly I will continue using them to lay out that process whether or not they have fuller meanings in other contexts. Don't @ me, Saussure nerds. 

(4) While this is because the young man encounters Sylvie again, he tells us that he almost blew off the bakery girl anyway, only going because "none of my friends was around." Great guy.