Functional clothing: dream of the invisibility cloak

A friend told us that she had caught a handsome Frenchman. When she unpacked him at home, it turned out that his underwear had holes in it. We didn’t find out whether she was able to exchange it.

A snob will draw the lesson from this story that, like a Phileas Fogg or a James Bond, the gentleman is a gentleman even in extreme situations, looks half-naked as if he were dressed and even at 50 degrees in the jungle of Sumatra he looks like a man. But that would be silly.

In reality, the story is a fable that tells us that clothing can do two things: show and hide. The young man presented himself in the best possible light and hid the fact that after his shirt and trousers he had already run out of change. Yes, he probably invested everything in the outer shell and hoped the unveiling would take place in the dark. But he was subjected to a cruel inspection and rags were found under the linen.

However, it is not absolutely necessary to undress a person in order to see what they want to hide with their clothing. Because every showing is also a hiding, every hiding is a showing. It is well known that the poor hide the fact that they are poor by wearing fake Versace. And the rich hide the fact that they are rich by wearing shabby corduroy pants. And in general, everyone who appears clothed hides the fact that they are fat, crooked, and often enough hairy, bulging, limp, or pimply animals.

So far the matter is clear. But to what extent is hiding also a showing? Well, by hiding something, it reveals itself as unpresentable. It doesn’t have to be noticeable at first, but experience teaches that everything that someone wants to hide will show up at some point. In previous eras of fashion, everyone wanted to be fat and hid their thinness by stuffing themselves. Today, in self-optimized late capitalism, everyone wants to be fit and thin and drapes themselves in loose, dark fabrics that hide their corpulence as much as possible. The connoisseur not only notices this immediately, she can already see from the cut, the shoulder pads, the super thick soles, the colors that drown out everything, that this or that person is extremely uncomfortable with their body and likes it bigger, smaller, lighter, darker , rounder, rougher, more muscular, more delicate, more feminine, more masculine than she actually is. »What a farce. It’s like escaping your body,” one might complain. But that would be stupid, and not just because bodies are merely social fictions.

Because let’s take a look at those who don’t think about these things, who don’t want to change their bodies, their status or their gender and simply are the way they are. Let’s look at the cyclists in their functional clothing. They think they are normal and inconspicuous, but are actually more intrusive than any dressed-up madam who is just stumbling to the opera ball. With these functionalists, the trekking pants sag and the down jacket crunches, the T-shirt doesn’t quite cover the stomach, the chemical fibers give off sweat, to make matters worse, dad has put on a hat with a Bundeswehr emblem, and mom, of course, wears Birkenstocks. Deep melancholy takes over at this sight. But why? No, no, not because functional clothing denies eroticism. We don’t even want to finish the thought. The sight is depressing because he doesn’t want to be one. The functional clothing tells us: »We are equipped against rain, against hail, against heat, against sun and, above all, against stares. We wear clothes because it’s practical and not to look like anything. We’re fine, look elsewhere.”

Functional clothing is a kind of invisibility cloak that has lost its magic. She doesn’t count on passers-by, pedestrians and subway passengers who, before they can immerse themselves in their cell phones or hide behind a flower pot, have to look at the functionally dressed family who are currently on their trip to the surrounding area. Functional clothing attempts the impossible: it wants to hide itself by showing itself. That’s why it’s so bulky.

I, on the other hand, dream of complete concealment, of the invisibility cap prêt-à-porter. I think it would be possible like this: Choose the fashion from the year before last, not from the last year, nor from the year before that. Avoid anything flashy, but also anything purely functional. Be it the “Man at C&A” that the Specials sang about, or because of me, the Woman, the last person in any case, all in gray, who, the song goes on to say, is waiting for nuclear war and is waiting before the catastrophe occurs, dissolves itself. This would have to be the apotheosis of fashion, its final entry into time. Has fashion ever wanted anything different? And it would somehow be capable of fighting.