Textile texts: Fashion and desperation: Show your feet

The author’s visit to a clothing store ideally goes like this: he decides which items of clothing he wants to buy and what they should look like (preferably like the discarded ones they are supposed to replace); He enters the store, walks purposefully from one department that is relevant to him to the next, avoids any salespeople waiting for service so that they don’t bother him with their “Can I help you?” (if salespeople need to help, the customer gets in touch, that’s why being available to them but not proactively offering help); He collects the appropriate pieces if available, tries on some of them if necessary, goes to the cash register with what he wants, pays and leaves the shop. If everything goes well, the whole process will take no more than half an hour.

Despite this – or perhaps because of this – mishaps sometimes occur that are only noticed afterwards. Recently, instead of the desired ten pairs of ankle-length socks, people accidentally bought sockettes, those baby-like narrow-gauge socks that look like insoles that you use when trying on shoes in the store and that almost everyone under 60 wears voluntarily these days. Of course, the bad purchase could have been avoided by paying attention, but unlike before, there are now a dozen socks, stockings and underwear corners in clothing stores that make the search time-consuming and annoying. Therefore, the goods were not exchanged (annoying and time-consuming), but they are used until they wear out.

The fashionable indifference, which the described purchase testifies to and which the author calls himself – unlike others – clothing pragmatism, is clearly evident in the way he deals with socks and stockings. Basically, anything below the knees on the clothed man who appears is not that important. Shoes only attract negative attention when they are missing, socks only when they are white, and men almost never ask themselves whether socks and shoes go together. Men only need one pair of shoes, according to an episode of the “Harald Schmidt Show,” in which a visit to the clothing store is reenacted: When it is worn out, it is replaced by the next one.

Despite some fashionable sprucing up of the male social character, which occasion which shoes are suitable for is still a women’s question; When men wear sneakers with suit pants for their graduation, wedding or promotion, it’s not a break in style, it’s punk. Such self-neglect comes to the socks themselves: If they have holes, unlike pants with holes, it is not considered cool, but rather the norm.

Anyone who throws away socks simply because they have holes in them is either a picky person or a wasteful person. The socks are also not changed every day, because when you go out among people you wear shoes that contain the odor from the socks.

A whole mythology develops around women’s stockings – they can emphasize the sensuality of the part of the body they cover, especially in the form of the knee-high stocking, which has become anachronistic today outside of hipster circles. Men for whom their stockings are more than functional clothing, on the other hand, appear as narcissistic, transvestite or awkward.

In her study “Fashion, School of Women,” published in 2007, Hannelore Schlaffer examined the reasons for the humiliation of men in fashion. According to Schlaffer, the features that distinguish female fashion from the banality of male civilian clothing are due to the transposition of male servants’ and work clothing into the freedom of purpose of female dress: vests, skirts, hats that were bold on women in their respective eras, which appeared exquisite or erotic, were previously part of male functional and standard clothing, for example for servants, soldiers or state officials.

Knee-highs, tights and garters were also part of the class-specific clothing of nobles, officers and servants between the 16th and 19th centuries, before they became an autonomous part of female fashion, freed from their socially distinctive purpose. The fact that such types of legwear are now given back to men without a purpose and without any memory of their origins and made culturally accessible to them does not change this depotentiation: a confident, spontaneous, playful and serious handling of such accessories is only possible for women; for men it is almost impossible inevitably in a non-serious, puppet-like manner.

“Show me your feet, show me your shoes, and watch the hard-working washerwomen,” is the refrain of a children’s song that was popular in the second half of the 19th century, and which resonates with experiences from the military world where the young men go every morning had to demonstrate that their footwear was properly maintained. But the point there is that the men who are asked to look at the washerwomen instead of their shoes if they want to be smart men should take care of the functionality of their shoes instead of delighting in their beauty . Something of this recommended habitus still resonates today in the carelessness with which they ignore the clothing on their feet.