Back in the days when Americans were flying frequently—which was not so long ago—did you notice how our fellow citizens dressed for travel? An awful lot of them showed up at the airport in their jammies, sometimes even clutching pillows. This told me something: there was no longer any distinction in our society between being in a public place and being in the family room at home. Now it was all just one big mish-mash of being where you happen to be in whatever way you want to be there.
Perhaps the slovenly costumes in airports were a subconscious reaction to being treated like hostages rather than customers by the airlines—that’s how you dress if you’ve been stripped of your dignity. But surely it also had to do more generally with the condition of public space in our country, which had degenerated into little more than one big demolition derby from sea to shining sea. Much of the time spent outside the house, Americans were in their cars, that is, in little mobile privacy pods, traversing public space as rapidly as possible, say the commercial highway strip, which had little meaning, except as a sort of psychological punishment. Hence, just about every place outside the home, except wild nature, took on some repellant quality.
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Having abandoned our old towns with their walkable Main Streets for the artificial wilderness of suburbia, where cars tyrannized the scene entirely, private space became aggrandized while public space was diminished—along with behavior associated with it. American houses had more bathrooms per inhabitant than any other culture, not to mention the evolution of the master bedroom to master spa, with giant Jacuzzis, elliptical trainers, and theater-grade flat-screens. The exorbitant luxury was out of this world. But outside that private bubble everything else was just a parking lot, a gray, meaningless void. Why should Americans care about their personal presentation in public places when they had none worth being in?
By contrast, in European cities daily life was still organized cognitively pretty much the old way, with very clear semiotics denoting a sharp distinction between what is public and private. Living quarters might be comparatively meager in European cities, but an abundance of cafes, bistros, and other gathering places served as public living rooms, some of them quite luxurious. So, the result was democratizing: luxury for all, at the cost of a cup of coffee. And all of this civic infrastructure was assembled in an armature of streets that were psychologically rewarding to spend time in, along with excellently designed parks, large and small, woven in through that fabric of streets and blocks.
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Americans who ventured over to Europe in the late 20th century were in for a shock. Parisians, for instance, seemed to have a very firm sense of the difference between being home and being in the museum. They presented themselves accordingly in public, in quite formal costume: skirts and dresses for women and tailored suits for men. American tourists in their short pants and Star Wars T-shirts looked like six-year-olds to them. No wonder Americans complained that Parisians condescended to them.
I was similarly conditioned to a strict sense of the public and private growing up in a Manhattan apartment in the 1950s and ’60s. I was wearing a tie regularly as a teenager. Even beatniks back then wore sportjackets in the Greenwich Village cafes. Going about among a cavalcade of strangers in the streets of New York one was obliged to construct a physical persona, starting with clothing, that made a legible statement about one’s role in society, without revealing too much so as to compromise the dignity of still being a private person in a crowd. Costume was both a kind of armor against all the friction of life lived shoulder-to-shoulder with strangers, and a signal that you were a trustworthy member of that society, safe to be around.
