Marginalia

We went to the Chap Olympiad last Saturday, and I’ll write a bit more about the event itself some other time. Ms Formerly Aldgate had been before, but it was my first venture there.

A friend posted a link on Facebook to this very annoyed blogpost by Ms Redlegsinsoho, justifying the event and the antics of the people who attend it against various critics. I think she gets a little intemperate and, as is the manner of these things, edges into the sort of intolerance she herself has a go at, especially as I couldn’t find much online which is particularly hostile towards the Olympiad or Chappism in general. The one exception is this vile, angry article in Vice, but then you don’t go to Vice for anything well-considered or understanding and its contributors toe a dedicated line in mock-fury.

Nevertheless, Goths, Vintagers and Anglo-Catholics all know what it’s like to be insulted for their interest in certain forms of dress. I will leave aside the last case for the time being, as its context is a self-consciously ideological one which separates it from a mere fashion subculture.

Or does it? Those subcultures do each carry a sort of ideological gloss. For Goths, that ideology can be expressed in very succinct terms as ‘Life’s a drama: let’s dress up’. I haven’t done as much thinking about the ideological implications of the Vintage scene, but they are there: you can’t flick through very far the pages of The Chap without becoming aware that there is a definite agenda in favour of tradition, politeness, decorum and formality. I suppose you might sum it up as ‘The past can teach us stuff: let’s dress up’. Both subcultures share an assumption that the way you look encodes and declares these basic ideas. Both are also complicated by a knowing self-awareness that there are ambiguities in their positions, and both use camp and over-the-top humour to defuse the ambiguity: for Goths, the ambiguity is to do with the dangers of melancholy, romanticism, self-involvement and deathliness, and for Vintagers it’s the negative elements of the past whose positive lessons they want to draw on.

In both subcultures, too, there is a privileging of the idea of beauty and a commitment to beautiful things, even if they find beauty in different places. You could argue (as society once assumed) that meticulous care of one’s appearance rubs off in the form of care for other matters – the feelings and needs of other people, a concern to do work well, respect for one’s surroundings; that’s definitely what Chappism argues, and the idea even finds a place in Goth (read Jillian Venters’s writings on the matter). An old-fashioned sort of Christian thinker might argue that beauty elevates the soul and, paradoxical though it may seem in the case of the Goth world, a concern for beauty is connected to a joyousness about life, provided it remains light-hearted and full of gratitude rather than censoriousness.

Non-subcultural people looking at these ludicrously attired individuals can respond negatively to the implied criticism of themselves that they see embodied before them. If these people are so concerned to distinguish themselves from me and others like me, it must be because they think they’re better than me and want me to know about it. And very often there is some justification for this: I have come across (thankfully indirectly) Goths who contemptuously use the horrible words ‘norms’ and ‘mundanes’ for non-Goths, while arch criticism of non-Chappish dress is what keeps The Chap going. But as always happens, these mutual criticisms chase each other round, using each other as the justification for an escalating cycle of contempt and misunderstanding, based on what each party thinks the other thinks.

The truth is that ‘Life’s a drama’, ‘The past can teach us stuff’, and ‘Beauty is good’ are pretty unexceptionable ideas which most people can happily subscribe to: it’s just that not everyone chooses to devote their time and resources to expressing those ideas in what they look like and the things they do. The fact that some people do and some don’t doesn’t give either group any reason casually to despise the other when they meet them. Because a person hasn’t dedicated a good portion of their lives to symbolising and ritualising these basic ideas doesn’t mean that they necessarily have a superficial view of existence, disdain everything about the past, or are indifferent to beauty, although they may exhibit all of those traits. Conversely, subcultural participants may equally pay no more than lip-service, or not even that, to the ideals of beauty, creativity or civility their particular fashion embodies, no matter what they look like, as neither a Darkangel dress nor a tweed three-piece proves that its owner is not an idiot. I can vouch for the truth of both these statements.

A subcultural participant meeting someone who isn’t might despise them for not coming up to their standards, or they might assume that they had chosen to devote their limited resources to something else equally life-enhancing; a ‘normal’ person meeting a subcultural participant might choose to resent their pretentiousness and elitism, or appreciate their attention to the task of increasing the general gaiety of the world. Either way, we ought to presume the best of other people and treat them accordingly, and take an interest in them, until they demonstrate that we are wrong. This utterly banal and obvious advice ought not to need stating, but it

clearly does.