Casualties

The seasonal rite of preening and sniping known as Fashion Week sashays out of New York today, trailing press clippings in its wake, yet it comes and goes at a time when the dictates of fashion itself seem to matter hardly at all to the average American.

It wasn't always thus. Once upon a time the nation -- and, some said, even the stock market -- hung on news of whether hemlines were rising or falling. Presidents and their wives set fashion trends. Little boys had "school pants." Americans were thin.

This summer's fashion favorites for women were flip-flops, which finally invaded the office, and sweatpants or shorts with words like "JUICY" lettered bluntly across the derriere. In the workplace, suit remains firmly established as a term of derision, as in "the suits." Straight American men, meanwhile, are presumed to be so hopelessly mired in slovenliness that a gay SWAT team is required to provide shock therapy.

Although New York magazine suggests in its fall fashion issue that "glamour is back in a big way," one would be hard-pressed to find any evidence in the rest of the country. In their velour sweats and bulbous track shoes, Americans west of the Hudson River (and a good many on this side as well) are arguably less glamorous today than at any time since frontier days.

In fiscal 2002, according to NPD Group, a consulting firm, sales of tailored clothing such as business suits came to $18 billion, compared with $38 billion for "active sportswear," a category that includes such apparel as warm-up suits. It should surprise no one that the tailored category is shrinking while the active one is expanding like our collective waistline. In the words of NPD's chief industry analyst, Marshal Cohen, "consumers today are thumbing their nose at fashion."

One reason is that Americans and their clothing have been getting more casual for decades, a trend whose intensification in recent years has seemed, at times, to subsume fashion itself. Casual Friday has become, in many offices, Casual Monday-Through-Friday. Visible tattoos are no longer taboo (to say nothing of piercings). And even fashion designers are often seen in the T-shirts and jeans the rest of us wear to the mall.

This isn't all bad. Casual clothes express a more relaxed social system, and the democratization of slovenliness is democratization nonetheless, even if dressing down is now, oddly, itself a sign of status. On the other hand, it's hard not to associate lower standards of dress with lower standards generally, especially in public behavior. That loudmouth at the movie theater is unlikely to be wearing a classic seersucker suit.

And visually, it's awful. Anne Hollander, whose books include "Sex and Suits," says we've settled on "a sandbox aesthetic" of sloppy comfort, a kind of camouflage that disdains to make distinctions among particular places or events, whether school, opera or jury duty. The new "classics" -- sweats, sneakers and jeans -- persist year after year, regardless of what designers are showing.

How far we have fallen. Photographs of day baseball games in the 1950s show ballparks full of men in dress shirts and loosened ties, their suit coats laid aside for the afternoon. Movie stars and clothing designers in those days epitomized glamour. How did the nation of Jacqueline Kennedy and Fred Astaire reach today's pass?

Susan B. Kaiser, a professor of both clothing and gender studies at the University of California-Davis, points to the 1960s, which not only exploded the more formal styles but opened fashion to a wider array of influences. "The looks aren't prescribed any more in the same way," Ms. Kaiser said by e-mail. "And the sources of inspiration, design and production are more scattered (i.e., not just Parisian runways, but also from the streets, subcultures, etc.)."

Hip-hop, for instance, has turned around young men's baseball caps and added yards to their pants. Hip-hop itself was part of the rise of youth culture. "We didn't want to look grown up," says Ms. Hollander, adding that "social institutions went along. All the dress codes vanished." Elementary schools that once required neckties might today recommend sneakers for playground safety. The workplace embraced khakis. The main thing was not to be mistaken for the man in the gray flannel suit.

Purple velour was one way to avoid that. "We started the velour tracksuits," boasts Gela Nash-Taylor, co-founder of Juicy Couture, a Southern California unit of Liz Claiborne Inc. that has put its name on more than a few fashionable derrieres. Juicy's upscale sweats, jeans and tops remain staples for Hollywood celebrities whose casual style helped validate sartorial sloth for the rest of us.

But maybe the best answer to "Why casual, why now?" has less to do with democracy and celebrity than with calories and French fries. Casual clothing has helped bridge the growing difference in body size between slender fashionistas and the ever-fleshier hoi polloi. In 1985, the top-selling women's size was eight, but by 2002 it was a voluminous 14. Today nearly two-thirds of Americans are overweight, yet the less we exercise, the more sneakers and sweats we seem to buy. This vogue for athletic wear among couch potatoes may at least be a sign of increasing gender equality, even if men's and women's outfits seem to be converging into a single androgynous uniform of carelessness.

That Americans have largely turned their backs on fashion doesn't mean there are no fashions, of course. There is the fashion among young women, for instance, of wearing pajama bottoms in public. But casualness in general seems to have acquired what they call in the dot-com business "stickiness." Trends come and go, says Mr. Cohen, but "the casualization of America is not a trend. It's a lifestyle."

Nowadays, too, more Americans live in warmer climates. The area roughly below the 37th parallel -- from North Carolina to Southern California -- was home to 40% of Americans in 2000, up from just 28% in 1950. The Sun Belt's informality and warmer temperatures, which make tank tops and flip-flops that much more inviting, have probably nudged all of us toward a more fashion-free America.

Ms. Hollander, as a historian who has seen a good deal come and go, expresses confidence that the suit -- "a complete envelope for the body," rich in sexual power and aesthetic integrity -- will rise again. But its resurrection is not on the horizon, and the Fab Five of "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" are probably not, by themselves, enough to get more than a few Americans dressing better. "Fashion is a business," says Lloyd Boston, a former vice president at Tommy Hilfiger who is now a TV style guru. "We've got to sell people on dressing up again, the same way we sold them on going grunge 10 years ago." Sounds like a hard sell.

Mr. Akst, a business columnist and novelist, lives in Tivoli, N.Y.

Updated September 19, 2003