“Sources based on secondary interpretation inevitably carry with them the dangers of biased or misrepresentation. The inherent moralism and censure of monastic sources, for example, constructs a history of dress based on exaggeration and outrage; whilst literary sources such as the widely-used Chaucer can ten towards caricature for comedic effect, or a sense of broadness and lack of historical specificity in their appropriation of folk traditions and earlier literary forms.”
-Christopher Breward in "The Culture of Fashion"
Christopher Breward's quote seemed like an okay way to start to talk about this cowboy-like outfit that I was wearing the other day. First of all, lets talk about the belt before the quote. You know when you buy something and you just can't stop wearing it with everything? It matches with your entire wardrobe. You can't imagine your life before this certain piece of clothes. You need it everyday. Around this time your friends, the good ones, the honest ones, tell you you need to chill the fuck out with wearing that thing everyday. That's what's happening with this belt and I right now. We're in a messy love affair. I want it on me all the time.
The thing about this belt is that is a kind of cowboy belt, but its Ralph Lauren, so somehow it looks like it belongs on any outfits that feels really American. All of this, of course, seriously, of course, is really silly, but that's what Christopher Breward was talking about. We border of parody of other times with our clothes sometimes, we appropriate some old folklore, like cowboys, and this broadness, this lack of specificity is how we draw our own characatures. Our outfits everyday, particularly mine lets not kid ourselves, are borderline sometimes for comedic effect. Our dress is secondary interpretation of a broad history, biased, barely represented at all so that we can tell our own history, kind of like me and the cowboy belt.
