The Politics Of Style

There's nothing funnier than someone trying to out-snob the elite. Or sadder than someone slamming the lower classes for wanting nice things. Megan McArdle:

I’ve always had a sneaking fondness for Lilly Pulitzer’s clothes. Not to wear, mind you, because they are ugly as sin; I have never seen a woman wearing Lilly Pulitzer who would not have looked better in a ratty flannel bathrobe. But the ugliness is rather the point. Here you have an entire clothing line that exists to signal that the wearer is so young and comely, or so comfortable in her social status, that she does not need to bother finding attractive garb, and instead can clomp around in a brightly colored bag. There’s a sort of grandeur to the whole project.

Tell that to Jackie Kennedy. She wore a print designed by her good friend Lily Pulitzer and it was off to the races for Pulitzer's brightly colored Palm  Beach attire. And frankly my dear, Megan McArdle is not one to talk when it comes to dresses.

So I should not have been surprised that the company decided to partner with Target. After all, for the stated purpose, Lilly Pulitzer for Target is even better than the original: You care so little about what you wear that you bought the cheapest possible version rather than laying out $200 to look like you swiped the slipcovers from the lobby of a genteelly declining Florida motel.

The Target customers bought the dresses and products for the same reasons McArdle buys her favorite products-to be like the rich. Who knows, they might even think they are pretty.

What’s all wrong is the people who mobbed Target’s stores and crashed the website in a desperate attempt to get their hands on some cut-rate clothes. Lilly Pulitzer is, as Robin Givhan notes, the embodiment of the preppy fashion ethos. And if that ethos could be written in words rather than in the hearts of every man who gleefully pulls out his Nantucket reds and his ridiculous hats come Memorial Day, it would go like this: “I don’t care enough about anyone’s opinion to dress well.”

Of course, as with many elitist customs, it is not the truth of the proposition that matters, only the appearance of it. I was in high school during the Great Preppy Craze of the 1980s, and I can attest firsthand that the people who pulled it off most successfully put an enormous amount of thought and effort into looking as if they had just rolled out of bed that way. But here's one thing we do know: You cannot successfully claim not to care if you were up at dawn, queuing in front of a big box store or doing stretching exercises with your keyboarding fingers in order to get your hands on some clothes. Actually wearing Target’s Lilly Pulitzer line, therefore, signals the exact opposite of what it is supposed to.

The poors can buy cheaper Pulitzers in the attempt to look rich and fashionable but it'll never work, McArdle sneers. She was around real rich kids and their preppy clothes and knows that wanna-bes who ape the rich are to laugh. It's not like she buys the most trendy products she can afford.

The preppy craze was around in the 70s as well, by the way. The wealthier girls in my high school bought their bags and shoes at Papagallo and wore pastel Lacoste shirts and khaki skirts with their penny loafers. The Official Preppy Handbook, a satirical look at the old-money phenomenon, came out in 1980. (All of these kids were highly groomed; they did not look like they just rolled out of bed.)

There’s an economics lesson in here somewhere. Signaling is one of the most fascinating and elusive things that economists study, precisely because signals can be so fragile. Send too strong a signal and it can actually backfire, like a politician who tries hard to show voters that he shares their values and instead convinces them that he’s a flip-flopper and therefore can’t be trusted. Or a shopper who tries to signal devil-may-care insouciance by storming the racks at Target.

Losers. Where are sumptuary laws when you need them?