Planet Bahá'í

Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.

Oscar Wilde

The seventh Glad-Tidings

The choice of clothing and the cut of the beard and its dressing are left to the discretion of men. But beware, O people, lest ye make yourselves the playthings of the ignorant.

(Bahá'u'lláh, "Bisharat" ["Glad-Tidings"], Tablets of Bahá'u'lláh, p. 23)

Recently we watched the film The Devil Wears Prada, a sly comedy in which an eager graduate of Northwestern University's renowned Medill School of Journalism (played by Anne Hathaway) goes to New York to pursue a career, landing her first job with an upscale fashion magazine.  Her boss, played by Meryl Streep, by turns bullies and seduces her into a more glamorous way of life, until finally the heroine's fiancée barely recognizes her.  Just in the nick of time, she realizes what's happening, quits her job, dons her accustomed Midwestern college garb, and becomes herself again.  The movie (and presumably the book it's based on, although I've never read it) romps gleefully in the realm explored by the poet Alexander Pope when he penned his "Essay on Man", with the famous lines, "Worth makes the man, and want of it the fellow./The rest is all but leather or prunella." (Epistle IV, VI).  Shakespeare, too, remarked on the distinction between inward realities and outward appearances when, in Hamlet, he made Polonius remind his son Laertes, "The apparel oft proclaim the man", we have to remember that Polonius was also "a good actor"—a fool fit to become the king's counselor by his glibness at playing roles.  (Politics hasn't changed much since the sixteenth century!)

For a long time now I've liked the two quotes with which I've led this article.  Oscar Wilde (who—and he probably would have been the first to appreciate the irony—appears in all the photographs I've ever seen of him to be a specimen of sartorial elegance) hit the nail square on the head.  (My example: the current fad for jeans cut so low one's, um, patootie is in danger of frostbite.)  And Bahá'u'lláh doesn't take on particular sorts of clothing for being overly revealing, immodest, etc., but warns us against making ourselves the playthings of the ignorant.  Whatever does that mean?

Well, of course, I imagine that to wear overly revealing, immodest, etc., clothing would be to attract the wrong type of attention and thus make oneself the plaything of the ignorant.  But I suspect that Bahá'u'lláh was also, in this passage, encouraging us to buck trends.  Consider this progression:  when I was a girl, a certain color would be "in" for the season—maybe green, maybe peach.  And there were designers, of course, but ordinary mortals couldn't afford to dress in Chanel and St.Laurent styles every day.  In the Eighties, the great designer boom began, and soon you couldn't find anything to wear that didn't have someone else's name prominently imprinted upon it.  Somewhere along the line, the trends finished trickling down into every aspect of life, so that now we have designer furniture in designer colors that you can sit upon while wearing your designer clothing and watching TV shows about designers.

Did something go wrong somewhere?  Just a couple of hundred years ago, men and women had a lot more say in what they wore, ate, watched, and drank.  These days everyone seems content to allow designers of every stripe to dictate each moment of their existence.  And, because it's intolerable ugliness, it must be continually changed, renewed, and . . . wait a minute, someone's getting rich from all this.  And it isn't you or me.

Playthings of the ignorant?

I'm not saying that fashion designers shouldn't be allowed to live.  And I'm not saying that we shouldn't be willing to buy their creations, occasionally.  But to say that we need forty pairs of shoes, or a thousand-dollar wedding dress, or we need the latest style, or the latest color—by doing so, aren't we allowing ourselves to be used by someone, or something?  Aren't we becoming a victim of corporate greed?  Haven't we, somewhere along the line, surrendered our own judgment, or abdicated our power to say, "I'm not going to wear jeans that leave my rump hanging out; I'm not going to wear unflattering colors; I'm not going to have a haircut that makes me look like an escapee from a cornfield"?

Personally, I don't think we should have to do that.  But when you go to the store and look around, increasingly what you find is what gets sent down the pipeline.  I make a fair amount of my own clothing, and even so it's difficult to find fabric and patterns that don't have some designer's name plastered all over them.  Two hundred years ago women (and men, too) were much more involved in making their own clothes.  Even if you didn't actually sew your own, you would have spent time with a tailor or dressmaker, discussing cut and fabric.  The only place the average woman gets this sort of attention anymore is at a bridal shop, which is sad because the individualism apparent in dresses from a bygone day has vanished in the present age of off-the-rack sales.

(And I can hear some of the men laughing, because they think this is girl talk, but I can tell you that Beau Brummel snookered every generation down to this day by making black the fashion for men!  If you hate business suits, now you know who to blame.)

Anyway.

It hath been... permitted you to attire yourselves in silk.  The Lord hath relieved you, as a bounty on His part, of the restrictions that formerly applied to clothing and to the trim of the beard. He, verily, is the Ordainer, the Omniscient. Let there be naught in your demeanour of which sound and upright minds would disapprove, and make not yourselves the playthings of the ignorant.  Well is it with him who hath adorned himself with the vesture of seemly conduct and a praiseworthy character.  He is assuredly reckoned with those who aid their Lord through distinctive and outstanding deeds

(Bahá'u'lláh, Kitáb-i-Aqdas, ¶ 159 p. 76)

I don't know who said you couldn't wear silk, but I'm glad the restriction is off.  Silk is soft and warm and has a gorgeous hand.  But I use it rarely, because it's expensive, and I hate to think of the moths that will never fly because humans have stolen their cocoons.  Maybe silly, but I'm just sentimental.

Bahá'u'lláh was a nobleman, and like most noblemen I'm sure he had very nice clothes, and watched people at court in their silks and finery.  I'm sure he noticed that some people were too attached to their silks and finery.  I'm sure he noticed that others took advantage of their vanity.  He understands that it's not healthy for us to get so attached to something as ephemeral as textiles—wrapped in veils, to use another of His metaphors.  He reminds us that appearance isn't what counts; substance is.  Our challenge is to not be designed by others, but rather to design ourselves.