When my granddaughters were very young, they liked “dressing up’ when visiting us. They would put on their grandmother’s old dresses, hats and jewelry, and pretend they were princesses, or just grown ups. It was pretend time and great fun for them . . . and us. Fashion is fun. Fashion can also be folly.
Speaking of dressing up, some years ago I noticed several horses in a field. They wore coats. I knew that horses are shod and wear shoes, but not that they wore coats. There are good reasons for horses wearing shoes– they’re almost always on their feet. I hope the coats were for warmth and not some fashion statement.
I think dressing animals up for showpieces is insulting to the animal species, as though we were saying that somehow nature failed to do her job. In New York City I’ve seen fur bearing society type ladies walking groomed poodles that wore bright plaid waistcoats and bow ties. Considering what the occasion was that brought them out there to the curb, I thought both were decidedly overdressed.
I often found the circus disturbing for that reason. I’d see monkeys wearing dresses and carrying handbags, while others were dressed to the nines in tuxedos. Keepers would place on their heads of the majestic elephants silly little party hats that looked like dixie cups. I thought it was frankly demeaning. I don’t ever recall seeing lions or the tigers dressed up like that, or snakes either; it was enough that the trainers could safely coerce lions or tigers to jump through hoops on command, and coax great poisonous snakes to slither around its keeper’s body: those trainers were wise to leave well enough alone and not try dressing up their show pieces.
By nature animals aren’t clotheshorses. Somehow, they escaped some of the consequences of the fall, and feel no shame in conducting their daily lives in the altogether. For all occasions in the critter kingdom, one suit fits all.
We have trouble accepting animals the way they are.
I went to a dentist, once, who had a family practice. To make office visits as agreeable as possible for children, his office walls were covered with a cheerful print wallpaper, picturing all kinds of jungle animals, all of which were smiling: not a single one had teeth. That animals are more lovable without teeth is an odd message for a dentist to send. The wallpaper tried to reassure children of the friendliness of animals, but by making them into something they weren’t.
Yet most of us began visualizing animals from illustrations in children’s books, books like Winnie the Pooh and the Wind and the Willows. I recall them fondly. In those books, Ernest A. Shepherd, illustrated particular animals dressed up like humans but not others; just why one and not another isn’t clear. In the Wind and the Willows, only Otter, Old Grey Horse and the Field Mice are depicted au natural. Others, like Mole, Rat, Badger are dressed for their adventures, often nattily, like Mr. Toad, the bon vivant who’s always dressed to kill in flashy sport jackets, cravats, coats, hats and gloves and on one occasion even stands in front of a public house smoking a cigar.
Some 18 years after the Wind and the Willows, The Pooh Story Book appeared. Of its cast of animal and bird characters, now only two were clothed, Pooh and Piglet; the rest like Tigger, Roo, Owl, Kanga and Rabbit appear unclad. It was as though time had loosened the social constraints of the dress code. Come as you are was beginning to come of age.
Today, dressing down is definitely the fashion. You see evidence of it everywhere. People now travel in public wearing wrinkled sweat suits, attend weddings in jeans and tank tops– not unlike the top Pooh wears– appear in church wearing shorts and tee shirts, and eat in restaurants with their caps on. On beaches, many bathers wear, if anything, little more than Tigger or Roo. And Tigger and Roo wouldn’t care a hoot about tan lines. Unlike real animals who don’t fuss about what to wear for that day, dressing down for us humans, however casual or relaxed it’s meant to look, is in fact very calculated, a deliberate way of making one’s statement. Jeans are bought brand new, faded, and full of holes, on purpose! Shirts are bought brand new designed to look wrinkled. Animals are exhibitionistic but only while mating: humans show off all the time whether in heat or not.
All this preoccupation with dress may be atavistic: a primal reaction to the fact that unlike most animals, when we are hatched, we enter the world with neither the hide nor the hair to protect us from wind and weather. We spend our lives changing, putting it on and taking it off but not, as animals do, naturally shed their fur or hair during hot weather and thicken it during cold weather. I see men wearing shorts and tee shirts in January and knitted woolen hats in August.
Our dress habits are not about staying cool or warm. We dress for fashion and that’s folly. I believe that all fashion’s pretenses result directly from the fact that few of us are able to be comfortable in our own skin. We’re not really putting on clothes; we’re putting on airs.
Columnist George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist. A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.
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