Man fashion shirt

FASHION, uninformed souls opine, is lowering and raising women's hemlines, widening and narrowing men's lapels. It reflects, they aver, nothing more than the greed of designers and clothing manufacturers, pressuring us to throw out perfectly good clothes before they wear out; or, worse yet, the vengeance of woman-hating homosexual designers on the female sex. There is even a moral ambivalence, as stated by a character in Albert Camus's The Fall: ''I am well aware that an addiction to silk underwear does not necessarily imply that one's feet are dirty. Nonetheless, style, like sheer silk, too often hides eczema.'' A sensible person is supposed to ignore the dictates of fashion, and simply be him- or herself. Like all half-truths this may be half true. But there is more to fashion than that, by half.

Fashion answers, or tries to answer, a profound human need: the need for change. Conservatives tend to pooh-pooh this need, except when they are out of office. The more literate ones will quote you Pascal: ''All human misery stems from one sole cause, which is the inability to be at rest in one's room.'' (One could also render ''demeurer en repos'' as ''stay put.'') The opposite of en repos is restlessness, which is where fashion comes in. Most of us cannot stay in contented repose either in a room or in a palace. We crave change because it is the cure, more or less, of the oldest known malady: boredom.

Do not underestimate the relationship boredom:change:fashion. Most simply put, boredom means being fed up with one's life, and change means doing something about it. But most of us are stuck with the sameness that is our destiny. We have scant control over other people, over the world; so we try to change what is changeable about ourselves. We want to feel like a new person; to achieve this, or the illusion of this, a modified appearance is indicated. Even a fresh shoeshine or boutonnicre has been known to renew us. A bit.

The great renewer, though, is fashion. We can't do much with our bodies: high heels or platform shoes will add a semblance of height; dieting, no easy task, will make us slimmer, if that happens to be the fashion. We can do a little more with our faces. For women, coiffures and makeup; for men, greater or lesser hirsuteness. But more can be done with clothes: with fashion or, as it used to be called after the French, the mode. Consider Sir George Etherege's 1676 comedy The Man of Mode, featuring the ridiculous Sir Fopling Flutter, based on an actual fop, Beau Hewitt. Sir Fopling is ''the prince of fops, the perfect product of Parisian taste of the day.'' Interestingly, he is a man; the earliest known victims of fashion were men. But so, too, were its earliest arbiters, notably Petronius, author of the Satyricon.

What cannot clothes do? You have thick legs? They can cover them up. You are short-waisted? The dropped waistline can lengthen your waist. Your behind is large? Flare out the skirt. You're a man with a tummy problem? Here's the double-breasted suit. Your chest isn't manly enough? Padded shoulders can create the illusion. And so on. All changes in fashion benefit some wearers; unfortunately, no fashion benefits everyone.

The reversals of fashion are, when you think of it, amazing. The flappers wanted to look boyish for reasons of sexual equality, so the look became flat-chested, tubular. When women are, or want to be, viewed as either good nursing mothers or sex objects, the breasts become built up or exposed. That calls attention to possible ambiguities. So, too, a bikini may imply equally love of tanning or lust for men. Ambiguities and contradictions are everywhere. In a given year, Paris may decree one thing, London another, Milan a third. Different designers in the same fashion center will diverge: do not expect a Ferre to look like a Versace or an Armani like a Zegna.

And yet, in hindsight, some sort of unison emerges. The Directoire low-cut dress with the high waistline gathered at the bust can be found on both the future Empress Josephine and the beauteous Mme. Recamier. Biedermeier, the less sexy German version, is not all that different. But everything changes, at a dizzying pace. Didn't Heraclitus, way back then, observe that you could not bathe in the same suit twice? Sorry, that was the same river.

Whether or not fashion is an art, it certainly behaves like one. There are the great couturiers, sold or copied by the department stores and boutiques, and all manner of cheap knock-offs. Just as you can hang on your wall an original by Manet, you can hang a Manet imitator or reproduction, or a piece of junk. The same goes for what you hang on your body. Of course, art comes into women's wear more than into men's, but it enters both. Men's ties, vests, shirts, and suspenders have been daring enough to compete with women's fashions. And, like other arts, fashion comes in for censorship. Puritanical societies have always tried to control fashion: Christian Lacroix would have had a hard time of it at the Spanish court in its Habsburg heyday. More significantly, artists have often worked, so to speak, hand in glove with fashion designers; so, for example, Sonia Delaunay created patchwork designs for Jacques Heim coats, worked for a textile company, and influenced Patou and Schiaparelli, among others. So Dali designed fabrics for Schiaparelli, and Saint Laurent co-opted Mondrian for a line of dresses.

Why should fashion be denied the status of art? Because it is functional? Is ceramics not art because one can eat and drink from it? Because it is cosmetic? Yes, it beautifies, but by means of something sewn, constructed -- not merely smeared on like a pomade. Clothes, to be sure, wear out, whereas a painting or statue remains; but in the light of today's deliberately perishable art, e.g., Christo's wrappings, permanence seems no longer to be a criterion. Granted fashion differs from other arts in that most of us can participate in creating it, in which case it becomes the art of self-expression.

It can, however, be costly. It takes virtually no money to write a poem or make a drawing. But to dress well, unless you make your own clothes, takes money. Hence modern fashion has bifurcated. For the wealthy, there remain the designers producing expensive haute couture. For the rest, there is something new.

Casual wear, leisure clothes and footgear, have taken over much of the clothing trade. Not long ago there was no such thing as Gap, Benneton, Reebok, Banana Republic, Eddie Bauer, and the countless rest. There you can acquire the latest in tight-clinging or loose-fitting, mainly sport-derived clothes, and an endless variety of footwear that looks like a cross between the old sneakers and the Tower of Babel. Until recently few of these clothes, and none of these shoes, would have passed muster in offices and other respectable surroundings; now they are practically everywhere. Symbolically, Nike is opening a super-store in Manhattan next door to Tiffany's. And all over America's cities you can see women dressed properly, even elegantly, going about with Nikes on their feet.

And not just women: fashion designers themselves appear in public in clothes only the riff-raff would be presumed to favor. I can remember how elegant the great fashion designers of yesteryear were -- men like Pierre Balmain and Jean Patou, to name but two, were always fashion plates, as is Oscar de la Renta today. But I remember my disappointment on meeting Nino Cerrutti sloppily dressed. Since then something has happened. I first noticed it with the brilliant designer Karl Lagerfeld, who looked to me like a cat-burglar in all-black casual wear and with a pony tail dependent from his boding head. The look seemed all right while he was designing trendy clothes for Chloe; but later, at Chanel? Yet that was nothing compared to the downright malevolent and thuggish look affected by Gianni Versace. And Jean-Paul Gaultier, in his skirts, might frighten little children.

How to explain all this? The casual look of the last decades has something to do with the success of the beatniks, something with the latter-day homosexual camp (as opposed to earlier homosexual chic), but mostly with today's trend toward what I'd call diurnal dishabille. At the recent MTV awards, the audience, as Bob Morris reported in the New York Times, consisted of ''honchos and junior honchos, some looking as if they couldn't bother to dress, others looking as if they couldn't bother to do anything else.'' Yet is there really much difference between those extremes? There are clothes from, say, Calvin Klein, Norma Kamali, Donna Karan, Ralph Lauren, and Tommy Hilfiger about which one can't be at all sure which social class they cater to. Some people may consider this democratic and good; I myself have doubts.