Chesterton & McAtee On The Meaning Of Apparel

“All women dress to be noticed: gross and vulgar women to be grossly and vulgarly noticed, wise and modest women to be wisely and modestly noticed.”

G. K. Chesterton

It’s been a beef of mine for quite some time about the way we post-moderns dress. We are far removed from the class and the Haute couture of previous generations. It all bespeaks a coarsening of the human condition… a continuation of our disintegration downward into the void.

And now it is not enough to be ill-kempt in our dressing attire, now we seek out being ill-kempt in our own flesh with our comparatively recent fascination in the West with tattoos and  body piercings.

Of course all of this is especially desultory on women as they are were created to be the fairer sex. It is one thing if one is living in a old shack to have torn and ugly furniture. It’s quite another thing if one is living in an upscale and higher end home to have it decorated like Berlin in May of 1945. God created women to be bearers of beauty as among mankind but today countless numbers of them dress like they are trying to star in a Jackson Pollack painting. One has a hard time today discerning a band of women at a shopping center from the crew of the fictional Whaler ship made famous as the “Pequod” from the novel “Moby Dick.”

I would go so far as insisting that the coarseness of our culture is perhaps best captured by the coarseness of our women-folk. Now, of course, as men are the head and creators of every culture (whether by abdication of their responsibilities to lead or by active leading askew) men are ultimately responsible for a culture populated by women covered in ink, pierced with metal, and dressed in spandex. When I was a boy, one could only see what I see daily by going to the circus or the county fair.

Look, I know that our women-folk have been led astray and so aren’t alone responsible for the ways they seek to de-beautify themselves. When living in a madhouse culture we can hardly be surprised when people begin to think that the madhouse is the norm and so follow the customs and norms of the madhouse. If a young lady sees her friends, peers, and elders looking like skin calligraphy is the hip thing one can hardly alone fault the innocent naive who have few better role models to not want to get pierced, inked, and trolloped in order to fit in with the madhouse culture.

I look at old photos of America from just two generations ago and it is like looking at another reality. Recently, I came across the photo of a major league baseball game in the late 1960s and I was amazed by the number of attendees who were wearing ties and suit jackets as well as the number of women wearing dresses. It was clear that the way they dressed then proves how coarsened we have become as a people. Another example is the way folks dress for church. Growing up we understood what “Sunday go to church clothes” meant. Nearly everyone was dressed in the best they owned. I have photos somewhere around here of me as a child with my Sunday School class with all of us 5 year olds all dressed up for church full of grins and sas.

None of this is to necessarily say people were better or more moral then. Often times dressing appropriately was a hypocrisy that was paying its coin to virtue, but people understood dressing like a vagrant was not acceptable. Even if all that finery in attire was hypocrisy, better the hypocrisy then, than the outright in your face non-hypocrisy that we have today. We could use a little hypocrisy in the way we dress.

So, our attire is just one more piece of evidence that we, as a people, are declining. What we wear, accouterments and all, screams volumes about us and screams volumes about what we think about God. There is theology being revealed in the way we dress (or don’t dress).

Author: jetbrane

I am a Pastor of a small Church in Mid-Michigan who delights in my family, my congregation and my calling. I am postmillennial in my eschatology. Paedo-Calvinist Covenantal in my Christianity Reformed in my Soteriology Presuppositional in my apologetics Familialist in my family theology Agrarian in my regional community social order belief Christianity creates culture and so Christendom in my national social order belief Mythic-Poetic / Grammatical Historical in my Hermeneutic Pre-modern, Medieval, & Feudal before Enlightenment, modernity, & postmodern Reconstructionist / Theonomic in my Worldview One part paleo-conservative / one part micro Libertarian in my politics Systematic and Biblical theology need one another but Systematics has pride of place Some of my favorite authors, Augustine, Turretin, Calvin, Tolkien, Chesterton, Nock, Tozer, Dabney, Bavinck, Wodehouse, Rushdoony, Bahnsen, Schaeffer, C. Van Til, H. Van Til, G. H. Clark, C. Dawson, H. Berman, R. Nash, C. G. Singer, R. Kipling, G. North, J. Edwards, S. Foote, F. Hayek, O. Guiness, J. Witte, M. Rothbard, Clyde Wilson, Mencken, Lasch, Postman, Gatto, T. Boston, Thomas Brooks, Terry Brooks, C. Hodge, J. Calhoun, Llyod-Jones, T. Sowell, A. McClaren, M. Muggeridge, C. F. H. Henry, F. Swarz, M. Henry, G. Marten, P. Schaff, T. S. Elliott, K. Van Hoozer, K. Gentry, etc. My passion is to write in such a way that the Lord Christ might be pleased. It is my hope that people will be challenged to reconsider what are considered the givens of the current culture. Your biggest help to me dear reader will be to often remind me that God is Sovereign and that all that is, is because it pleases him. View all posts by jetbrane