Zoot Suit
By Kathy Peiss Pennsylvania, 236 pages, $24.95
Amid the great and grotesque "isms" battling for primacy in World War II, a curious ideological contest was fought out in America: the epic struggle over the zoot suit. Was the fashion, as singer, bandleader and hepster extraordinaire Cab Calloway defined it, "the ultimate in clothes. The only totally and truly American civilian suit"? Or were those long, baggy glad-rags a treasonous waste of woolens desperately needed for the war effort? Frank Walton at the federal War Production Board voted for the latter: "Every boy or girl who buys such a garment and every person who sells it is really doing an unpatriotic deed."
(click below to read more)
This debate is at the heart of Kathy Peiss's social history, "Zoot Suit: The Enigmatic Career of an Extreme Style." What was the zoot suit, a threat to the nation or a yawping expression of the very freedoms that the country was fighting for?
Two wartime animated cartoons capture the often comical debate over the zoot suit. There is "The Spirit of '43," a ham-fisted and humorless Disney short in which Donald Duck, with a fresh payday bankroll from his defense-factory job, is tempted to blow all his cash juking the night away instead of saving his money to pay his taxes. Voicing the cause of patriotic restraint is a penny-pinching Scots duck (Disney would reinvent that character after the war as Scrooge McDuck, with a less favorable gloss on frugality). Voicing the pleasures of high living is a duck in full zoot regalia—the high-waisted pants ballooning at the knee and tapered to an ankle-choking peg; the wide-shouldered jacket swooping down to fingertip-length; the pavement-skimming watch chain; and the wide-brimmed hat with a long, angled feather. The "sharpie" tries to lure Donald into a saloon; but just in time he sees that the zoot-suiter has a shock of Hitler hair and a little square mustache. Donald gives him what-for.
The "Tom and Jerry" animators at MGM took a rather more lighthearted approach. Tom the cat tries to woo a jitterbug kitten, showing up at her door to knock out a hot-cha tune on the ukelele. "Boy, are you corny," she sneers. "You act like a square at the fair." Tom, humiliated, hears a radio ad for zoot suits, and soon he is cutting up an orange-and-green hammock to make his own drape-shaped, reet-pleated threads. (He achieves the desired shoulder width by leaving a coat-hanger in the jacket while he wears it.) "Jackson!," the kitty cutie declares when she sees the newly hep cat: "You're on the right side, you alligator, you."
The "Tom and Jerry" cartoon appeared in 1944, not long after the cultural conflict over the zoot suit had taken an ugly turn. On the pretext that zoot-suited Mexican-American teens were wearing seditious togs, sailors on leave in Los Angeles went on a rampage in 1943, chasing "pachucos" and ripping the offending jackets and trousers off them. The police responded by locking up the Mexican teens.
Ms. Peiss argues that the zoot-suit riots, as the series of street fights came to be called, were actually old-fashioned race riots. In any case, a style that had managed to overcome some racial barriers ended up as a pretext for racial violence. The distinctive clothes had originated with urban African-Americans, who looked to dress "down to the bricks" by exaggerating the drape of English bespoke tailoring (the sort of suits favored by the Prince of Wales and Cary Grant). But the extreme drape-shape was embraced by swing-besotted white teens as well as by Mexican-American youth, making the style a rather confused stand-in for race.
As Ms. Peiss tells it, the zoot suit became particularly problematic in Los Angeles when ethnic sensitivities prompted the adoption of an unhelpful journalistic shorthand. The California press found itself chastised by the Mexican government for telling lurid stories of young Mexican-American delinquents and their gangs. Urged by U.S. officials not to offend a wartime ally, the papers stopped using the word "Mexican" and, with a wink and a nod, warned instead of "zoot suiters." A style that in many quarters had been regarded as unpatriotic came to be synonymous with downright criminality.
The zoot suit caused something of an intellectual riot as well—a cacophony of social-science theorizing on the meaning, semiotics and politics of the style. Ms. Peiss is refreshingly skeptical of the intellectual habit of reducing all cultural expression to the political. She quotes, approvingly, Harlem newspaper columnist Dan Burley, who in 1947 scoffed at serious interpretations of zoot fashion. "Anthropology is a heluva subject," he wrote. "All you gotta do is to look out the window at the nearest zoot suit or drape shape and write what you think is on his mind." In her rather more academic formulation, Ms. Peiss writes that "the political valence of the style was not foremost in the minds of those who wore it."
But what of Malcolm Little, the zoot suiter who would become Malcolm X? There are academics who like to say that his sharpie style was his first expression of protest: "Malcolm X is widely accepted as evidence of the zoot suiter as a figure of resistance," Ms. Peiss writes. But she dissents: It was Malcolm X's eventual rejection of such gaudy frivolities, she says, that signaled his radical ideological transformation.
Though the government sought to make a political issue out of zoot suits—the War Production Board would eventually ban tailors and haberdashers from selling the style—Ms. Peiss says that those who wore them were not, by and large, trying to make a statement with their clothes. Sharpies and jitterbugs were interested in clothing for its own sake. Fabric, stitching, shape, texture, color—all combined for visual effect and tactile sensation. Yes, the zoot-suit wearers expressed a group identity, as the fashion-conscious will, but they were not lodging a coded protest. The zoot suit wasn't a way to tweak the Man; it was a way to get the girl.
The vagaries of fashion would ultimately do what Uncle Sam's bureaucrats could not, killing off the zoot suit. The style had largely disappeared by the late 1950s, though every now and then hints of the zoot-suit aesthetic resurface, as in the harem pants worn by MC Hammer in his 15 seconds of fame. One can't help feeling that something has been lost with the demise of the zoot suit, a certain democratic panache. Ah, for the days when even juvenile delinquents wore suits.
—Mr. Felten writes the Journal's biweekly Postmodern Times column.
No comments:
Post a Comment