The death of style

Just as I finished complaining last week about the inability of Americans to string together a complete sentence, I realised that they make up for it by being the worst dressed people this side of Ukraine. J. Crew has been in the news lately because the company has changed hands, with hacks waxing nostalgically about preppy style and all that 1960s stuff. All I can say is: how can they tell? Hacks wouldn’t know what style is. They thought that Gianni Agnelli’s unbuttoned button-down shirt was the result of carelessness.

The last American newsman with style was Joe Alsop, now long gone, a cousin of Roosevelt and a DC insider who, unlike the motley group of grifters and wokesters assembled by the Bagel Times, was born a gent. Style is the most overused word in English, usually attributed to fashionable people who lack it – Vogue’s Anna Wintour being a prime example. Style is an elusive quality and no one is capable of buying or faking it. It is of an abstract nature; one either has it or one doesn’t. Today more than ever, and especially here in the Bagel, there is a dearth of style, especially at the top.

Once upon a time women dressed in order to be admired by men. Now they dress to be comfortable, and they look much poorer for it. Some look like the female Soviet shot putters of long ago, others like homeless lassies. But one thing is for certain: no one will whistle at them, even if whistling weren’t a jailable offence. Still, the idea that men’s fashion is being written about, instead of women’s, tells us a lot about the state of America.

Woke culture has an unyielding stranglehold on style.