• back issues
• gallery
• discussion
• blogs
• donate

What are you wearing?

by David Howard Malone

I dress up to go to work and dress down to go to church.

This is not the way I thought my life would be when I was growing up: then, I assumed I would dress up to go to church, and dress down to go to work. My father drove a truck for most of his life: his work shirts and pants were infused with dirt and oil stains--I remember them as having been rendered softer than other clothes by wear, and probably the oil. Sunday mornings he put on a (clip-on) tie and shined shoes and usually a suit jacket and busied himself in the back halls and stairways of our old church, taking attendance in the Sunday school classrooms, handing out the take-home papers, collecting offering envelopes. My vision of what I'd wear as an adult, such as it was, didn't wander far from this example.

Instead, when I go to church today, I wear jeans, usually the ones with the cement stain on the left knee and a faded rectangle the size and shape of my wallet on the right back pocket, and a short-sleeved shirt, usually striped or plaid. I wear these clothes, as my father wore his, out of certain convictions.

I'm pretty sure my father's convictions--it feels awkward to me to speak for him--were that the clothes he wore to church brought glory to God. It was the Christian's duty to give of his best to the Master, to paraphrase a line from an old hymn, and the clothes he wore marked Sunday morning as a time set apart for worship, for turning one's attention from the thrum and dust of daily life to the glorious, loving, sacrificing God of the universe.

My own convictions ideally have less to do with worship and more to do with removing barriers. We go to a church that is supposed to be seeker-focused or seeker-friendly, which in practical terms means a) just about everybody wears casual clothes, and b) our band rocks. Wearing jeans and a plaid shirt means, at least to me, that I'm countering the notion that people have to get their lives in order and put on a tie before they can come to God. God in his grace reaches out to us while we are still sinners--we don't need to get cleaned up to attract God to us. Like most good ideas, the notion that we honor and give glory to God by putting on our best, most celebratory clothes has been turned into meaningless ritual, another reason for the whitewashed tombs at some churches to feel superior to other people, even seekers, whose exteriors don't measure up. Worshipping God isn't a matter of outward appearance but of spirit and truth--wearing jeans is a statement of concern for and commitment to authenticity.

I don't think I've ever taught in jeans, though. Usually I wear dress pants, chinos or khakis, mostly; shirts with button-down collars; and on all but rare occasions, a tie. I dress up to teach more out of habit than conviction: I taught my first college class when I was twenty-three and, regularly told I looked like an eighteen-year-old, and I hoped dressing more formally would help my freshman and sophomore students take me more seriously, would serve as a visual metaphor for the distance between my knowledge and authority and theirs. Today, the thought of teaching in casual clothing strikes me as slightly inappropriate, like flipping burgers without a hair net and a McDonalds smock.

That's not all there is to it, of course. I like the feeling of broadcloth and pinpoint oxfords, and I love ties with flashes of brilliant reds and blues and yellows--I'd rather not wear muddy-colored, muted ties that look like they've been inspired by swamp water or the diaries of Kurt Cobain. I'm a little sad that a deep purple shirt I've enjoyed wearing for at least the last five years is starting to fray at the collar and cuffs; I still kind of miss a shirt I wore when Emilie, my oldest daughter, was a baby, its color on the cusp between fuchsia and violet. I'm offended by teachers who wear sports coats, usually something tweedy, with a pale dress shirt, no tie, and jeans--it seems like a play for the authority of dressing up without the requisite commitment or rigor or color, the clothing equivalent of an honorary doctorate. I'm just a bit envious when I walk by the windows of stores that cater to African American men and see suits in lemon custard, cream of tomato, kelly green, royal blue. Why settle for humdrum when you have the choice to wear a celebration?

There's every reason to believe, after such an exhibition of sartorial drooling, that my dressing up for work is an occasion for vanity. It's not that I'm convinced this isn't true, but I'd add it's a shabby sort of vanity, a rumpled, comfortable-shoes-that-only-slightly-resemble-dress-shoes, tie-wearing-bear sort of vanity. I only know one way to tie a tie, and don't even know the proper name for that technique--it's what my uncle showed me during my senior year of high school. Is it vain to think about separating myself from my students? Or would it be vanity instead to think I could reach across the years and life experiences and training that separates us and insist there's no difference between us?

What troubles me more than my pleasure in bright neckties is the puritanical vanity that rises up in me on Sundays when somebody in a suit and tie eyes me in a restaurant or grocery store, assuming, based on my clothes, that I'm a church-avoiding heathen, scoffing at God's grace. And of course the really sick part is that I'm doing the exact same thing, reading suit-and-tie-guy's faith as merely cultural and superficial and vacuous based on his clothing.

Add to this more-pious-and-down-to-earth-than-thou attitude my concern that growing up without any occasions to wear dressy clothes is going to give my children the strange impression that they can shuffle through all of life's occasions in clothing suitable for yardwork. Ian, my eight-year-old, is so used to wearing T-shirts that it's a struggle to get him to take a half-step up to a polo shirt. "Buttons?!" he says with outraged surprise. "A collar?!" It's like we've asked him to try on a shirt made of scorpions. And Emilie, who's 13 now, has pretty much devoted herself to T-shirts, too, although hers convey messages like, "Please Don't Interrupt Me While I'm Ignoring You," "It's Funny When Boys Try to Think," "Hug Me" (on a shirt featuring Elmo, the cutesy red puppet from Sesame Street), and "Pandas Are Friends." Considering how boy-crazy some of her friends are, I kind of appreciate the hostile tone. On several days when the highs were in the mid-nineties, she wore hooded sweatshirts to school--the air conditioning was turned too high in her classrooms, she said, and she spent the entire day feeling frozen. But one can't help wondering if she's going to grow up to be a slob, or a stalker, or somebody with severe body image problems.

Despite the pitfalls of topsy-turvy vanity and radically casual kids, we're not going to start looking for a church with a more upscale dress code. Vicki says she had trouble worshipping at the last church we attended because she'd spent all morning rushing around getting her hair and face and clothes and children presentable and by the time she sat down in the pew she was a nervous wreck. To be free of that burden, I'm more than willing to battle my tendency to feel humbler-than-thou. Nor am I likely to start wearing casual clothes to class. If my students want to see me in a less formal setting, they can come to my church--in class, I'm still trying to represent the dignity of my profession and discipline, and I'm not sure I have the capacity to communicate that in casual clothing. I still need the teaching uniform.

But some Wednesday night this fall, after I've dropped the kids off at their classes at church and am sitting down in the worship service, I'll glance down and notice I'm still wearing the tie I put on early that morning and feel like a truck driver who's come into church with his work stained clothes and wish I'd taken time to change. And then I'll feel foolish and start to sing, knowing that my brothers and sisters, and my God, accept me no matter what I wear.