SUITED TOAT

SUITED TOAT

ELEGANZA

by

John Mendelssohn

The time has come, Eleganza believes, to set forth some guidelines for the wearing of short-sleeved shirts. And Eleganza is nothing if not timely.

Here I will paraphrase Fran Leibowitz, and ask this: If people don't want to hear from you, what leads you to imagine that they want to hear from your T-shirt, or to be urged to buy something by it?

Of course there are exceptions to every rule, and this one is no exception. T-shirts for which the wearer himself did the artwork, for instance, are Eleganza-approved, as too are those that advertise products, businesses, or services with particlarly amusing names (Buster's Flophouse, say, or Bobo's No-Pain Acupuncture [Five Puncturers—No Waiting] or eye-pleasing logos—so long as these products, businesses and services are unavailable in the locale in which the T-shirt is worn. Eleganza frowns with all its might on passive shilling.

As too does it glance askance at T-shirts that proclaim themselves the property of some institution of which the wearer is clearly not a member, particularly when they're worn to suggest that the wearer was born to be wild or, as most wearers of such garments would probably be more likely to describe themselves, as wild and crazy guys. Each time he glimpses a CPA in a T-shirt that proclaims, "Property of French Guyana Men's Penal Colony," it is to be understood, Eleganza snorts loudly in derision.

You should wear no T-shirt that contains as much polyester as cotton. You should, on the other hand, join countless hundreds of thousands of other Eleganza readers who have written their congressman on behalf of compulsory sterilization for people who wear T-shirts attesting to their self-identification as.. .party animals. We have in mind the sort of shirt the Eleganzas glimpsed on so many of their fellow vacationers in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico recently. They imagined, these vacationers, that the zany T's they'd bought in the local souvenir shops said only, "Everybody needs tequila." In fact, they said, "I'm an asshole!" much louder, if less liminally.

T-shirts that are intended to offend ("Too Drunk To F* * *" leaps inexorably to mind) are not viewed kindly by Eleganza, which suspects that they're worn by the same people who spray paint names of their own garage bands qn other people's walls— people who yearn for attention with every morsel of their beings, but who haven't the force of character to get it any way other than vicariously.

Eleganza, for the record, has noted an inverse proportion between a group's quality and the frequency with w'hich it feels compelled to spray paint its name all over town.

Black concert souvenir T-shirts shall not be worn under any circumstances, particularly if they bear the horror comic bookstyle cover art of a particular heavy metal band's latest album. They're almost invariably 50% polyester, and T-shirts that contain polyester are a perversion of nature. The Jockey Underwear Company invented the garment in the early '30s at the suggestion of USC football coach Howard Jones, who'd conceived it as something absorbent that could be worn under shoulder pads. Polyester isn't absorbent. It's tossed in with the cotton solely to widen the tosser's profit margin.

Such T-shirts mark the wearer as a dupe of an economic system that has ruined the lives of countless hundreds of milions, as one so mindless as to have shelled out good money for the privilege of helping to further enrich the already obscenely rich lackeys of recording corporations.

While we re only a paragraph away, it might be noted that heavy metal itself must go. (I want to bite the hand that feeds me. I want to bite that hand so badly.) It all sounds the same, and none of it sounds very good.

Mom and Dad Eleganza used to say the very same thing, of course, but that was about The Who Sing My Generation, say, and The Hollies Hear! Here! All metal, in contrast, really does sound the same. One of three guitar soloes is played in every heavy metal song.

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Most heavy metal guitar-playing is a perversion of music. ("All right!" I can just picture some asshole in a studded bracelet saying as he practices poses in the master bathroom.) Music is supposed to be expressive, but heavy metal guitarists are too preoccupied with playing clusters of 32nd notes in that area of their fretboards where the frets get tiny to express anything except how nimble-fingered they are.

And the singers are all interchangable. They all squeal. They all shriek. They all howl, "Ooh, yeah!" They include Ronnie Dio, for whom there is no excuse.

Heavy metal fans come on ultra-bad in their spiked leather bondage accessories, fists in the air, and conspicuous overconsumption of drugs and drink, but they're the most acquiescent fans in the all of pop. No matter how relentlessly vainglorious asshole lead singers shriek, "Ypu having a good time?" (which translates as, "Aren't we [the band] bitchin'?") at them, heavy metal fans invariably roar back in the affirmative. Fans of no other pop genre would endure someone like Ronnie Dio, who isn't only a hideous little dwarf with a receding hairline, but actually smug about it.

They come on so ultra-bad and macho, but they're scared to death of women. You can tell from the songs, which are almost invariably about one of two things—how big the singer's genitals are/how vengefully insatiable he is in bed, or what a devious, contemptible creature his girlfriend is/all women are.

On the eve of this column's submission, a teenaged girl was dragged into the Jack Murphy Stadium men's room and raped by 20 ultra-bad male Def Leppard fans while dozens more laughed and cheered. Served the little slut right, one imagines.

Speaking of Def Leppard, it might be noted that, in terms of Eleganza, there's only one thing worse than a sleeveless T-shirt bearing either the Union Jack, the stars and stripes, or a Japanese rising sun (I mean, they're such a cliche, you know?), and that's a LaCoste-style sport shirt.

Clothes talk. Before one can otter a single peep, what he or she wears lias already told the observant other much about him or her. A black heavy metal concert T-shirt, for instance, says, "I so want to be perceived as tough."

A LaCoste, on the other hand, says, "1 have money, but no mind of my own. There is no madness in my soul, no outrage. I probably believe that there's such a thing as 'soft rock,' and will probably register Republican."

There is nothing more heartbreaking (and not in the good way—not in the way that Brooke Shields is, or Lobsterhead Kenhart) than a woman in a LaCoste-style sport shirt.

The low point in the history of the Los Angeles rock 'n' roll scene came one evening in the spring of 1979 when the bass player in a group called Code Blue came on stage in a LaCoste sport shirt and the audience failed to tar and feather him.

You'd have thought you were at a heavy metal show in the face of that sort of acquiescence.