I’m sure you know the tweed guy. This is the guy who, inspired by Tolkien or Waugh, has adopted, as daily attire, the shooting costume of a midcentury English country squire.
Of course, he doesn’t always get the style right. Sometimes he ends up looking like an Irish grandpa who lives in New York but supports the I.R.A., or like a Yorkshire gangster, replete with flat cap and whippet. Every now and then he understands—better than the other tweed guys—that his dress is for outdoor sport and wears a shooting jacket and breeks everywhere.
Usually he lives in Washington, D.C., or perhaps Atlanta, although occasionally he is genuinely English. He smokes a pipe. If he is from the South and identifies with Walker Percy, the pipe may be a corncob one. Frequently, although obsessed with Catholic authors, he is Anglican.
About forty years ago, he was briefly mainstream or at least socially recognizable. The T.V. Brideshead Revisited and the Young Fogey Handbook were major milestones in tweed guy history. In the 1980s, tweed guys could be found at the University of Chicago and at Oxford and Cambridge. They were typically middle or upper-middle-class and could afford to have an appropriate tweed suit made to specifications by a reputable tailor.
Often, the American graduate students weren’t consciously imitating Brideshead. They were emulating a kind of midcentury Hollywood-ish masculinity of whose origins they were likely unaware. The British students were genuinely embedded in upper-middle-class society and could not be accused of play-acting. And when they graduated, they would often find jobs in some suitably tweedy field: antiques, archival work, writing for the Spectator.
The twenty-first-century tweed guy has taken up the worst instincts of these mainstream tweed guys of the Eighties while being mostly unlike them. These second-wave tweed guys have splintered: upper-middle-class hipsters who own a tweed blazer or two, but not as a dedicated “thing,” vs. acolytes of the Tumblr movement known as “dark academia” inspired by anime and school uniforms. Neither is interested in conservative politics or, for the most part, in religion.
Meanwhile, the mantle of the “young fogey,” the political tweed guy, has been taken up by a generation of young Americans, often Anglican or recently Catholic and active on Twitter, who wear thrifted, mass-produced hand-me-down tweeds, probably not tailored, probably not matching—certainly not matching their shoes—and imagine that this brings them closer to the greats. This is the kind of guy who can admire Nathan J. Robinson’s dress sense with a straight face, who thinks Tom Wolfe looked aristocratic.
There are worse things. Consider the cardigan guy. He knows he’s not a country squire, and religion doesn’t interest him. He’s nostalgic, but if you could ask him what he’d do with a time machine, he’d go back to the 1940s and invent both the atomic bomb and Playboy. Like the tweed guy, the cardigan guy smokes a pipe. He wears round glasses, the “theory” kind made popular by Pierre Bezukhov and Trotsky. He has politics, but they are unsentimental: libertarian, or perhaps Marxist. He reads fiction, not Waugh or Kenneth Grahame, but Stoner or maybe Bret Easton Ellis. When people talk about Mad Men in connection with his dress sense, he pretends he’s never seen it, but it’s the closest thing he has to a religion. The tweed guy is often married; the cardigan guy has a girlfriend with whom he’s not sure he sees a future. If he is middle-aged, the girlfriend is not.
Personally I think that political views largely based on the fashions of a particular decade are no political views at all. But in the spirit of civilizational preservation, I propose a provisional alliance with the new tweed guys against the cardigan guy.
“Look,” I’ll tell the tweed guys, “that man wants to change your way of life. He’s the harbinger of the nuclear age that turned country houses into field hospitals, churches into community centers, and traditional men’s tailors into department stores selling ill-fitting polyester monstrosities. His cardigan may be wool, but he’s developing synthetic fibers in the lab, or genetically engineered crops that will kill off the world’s sheep. He’s trying to get your wife hooked on barbiturates. He wants to party at the Playboy Mansion; you want to weep in the shrine at Brideshead. Come with me if you want to live.”
