In 1899, economist and social thinker Thorstein Veblen wrote a book that examined the tastes of late 19th-century society, The Theory of the Leisure Class. Alongside the oft-used phrase “conspicuous consumption”, one of his key ideas was its counterpart, “conspicuous leisure” — “can’t work, don’t need to work” as an expression of affluence. To illustrate both ideas, he declared nothing more apt than dress.
“A detailed examination of what passes in popular apprehension for elegant apparel will show that it is contrived at every point to convey the impression that the wearer does not habitually put forth any useful effort,” wrote Veblen.
Ouch. He applied his ideas to both men’s and women’s clothes, though he stated that the latter pushed the idea to the extreme. “The substantial reason for our tenacious attachment to the skirt is just this; it is expensive and it hampers the wearer at every turn and incapacitates her for all useful exertion.” Veblen had lived through the vast, dome-shaped excesses of the crinoline of the 1860s — which at its widest reached some 18ft in circumference, impeding all but the most essential activity.
Although now considered passé by many, Veblen’s ideas drift into my mind a lot when I’m watching fashion shows. Especially this autumn/winter 2022 season, where great lengths (literally) seemed to have been taken to emphasise leisure, once again via excessive fabric. The crinoline of our time? That’s sleeves cut to trail beyond the usual borderline of the wrist — sometimes tickling the fingertips, most often dropping to cover the hands entirely.
They were there in London, Milan and Paris, where catwalk models looked mutilated, as if their hands had been deftly sliced away at the wrist. Missoni showed bathrobe coats that stretched beyond the fingertips; Rick Owens and Burberry dangled the wide-cut sleeves of ironically named “workwear” styles so low that the most mundane of activities — filing a nail, or even biting one — would prove cumbersome.
At Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen’s brand The Row, skinny sleeves were tugged to Slender Man attenuation, with sweaters and shirt cuffs falling a good foot past a sensible wrist length. Sometimes it looked elegant, often a bit daft, as when models cradled presumably expensive handbags in the crook of their arm and the extraneous sleeve seemed to give each limb a second elbow. You fought the urge to reach out and ruche each one up the forearm, so that the models could go about their business unfettered.
But perhaps that was the point. Impugning the inherent practicality of sleeves has a whiff of the profoundest perversion. To borrow from Veblen again, these trailing cuffs seemed to testify “to the wearer’s exemption from or incapacity for all vulgarly productive employment”. Sleeves are, after all, pragmatic coverings, articulated to move with the body, allowing for essential motion — which is why, alongside shoes, they’re some of the first things to be shrunken or swollen in line with Veblen’s theory of the luxury inherent in immobility.
They were one of the earliest things that Coco Chanel tackled when revolutionising women’s dress in the 1920s, cutting armholes high and U-shaped to flatter the figure yet allow total freedom. By contrast, in the 16th century, Elizabeth I and her courtiers had sleeves so heavily padded, puffed and encrusted with gems that they had to lock their fingers together in front to bear their weight.
In the 17th and 18th centuries, gentlemen wore trailing lace frills and “bucket” cuffs deep enough to impede bending at the elbow; by the late 1800s, women’s sleeves alternately strangled their arms or inflated them to gargantuan proportions, both restricting or outright prohibiting movement.
How we guffaw at these foibles — then look at the equally fulsome puffball sleeves and ubiquitous wedge-shaped shoulder pads of the 1980s and realise that it isn’t confined so deeply to the annals of history.
So we can see fashion’s current taste — let’s call this sleeve the “low-hanger” — as merely the latest in a long line of luxurious impediments. And it’s actually an idea that has veered up repeatedly — infuriatingly — over the past half-decade.
There’s often a feel of teendom evoked by low-hangers, of youths in oversized clothes devised for them to grow into, sleeves flopping over hands like a toddler in an adult’s sweatshirt. It kind of ties in with that whole Hollywood child-woman thing, too: small hands emphasised by XXL Starbucks cups, sloppy layers counter-intuitively serving to emphasise rather than disguise the slenderness of the aerobicised body inhabiting them.
Bottega Veneta has cut its sweaters skinny and long of limb for a few seasons; Balenciaga coats and sweatshirts let their cuffs flap low. Often, these seem like ideas great on paper — or look elegant in still images, or on the catwalk. Cross over into real life and those seemingly stylish outfits quickly come a cropper: I’ve attended dinners where cuffs have dragged across dinner plates, dipping in soup.
Those cuffs belonged to others — I am merely reporting on this, observing, not endorsing. It’s actually anathema to my personal style, where I have a marked propensity for hauling my sleeves up, ruining the line of many a tailored jacket. I don’t wear jewellery, or a watch, as a result of what I reason is the same impulse — which, if I’m going all Veblen, may be a reflection of a working-class upbringing, but may equally be because I have short arms.
Miuccia Prada — who was a communist in her youth in the 1970s (although she reckons everyone was back then) — has a penchant for flicking back the too-long cuffs of overcoats, which I unconsciously mimic (the fact that one of the most elegant people in the world also does it gives me a degree of validation, I’ll admit). As opposed to the idleness of a low-hanger, a pushed-up sleeve semaphores a knuckle-cracking impulse to work, to shove your sleeves out of the way and get down to the job in hand.
Of course, in the age of Covid-19, a covered hand can mean something other than a Veblenesque eschewing of productive labour. Long sleeves now don’t so much spell inaction as protection, caution; there’s even a strange practicality to them. Low-hangers give you something to wrap about your hand when pulling open a door, to cover your fingertip when pushing a button. They certainly seem less archaic and forced than a pair of gloves: cotton ones spell Jackie O cosplay for women, cater-waiter for men; latex have shades of Julianne Moore-level paranoia in Safe. And as facial and voice-recognition software increasingly renders the touchpad obsolete, maybe we don’t need our fingers that much after all.
On the other hand — no pun — as we move out of Covid, presumably we’ll all want to hack our cuffs off, grab, stroke and hug again. To hark back to Veblen: “The prevailing fashion is felt to be beautiful. This is due partly to the relief it affords in being different from what went before it.” Luckily, it’s easy to shorten sleeves.
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April 13, 2022 at 11:02AM
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Overlong sleeves — or how to keep vulgar practicality at arm's length - Financial Times
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