Modern scruffiness, says Dalrymple,
is a manifestation of egotism.
He writes of some clothes shops he comes across in Amsterdam:
Outside one of the shops was a large plasma screen showing models wearing the kind of clothes to be had within. They were precisely the insolently ragged clothes that the great majority of people in the street were wearing anyway….The models, in their T-shirts, baseball caps, sneakers, and so forth, as uniform as any army, walked with the kind of vulpine lope that one associates with the less law-abiding young males of the American ghettoes.
More striking
was the expression on their faces, which were cachectic in the case of the women, androgynous in the case of men: a fixed, determined, humourless stare that indicated a hatred of the world and all that was in it, including their fellow beings. The models’ faces were vacantly earnest, as if they wished for annihilation of everything around them.
This, says Dalrymple, is the first age
in which people do not dress to please others, but dress to displease others, to make sure that everyone knows that I’m not going to make any effort just for you. And this, no doubt, is because I am as good as anyone in the world, bar none.
