Cornel West Talks Clothes with Prepidemic

Last spring, public intellectual Cornel West, did a few short interviews on clothing and style with Prepidemic Magazine. These are the more interesting among them.

In this first piece, Prepidemic asks him for his definition of style. He says this "has to do with the ways in which you are able to orient your critical intelligence, your spirituality, and your sense of character," or, more succinctly, "it's how you move through space and time." Even more interesting, however, is his claim that style cannot be without substance. In other words, the expression "all style and no substance" is a contradiction in terms if, by the former, one means "genuine style," which entails substance. This is not easily obtained, however. To have substance and thus style, he says you have to come to terms with who you are, which involves examining "the dark corners of your own soul....you find your voice, then you've got your style."


The following piece reifies the previous one's notion of style in the example of fashion. Here, Mr. West makes a very explicit link between how he sees himself and the world on the one hand and what he wears on the other. His attire actualizes his philosophy.


Getting still more specific, yet less philosophical, Mr. West discusses some of the features of his particular "uniform."

Being Considerate

My interest in the gentlemanly ideal began just under two years ago. I was visiting a friend in Santa Barbara and finding myself with a great deal of free time for research, contemplation, and media consumption. During this time, I listened to a sermon by the somewhat infamous Seattle pastor, Mark Driscoll, entitled “Humble Christians.” The entire sermon is here, but YouTube has a nice excerpt of the part that really struck me:


As it happens, Driscoll's IPod Idol example is especially uncomfortable for me, as I used to do this quite frequently. In fact, one time I did it in the early morning while everyone was asleep in the home of friend of a friend, whom I was visiting in Texas. (This post is going to make me sound like a perpetual vagrant, which is not entirely accurate; the relevant events just happened to occur while visiting various friends.) More gentlemanly than I, this friend found me a new place to stay, citing some other reason for the required departure. I didn't then know how embarrassed I should have been, but I do now.

Returning to the subject at hand, however, I was particularly struck by Driscoll's assertion that "we live in the most inconsiderate age. People are unbelievably inconsiderate" but that humble people "recognize, hey, there's other people and some of them have needs; I'm not the center of the universe. I should be attentive to them." When he asked "How considerate are you?" and said not to rate yourself, but to ask your friends, etc., I didn't have to contact anyone. I knew my roommates would not give me a very flattering score.

After mulling over this realization for a few days, I was visiting another friend in L.A. Among the other books on his shelf were a few volumes of the immensely influential "Gentleman" series by John Bridges and Bryan Curtis. I opened up "As a Gentleman Would Say" and read the following lines from the introduction:

Gentlemanliness goes deeper than mere nice manners, it requires preparation, so that, whenever possible, a gentleman can do his part to make the world a much nicer place in which to live.

Driscoll and Bridges/Curtis proved to be a powerful combination. They were communicating the same message: Most people are inconsiderate, but no one should be comfortable with it. The answer was clear: We need more gentlemen.