At the beginning of the essay, translator M.E. Screech notes something important about it:
[In this chapter Montaigne makes a pun on the French taste for bigarures, which means, as Cotgrave explains it in his Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (1632) both a medley of ‘sundry colours mingled together’ and a discourse ‘running odly and fantastically, from one matter to another’. This chapter is an example of such a colourful medley, hopping from thoughts on Man’s natural nakedness to examples of extraordinary cold.]
There’s very little else that holds this brief, amusing trifle together than the aforementioned pun. Montaigne is taking glory because he can write about any subject he wishes—and without an extensive amount of knowledge of the subject — while conducting a bull session on why human beings wear clothing when most mammals carry around their own protection.
He doesn’t really provide an answer to that question, although he makes this interesting point:
If we had been endowed at birth with undergarments and trousers, there can be no doubt that Nature would have armed those parts of us which remained exposed to the violence of the seasons with a thicker skin, as she has done for our fingertips and the soles of our feet.
Interesting, because Montaigne is basically making a case for evolution, even if it’s the minor sort that happens through a lifetime instead of using natural selection over scores of generations. It’s a good reminder that evolutionary thought was common even hundreds of years before Darwin.
Otherwise, there’s not much to point out in this essay. But clothing is an interesting topic, because it speaks to the way we regulate the human gaze, a subject I will return to later in “On Some Verses of Virgil.” There I bring in French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty and his thoughts on the body. Another source from that era, French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, was particularly interested in the gaze. Both clothing and eye contact serve as tools for managing how we present ourselves to the world, balancing connection with self-protection.
In this essay, Montaigne observes that customs shape not only how we dress but how we interact, often in ways we scarcely notice. While clothing carries cultural codes that communicate identity, status, and intent, something as simple as our eyeline also sends social signals. One area that has had particular interest to me for a long time is eye contact, especially in regard to public speaking. Customs on eye contact vary greatly across cultures. In some cultures, avoiding eye contact is a sign of respect, while in others it might be perceived as evasive or even dishonest.
Some have noted since the pandemic that conducting more meetings over Zoom has made it more comfortable for people in eye-contact-shy cultures to make and hold it in professional settings,
Eye contact is absolutely essential for public speaking. It builds audience rapport but, perhaps even more importantly, allows the speaker to ‘read the room’ and adjust their delivery accordingly. But such an endeavor has its own risks.
To meet another’s gaze is to acknowledge them, but to hold it too long risks unsettling the balance of connection. As Lacan suggests, the gaze reveals our vulnerability: to be seen is to become an object in another’s field of vision, but to look too intently risks transforming the other into an object of our desire.
I noticed this phenomenon while at a global conference in Baku recently. I was in the audience for a panel presentation, and I am always one to maintain strong eye contact with the speaker. I simply have a great deal of comfort with eye contact and only break away if I feel something too powerful to maintain. Most speakers on the panel made no effort to make eye contact with anyone. But one woman was a strong presenter and I noticed that she did a very good job of trying to build audience rapport.
The problem is, she only gave eye contact to the people reciprocating her looks. And there were only a few of us, so the gaze at time could feel intense. I haven’t done any research to confirm this, but my sense is that once eye contact exceeds a couple seconds, it passes over from an acknowledgement, a sense of being seen, to a gaze, a sense of being desired. Her focus on those willing to meet her gaze created a kind of intimacy, but it also excluded the rest of the room. It was a reminder of how the gaze can be both a bridge and a barrier, inviting connection while leaving others outside its frame.
I was not at all surprised when her presentation was over and it was others’ time to speak that she then checked back in on my eyeline a few times while her role shifted to observer. Another’s gaze can be powerful, obliging interpretation and leading us to seek it out again once the effect wear off. But to do so in this context had the potential to change the nature of an interaction, so I made an effort to keep my eye contact on the next speaker as best I could.
Clothing and eye contact, then, share a common purpose: they mediate our visibility, inviting connection while preserving boundaries. People clothe themselves to invite acknowledgment and appreciation, but also at times to invite desire. They are aspects of a complex social game that is mediated one interaction at a time.
But I’ve just provided more intellectual heft to Montaigne’s discussion of clothing than he provided himself. His piece feels like something you’d come across on the back pages of a magazine, a light wrap-up piece.
So in that spirt, I’ll discuss my own connection to clothing. I enjoy the fact that Montaigne states his own preference for black-and-white clothing over the more colorful garb, more typical of the French. I am a fan of what has sometimes been described as “normcore” dress, a unisex, simple style meant to draw as little attention as possible, while not coming across as slovenly. Normcore’s appeal lies in its quiet defiance of the gaze—it’s a way of being seen without being scrutinized, of participating in the social game while sidestepping its more performative aspects.
Part of my normcore style is also practical. One of my sons is roughly the same size as me, so he finds a way to steal just about any article of clothing I buy. This has made me far less willing to invest in any high value item of clothing because it will soon disappear. So over the course of this decade, I’ve found myself dressing more and more like a Gen Z teenaged boy.
Twice a year, I work backstage at a work event for about a week at a time and am required to wear all black every day. At the close of the event, I am always so sick of wearing black that I swear not to do so again until the next convention.
And then, inevitably, within several days, I’m back to wearing all black, if for no other reason than it is the simplest, cleanest form of normcore and I miss the lack of thought required at dressing time. By now I should know myself well enough to avoid making such sweeping pronouncements about anything.
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