Dressed Up, Acting Up
On the weekends, Harvard’s student body is as fashionable as it’s ever been with garb that contrasts markedly with students’ casual wear in class and in dining halls. Suffice it to say that we have long ago forsaken the grey smock and matching bonnet of the 17th century, but just what kind of people are we to be so well-attired these days?
This past weekend, I pushed myself to come down from Mather Tower, the concrete structure incongruously named after the notable Puritan, and took to the streets in search of an answer to that question.
First, I meet with friends at a sushi restaurant. We are seated in a back room where large parties are sequestered from the intimate parties in the restaurant’s front.
At a table next to mine, a young man wearing a tweed jacket arrives from the Porcellian; his friends exhort him to shotgun a Busch, and he eagerly does so, deftly managing to avoid spillage on his clothing.
His performance is followed by a blonde’s chugging of her umpteenth beer. Five minutes later, her head lolling, she faintly murmurs, “Where did the wasabi go?” She tries to get up, professing her need to go to the bathroom, cannot make herself erect, and slumps back down.
Just try to ignore the wildlife, Kavulla. Think of calming things, like Shinto priests putting drunkards and hussies into stockades for defiling Japan’s sacred honor...yes, that’s it, calm thoughts.
I concentrate on my table, and an hour into the meal, everyone is likewise drunk.
Members of my well-tailored party, many of whom are recently employed i-bankers and consultants back in Cambridge for the recruiting season, follow the pernicious principle that so long as one pays an exorbitant amount of money as a tip, one can be as much of an asshole as one wishes.
And so it happens that our table is beseeched half a dozen times to quiet ourselves. The pleading is to no avail—“they’re getting their money” someone says of the wait staff who have asked us to show restraint. And besides, I’m told, the creation of sake bombs, whereby shots of the rice wine are precariously situated between chopsticks running parallel atop a glass of beer, necessitates the raucous slamming of fists. There’s just no way around it.
In the course of our couple hours there, the grimaces on the sushi chefs go from mild bemusement to annoyance. I drunkenly wonder aloud of the possibilities of a culture of decorous restraint that might have attended a Japanese victory in World War II.
We are finally asked to leave—the restaurant is closing—and I break off with soberer friends.
All of us are walking by Winthrop when we see a shirtless collegian charging down the street with a girl riding piggyback atop him.
The eponymous Rev. Increase Mather leaps to mind, who noted in his sermon “Woe to Drunkards” that “a Beast will drink no more than shall do him good; and therefore a Drunkard is worse than a Beast. Reason is that whereby a man Excels a Beast; but this Sin depriveth him of his Excellency.”
Our drunken interlocutor is indeed bestial. He doesn’t say anything as he runs by us; it’s more of an inhuman howl. Errrrrggh! His mate is slapping him on the rear and hoisting aloft his shirt—it appears he was wearing a tuxedo earlier in the night—screaming at him to go faster.
Later, looking forward to Mather House’s sweet embrace as I head down Cowperthwaite Street in the early morning, I get one last whiff of Harvard’s social reality. I recognize one of the girls walking ahead of me, a beautiful girl, restrained in section, always well-dressed.
Now, that girl is screaming loud profanities about how, no, she doesn’t like this piece of pepperoni pizza, that she only eats cheese pizza, and that...She doesn’t have time to articulate fully this thought, instead losing her balance and falling into the dewy grass.
I want to be honest with FM’s audience: I’m no fan of theocratic excess, but when I encounter such examples of well-dressed, smart people behaving badly, I silently wonder to myself, where are the Saudi religious police when you need them?
Some will call this attitude Puritanical, a word that sounds nastier than it should, and will boldly defend students’ “right”—the most overused word of the 20th century—to do whatever they want whenever they want to.
But I’m more inclined to agree with what the ethicist Peter Lawler has written, that our loss of Puritanism “has exacted a real erotic cost. A genuine 17th-century Puritan man who caught a glimpse of a young woman’s bare ankle might have had difficulty controlling himself. Today’s licentious young men watch virtually naked and perfectly sculpted young women gyrate on MTV and yawn.”
Similarly, it makes little difference that one’s lithe legs are gloriously exposed to the thigh, or that one’s coiffure is the product of four hours’ labor, or that the day’s maquillage is glowing just right under the streetlight, if the same person is evacuating her stomach on the pavement outside a final club—a scene not so uncommon these days.
Just as the mutilated bodies of Toscanini’s employees send their own signals, preppy fashion at Harvard so frequently collides with the wearers’ bad behavior that I’ve taken seersucker and salmon, among other aspects of Cantabrigian wear, to be ostentatious declarations of “I am not yet mature!” or “Check back in two hours and I’ll be, like, totally smashed!” bellowed across our cobblestone streets.
Perhaps there are no hard and fast rules about how people in button-downs should act—but there should be. Because at Harvard, it seems that students are often playing a twisted game of dress-up where we dress like gods and behave like animals. And it’s quite time to bring ourselves into an internal consistency a man like the Rev. Mather could at least begin to comprehend.
Travis R. Kavulla ’06-’07 is a history concentrator in Mather House. He believes one should dress when taking sushi.