This is the last February post dedicated explicitly to stuff I love, and I admit it, I love clothes. When Marie Kondo, writing to the “Visual” person, said, “You tend to like clothes, and have a lot,” truer words were never spoke.

I try not to go overboard on my interest in clothes here at outofbabelbooks unless I can tie to ancient clothing. There are plenty of good fashion blogs out there, including “modest” fashion blogs by Christians, and compared to them, I don’t really have any expertise to offer. I haven’t had much money to spend on clothes until recently, and my tastes are what you might call eccentric. I also have a short attention span, which means I am not good at buying just a dozen “basic pieces” and wearing the heck out of them.

However, lest you think that fashion is by its nature a shallow subject, I present you this interview with Dimitry Toukhcher, a high-fashion men’s suit designer who voluntarily wangled himself into the position of becoming Jordan Peterson’s personal tailor. This man is very smart, and it’s amazing the significance he finds in trends in men’s clothing. (Let alone women’s.) For samples of his analysis, I have posted my transcript of snippets of the interview below.

Triggernometry: How does fashion reflect the people that you design for? And your beliefs and your politics?

DT: Yeah, I’ve thought a lot about this. … The bespoke movement in England actually started after the London Fire … so what happened was, as the luxury consumption started to elevate in England, the society also became more liberal. You saw this during King George IV, Edward VII – I know my clothing history — so a lot of the clothing brands that were built during those years, were built on a vision of moving towards a more liberal society. Tom Ford would be an example of that. Tom Ford’s entire mantra is libertine living.

Triggernomentry: What’s the logic behind that?

DT: Well, the logic is that you’re spoiling yourself. And so, in the 60s and 70s we saw the cultural shift with the Vietnam War. That’s actually when the bespoke tailoring thing kind of fell apart, because everyone was struggling. So everybody moved away from their father’s uniform. You know, it wasn’t cool. The counter-culture was liberal.

But what’s interesting to me — and this is completely serendipitous, not intentional — is today’s counter-culture is not liberal. Today’s counter-culture is a re-awakening. It’s a Renaissance. Today’s counter-culture is seeking iconography … baptisms … rules! And Jordan Peterson has sort of risen as the Internet’s father as a central figure for that. So it wasn’t that I purposely set out to design anything that would invoke society into some kind of a conservative movement, I just happened to work with the suits.

Triggernometry: And do you think the structure of the suit reflects people seeking a more structured way of life as opposed to the chaotic elements that extreme liberalism brings?

DT: I’m very intentional with that. I e-mailed Jordan [Peterson] and I said, “Hey, Jordan. The outfit you’re wearing [to meet] with this prime minister is the wrong outfit. This prime minister has a military background, and you’re wearing an unstructured jacket. … I wanna do a structured, more militaristic-looking jacket in a darker tone, so that you would pay homage and respect to the person with whom you’re sitting.”

I have a book coming out, and part of the book is actually talk [sic] about the evolution of suits through the decades – the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, etc. What’s interesting to me is [that] the movement of suits specifically — fashion in general, but suits specifically — today, is kind of moving towards what suits looked like back in the 1950s. Which is a fuller cut suit, which is a more traditionally conservative suit, not a lot of exuberant details. And the 1950s were an interesting era for that. We were coming out of the 40s where things were being rationed, so fabric was difficult to come by, and before that we had the 30s, where we had opulence. The 50s were not a re-emergence of the opulent 30s, but they were a breakaway from the restrictive 40s. And now that I look at the 2020s, what’s happening with clothing [is] it’s coming back to the 1950s. It’s almost like the clothing today is a re-emergence from a war. We didn’t actually have a very big physical war in the West, but we surely had a cultural war.

And the Triggernometry boys nod soberly, with the look of war survivors.

DT: So I do see suits coming back. I see a lot of really cool hats coming back. I have a friend who’s in the hat business, and business is booming. When was the last time you saw a guy wear a hat ten years ago?