Clothing as Architecture: Why Comfort Replaced Character
15 Nov 2025
Written by Mikel Ínigo Urrutia DeTournemine, Edited by Maria Sauda
Hi divas!! 🌺 This is the first ever guest post on the blog, I have always wanted others to write in their own posts so I'm excited about this, if you'd like to yap about a topic you like please write in here, I hope you all enjoy this!
Introduction
Modern dress traded internal structure for external ease. In mistaking form for oppression and convenience for virtue, we lowered our standards and thinned our sense of dignity, which should be an extension of love for ourselves and for others.
It happens more often than I can count. See someone dressed formally, and the near-immediate verdict is, “He must be off to a wedding or a funeral.” Ask the person why and you may hear, “I like to be presentable,” or simply, “I like how it looks.” The answer is met with surprise, as if composure now requires an excuse.
Counterculture has become a luxury product that sells anti-form at a premium. Swap Balenciaga for any fashionable house, and the script remains the same. A sweatshirt that looks as if it came from a concrete mixer and a vat of lime is marketed as transgressive, while bespoke craft is mocked as gaudy or excessive. The market flatters rebellion, then invoices it.
What is more countercultural: supporting living crafts like the tailor and the cobbler, or feeding the algorithmic churn of mass-produced trend?
I do not write to prescribe uniforms or to play hall monitor. I write because the culture of convenience has turned careless. The rich kid cosplays labor in an overpriced work jacket. A grown man walks into a formal meeting in shorts and dress shoes. The posture is “carefree,” but it drifts toward shamelessness.
We also comfort ourselves with strange pep talk. It is easy to tell a child with dyslexia that “Einstein had it too.” The bar leaps to the stratosphere and rests on the insecurity of borrowed greatness. It is just as easy to tell everyone else, “Dress, act, be as you will.” The bar then sinks to the Mariana Trench. Permission without standards does not liberate. It hollowed out aspiration and left us with a shrug, it is degenerate.
By “degenerate” I do not mean a political slur. I mean the simple philosophical sense: to degenerate is to subtract, remove, or replace virtues and standards. When presentation loses form, the person loses a small but real habit of self-command.
Modern myths blur history. We call the suit or the dress an emblem of the crushing machine, cigars and all, yet many billionaires dress like men in a Dunkin’ Donuts line. We call older garments instruments of oppression when many of them were practical structure, not punishment. Corsets provided postural support and a foundation for dress construction. They distributed weight, stabilized the torso, and allowed garments to hang in proper proportion. For ordinary wearers, they were closer to an orthopedic brace than a vice. Male suspenders did something similar for trousers, providing vertical support without the pinch of a belt. Remove the inner architecture, and the outer garment loses its intended form.
Structure is not the enemy of freedom. It is the condition that lets a shape hold. Architecture needs a frame. Language needs grammar. Dress needs a foundation. When we lose foundations, we do not get honesty. We get collapse.
Interrogate the reflex that equates classical clothing with outdated politics. Every era had its faults; acknowledging them does not require throwing out coherence, proportion, and ceremony. Yet the modern habit is to turn up our noses at everything that came before. The cathedrals are labeled oppressive and theocratic. The people are labeled repressed and miserable. Meanwhile, our enlightened century suffers a mental health crisis that claims hundreds of thousands of lives each year.
Simplicity does not equal honesty. The rejection of ornament is often treated as a moral achievement when it is only a style.
What are we doing to ourselves? We are thinning the human by thinning the forms that once taught us how to carry the human. We are degenerating through dehumanization through the steady unmaking of our inherent beauty.
I do not care if you wear pajama pants to the corner store. I care that you know you can choose form when you want to. If you have ever thought of dressing up for its own sake, do so. Not as obedience to me or to a tribe, but as a small act of order, gratitude, and love. People respect conviction and self-determination more than you might imagine.