Features

Photo Credit: Colm Johnston

There was a time when I thought Doc Martens paired well with shorts. I’ve complimented Uggs, and meant it. My goatee has weathered at least two cycles of facial hair trends, and I’ve publicly remarked that “fashion” is a conspiracy to extract money from people so vacuous their heads make sucking sounds when they attempt to spell. For years, I took pride in shunning a topic that’s seemingly arbitrary, commercial and unmoored from reason.

But now I dress as natty as a chipmunk. I own a good tuxedo and several shirts with mother-of-pearl buttons. I have become what Shakespeare called “a flouncing jackanapes, a popinjay. A preening fop.”

My Damascene moment occurred about five months ago, when I stopped in front of the mandrill exhibit at the Franklin Park Zoo. It contained a monkey with a violent blue bottom. The animal looked neither self-conscious nor upset that evolution had given it such a lurid end. In fact, it wore the color well, fully at ease in its skin and with whatever weird ideas of sexual selection they have in the jungles of Gabon. If the she-mandrill liked blue bottoms, the fellow obviously thought, blue bottoms she would have. And damn the scoffing, pasty-buttocked fools.

It was then that I realized if a monkey could pull off such an absurd look, then, by God, I could get away with a loud, purple shirt from Banana Republic. Sexual selection makes monkeys of us all.

Andrew Rimas, Editor
andrew@improper.com