Chuck McFadden

YASIR ARAFAT: FASHION TRENDSETTER?

"YASIR, THAT'S OUR BABY!"   Chuck Models the Yasir Look Just for the Hell of It

Bustles, white nylons, now Arafat face fuzz. Egad!

 

One of the things you get to do when you're retired is to make querulous inquiries and protestations over what is considered au courant, and modern.  (I'd say "hip," but that would make me sound like more of an old fart than I am, an admittedly difficult task.)

Anyway, what's with the Yasir Arafat look among some young men these days?  It's not so much actual, real young men as it is those lissome creatures that appear in ads for men's clothing.  Take a look at some of the ads from large department stores for fashion-forward men's clothing and you'll see what I mean.  Here's a young guy model, maybe 20, 21 years old.  Along with the required pout, he's wearing a three-day growth of beard.  Not a full-grown beard a la Abraham Lincoln, Jerry Garcia and the Smith Brothers, but a sort of scraggly in-between facial growth that could grow up to be a beard someday, perhaps, but probably won't.

When I was young, the only people who had three-day beards were alcoholics coming off a bender or panhandlers.  Then Palestinian leader Arafat first started appearing in the media with his not-quite-a-beard look.  Here was a man on the international stage who looked like, well, a bum.

He never appeared clean-shaven, and he never appeared with a full-grown beard.  It was always something halfway, a three-day growth.

"How does he do it?" we wondered at the time.  "How does he keep it just that way? Does he shave, and then go into seclusion for three days before appearing in public? More to the point, why does he do it?  Is it a sign of virility in the Middle East?  But why wouldn't he do as other men there do and let it all hang out--grow a regular beard?"

Only Yasir knows.

Controlled scruffiness has now arrived at our shores.  To the uninitiated, it would appear that Arafat has become a facial role model.  Brad Pitt, for instance--every time you see him in some magazine or other, he's growing something on his face.

Is it attractive to women?  That would be the point, wouldn't it?  But women of my generation emphatically think not.  And from my limited research, it doesn't seem to appeal to younger women either.  I mean, these gals spend fortunes making their skin soft, and all that, right?  And wouldn't the skin you love to touch be pretty well torn to bloody shreds after a little nuzzling by one of these half-hirsute types?

No, the three-day growth look is another one of those mysterious phenomena that seems to have no basis in function, or esthetics.   No one defends it.  No one says it looks great.  But there it is and it's widespread, at least in advertisements.  Someone, somewhere, must have said, "Hey, guys with three-day growths of beard on their faces are high fashion."   Pretty scary, if you ask me.

It's not the first such goofball fashion.  There was the bustle, which served no useful function and made women look ridiculous, and then about 100 years later in the 1980's and 1990's, there were white stockings on women.  They made their legs look awful. No man liked them.  Yet women by the millions wore them, thereby ending forever the myth that women dressed to please men.  And don't forget polyester Nehru jackets.

Thank God white stockings have gone the way of the bustle.  Now all we have to do is hope the Gillette people have something up their sleeves.

©2003 by Charles M. McFadden. The McFadden caricature, modified just this once, is ©2001 by Jim Hummel.

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