Christopher Hitchens Wet Dreams
Or rather, why I have decided to write about fashion in this way
I have a background in fashion business— the scrappy parts of fashion business. I worked in retail for years, then moved to e-commerce (otherwise known as selling shit online). Thanks to a boss who introduced me to photographer Nick Knight’s Show Studio, a platform for fashion film and panel discussions, I started to develop an interest in communications and journalism. I wanted to do something that utilized my intelligence and analyzed style within its greater cultural context. I decided to pursue an internship, and interviewed at three fashion magazines.
One of the magazines asked me to send an email after the interview which would contain three propositions for articles. Scanning the site for commentary they had already published, I noticed something disturbing: a significant amount of the entries did not concern fashion at all, but rather what I will loosely term “social justice” issues. And those articles that did mention fashion were written, necessarily, from a social justice standpoint. There was almost nothing they published that did not focus on it, and no entry which deviated from an approved and narrow viewpoint concerning it.
Around the time of these interviews I had a dream. Or rather, two dreams. In the first I sat at a desk, pencil in hand, while one of the editors I had interviewed with stood over me in a manner that conveyed control and rigidity. He slowly ripped a tiny piece of paper from the page of one of his magazines, placed it in front of me, and commanded, “Write.” I couldn’t think of anything. I sat in front of the piece of paper, frustrated. A blank feeling came over me, and a kind of mounting pressure. I noticed that the piece of paper was deep blue.
Right after this came another, seemingly incongruous dream: I was standing somewhere with Christopher Hitchens, the late social critic and polemicist, when he wrapped his arms around me passionately and started kissing me. The feeling of being in love rushed through my body as we stood in an embrace full of fire.
I was somewhat familiar with Hitchens at that point, having been introduced to his work through other other writers I admire, like Katie Roiphe. But this dream spurred me to delve into his output, and I devoted hours to watching his interviews and commentary on sites like C-SPAN.
One of his reflections, made during a conversation he had about the book “Letters to A Young Contrarian,” has stayed with me ever since:
“The message is to try and live your life as if you were a free person. That you didn’t have to wonder what anyone else’s opinion was. That you should take the risk of believing that if you were the only person who thinks what you think, that that still might well mean that you were right. In fact, that loneliness often makes people wonder, because perhaps out of modesty they feel, ‘Well, if I feel this way and everyone else doesn’t, maybe I’m crazy, or, maybe I’m— maybe there’s something they know that I don’t.’ I’m trying to encourage people not to think like that. You’ll notice sometimes on chat shows and call-in shows, people will say, ‘Well, as so and so was just saying and as I, you know I quite agree, and um—’ they’re nervous, they don’t want to speak in their own voice, they won’t ever kind of come out and say ‘This is what I think.’ What I’m trying to give people the confidence to do, in other words, is to not only think that— even if you’re the only one who thinks it, it could be true— but to imagine that actually, if the majority thinks one thing, it’s more likely than not to be wrong.”
For news reporting to align itself with one ideological faction in the interest of social justice and advocacy journalism is one thing. One might even say there could be a credible defense of it. But for an industry like fashion— or any other creative business or enterprise— to subject itself to the strictures of a movement that actively combats freedom of expression is madness.
The First Amendment still exists. But the real censors now live in our heads, like the controlling editor in my dream. Writing in The Atlantic, George Packer points out that “all across the worlds of media, the arts, and education,” a process of “self-deception” is causing “intelligent people [to] do the work of eliminating their own unorthodoxy.” In another piece he claims that “a writer can still write while hiding from the thought police. But a writer who carries the thought police around in his head, who always feels compelled to ask: Can I say this? Do I have a right? Is my terminology correct? Will my allies get angry? Will it help my enemies? —that writer’s words will soon become lifeless.”
I do not always remember my dreams. But I have chosen to keep the memory of Christopher’s embrace in my mind, and I refer to it anytime I am sitting in front of an empty page.