Obsessed
Andy Crouch
April 1, 1999
Sometime in the mid-1980s I realized that the body had begun to matter again. As a child I had absorbed the seventies' dictum, "You should love me for who I really am, not for how I look." That this nice bit of Platonic doctrine ruled for a time can be confirmed by glancing through any Boomer's high school and college pictures: only an age determinedly unconcerned with appearance could have tolerated that decade's fashion disasters, ranging from showering as little as possible to abandoning undergarments. Say what you will about the eighties (and The Wedding Singer said plenty)—the Class of 1985's prom photographs will be much less a source of embarrassment than the Class of 1972's. Well, except for the feathered hair. But still.
Simply put, sometime in the early '80s it began to matter how you looked. And that included men, who, while maintaining some of the immunity from being reduced to appearances that they have always enjoyed, began paying more attention to their appearance, in a trend that continues unabated to the present. (The average American man spends 15 more minutes per day on personal grooming now than he did in 1990. Think about it.)
The recent rediscovery of the styles of the seventies—spearheaded by those who missed the decade's first incarnation—is no exception to this observation. As with the VW Beetle, so with our bodies: what once was a genuine statement of simple living is now (with few exceptions) a carefully buffed, seriously priced, archly retro attitude. It ain't the real thing. No one driving the original Bug down a city street checked out their reflection in plate glass windows. No one driving a new one doesn't. Same with tattoos—once a subjugation of the body in homage to "Lola," "Harley-Davidson," ...
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