Casablanca Lessons: Dress Like the Game Is Still On

Transcript

When my mother was eighty-seven years old, she was gardening in high heels.

I brought it up once. Gently. I told her that a more sensible shoe might spare her a fall, a broken hip, and the slow decline that comes after. I thought I was being a good son. Practical. Responsible.

She told me to mind my own business. Then she got serious.

She told me that vanity, within limits, is a virtue. It keeps you younger, she said. It keeps you engaged with the world. It makes you more attractive to other people, and being attractive to other people makes you happier. And that, she said, is not vanity at all.

I did not expect that response. And before I could say something contrarian, I remembered a book I had read a few years earlier. It was Slaughterhouse-Five.

Kurt Vonnegut was a prisoner of war in the Second World War. In the book, he writes down what an Englishman in the camp told him about survival. The Englishman said: if you stop taking pride in your appearance, you will very soon die.

Then he described how he had watched it happen. The men stopped shaving and washing. Then they stopped getting out of bed. Then they stopped talking. Then they died.

That is the order. It starts with how you look. Speech goes last.

Rick understands this. He wears the white dinner jacket while a war is going on outside his door. Not to impress anybody. He dresses well because it is a sign of life. It says the game is still on and he is still in it. (He also wears lifters in his shoes because Ingrid Bergman was so much taller, but that is the subject of a different episode.)

His club has a dress code, and it is not snobbery. He knows his guests feel better about themselves, and about each other, when they have made an effort. The club is an oasis because it has standards. Take away the dress requirements and you have just another room full of people drinking and gambling and avoiding Nazis.

So here is the rule I want my daughters to keep.

When you feel like nothing, do not wait until you feel better to get dressed. Get dressed first. Put on the good shirt. Fix your hair. You will not feel like doing it. That is the whole point.

I have watched this work in my own life. You dress like you matter, and pretty soon you start acting like it. And once you are acting like it, other people treat you like it. That is not magic. That is how the world reads a room.

It will help your outlook. It will help your prospects. Both of those are worth a clean shirt.

Now, within limits. That part matters.

This is not about looking pretty for someone else. Social media influencers posing in their cardboard jets are a cancer. From what I can tell, their primary mission is to make normal people feel crappy unless they buy whatever they are selling. So this is not about comparing yourself to anybody else, and it is certainly not about building your whole worth on how you look or what you own. That is the kind of vanity that will eat you alive The virtue is in the effort.

You keep a standard for yourself, even on the days nobody is watching. Especially on those days.

Because there will be days that knock you down. Somebody you love will let you go. A plan will fall apart. Money will get tight. You will lose a lift in your left shoe.

On those days we are all tempted to disappear, or to hide behind a monkey in a fez. But do not do that.

Get up. Wash. Put on something you would be willing to be seen in. Walk out the door like the game is still on. Because it is. It always is, as long as you are still in it. You do not need to feel strong to look sharp. You just need to look sharp.

Here's looking at you, kids.

And when you are eighty-seven, I hope you both are out in a garden. In high heels.