Quentin Crisp was a flamboyantly gay Englishman employed for much of his life as a model for government art schools in Britain—a profession that provided the title of his autobiography and the subsequent John Hurt film, The Naked Civil Servant. He survived the Blitz and the distinctly disapproving social environment of midcentury London, and at seventy-two he abruptly moved to New York City, where he knew next to no one.
Over the next eighteen years he became a fixture of the city, appearing repeatedly on Late Night with David Letterman, performing on stage (especially in his one-man show, An Evening with Quentin Crisp) and in films (appearing, for example, as Elizabeth I in Orlando), and writing a dozen books about his life and philosophy. He is the subject of a well-known song by Sting (“An Englishman in New York”). He died in 1999 at the age of ninety, about to open a run of his show in his native England.
Beneath the henna, ascots, and makeup was a remarkably incisive intellect and a powerfully independent man. In books such as How to Have a Lifestyle, Crisp outlined his philosophy of self-determination. One of his pet concerns was the nature of style.
Most people view the words fashion and style as near-synonyms. Crisp insisted that they were opposites. He felt that one of the driving motivations of most humans is the desire to eliminate their own uniqueness—a kind of psychological suicide that Freud might have likened to Thanatos, the death instinct.
Fashion, in Crisp’s view, is the art of denying one’s individuality in order to adopt the uniforms and dictates of culture, as determined by people who
The implicit goal is to cover your imperfections and become something you are not: a person who is acceptable in the eyes of others. A pleasing shell with no discernible interior. In Crisp’s words, “Fashion is what you adopt when you don’t know who you are.”
Style, on the other hand, is the art of bringing your defining individual features to the fore, regardless of what others might expect or find acceptable:
In brief, be who you are. Make no attempt to fit in.
Crisp saw this as a purposeful and conscious act of personal development. Unlike many, he did not believe that being yourself is simply a matter of self-expression—a loosening of your own leash or a random pushing outward of everything inside. When we appeared on this planet, our only means of self-expression was to look around, cry, and create puddles. Everything else came later.
In his view, becoming who you are is a lifelong and very deliberate act of personal self-creation. It is an art form. If you want to be a multilingual conversationalist, this won’t happen on its own. You have to enroll in some language courses and cultivate your knowledge base. In a sense, the life we choose to lead creates us. He points out, “It’s no good running a pig farm for thirty years while saying, ‘Really, I was meant to be a ballet dancer.’ By then, pigs will be your style.”
The trick, of course, is figuring out the elements of one’s personal style. In psychotherapy, we often employ questions as sharp paring knives to get to the core of life’s issues. Crisp proposed a particularly potent question best avoided by seekers of the dark side of emotional life: “If there were no applause and no criticism, who would you be?”
If, in other words, nothing you do can impress anyone, and nothing could attract their disapproval, what would you do? In this imaginary world of social equanimity, what might govern your behavior? Your motivation would have to come from within and be directed by your own interests.
Once you’ve figured out what you would do on his imaginary planet, Crisp doesn’t order you to act automatically on your insight as though you really lived there. His question is designed to clarify your options, not narrow them. The truth is, we do live in a world of applause and criticism, and at least some of our behavior will always be governed by the hope and fear they create.
For our purposes, Crisp’s flashlight illuminates the reverse path as effectively as the route to selfhood. If the road northward involves choosing style over fashion, then those of us who want our lives to go south should choose fashion over style.
So listen to the recommendations of cultural gurus and follow instructions. Base your life on the pursuit of the admiration and approval of others. Take out a nail file and scrape away any of your troubling uniqueness. Regard your personal talents, quirks, and interests as impediments to the real goal, which is to camouflage yourself, like a chameleon, in your surroundings.
Even more importantly, determine which aspects of your nature might attract the disapproval of others. Hide these away. This will enable you to starve those parts of yourself and to feel shame for their very existence. Remind yourself that if people saw the real you, they would reject you. This will disqualify any approval you receive as having been obtained under false pretenses.
In sum, ask yourself the question of the Anti-Crisp. “If the applause and criticism of others was your only guide, who would you be?”
Look for the herd. They must be galloping off in that chosen direction for a reason. Follow them and attempt to vanish in their midst.