This is the final installment of my notes on the cultural history of the bowling shirt. You don’t need to have read part one or part two, but you might like them.
Winning
In the twenty-first century, nostalgia piled on top of itself until it collapsed into a heap of meaningless.
The swing revival ended on January 31, 1999, when Big Bad Voodoo Daddy played the Super Bowl halftime show, along with Stevie Wonder and Gloria Estefan. Twenty years later, critic Rob Sheffield told the Ringer this particular halftime show did to ‘90s culture what Altamont did to ‘60s culture.
Things were about to get very weird in the new century. But the change wasn’t immediate.
Whatever ideas became outdated after Altamont didn’t vanish entirely. Many elements of the 1960s broke from their larger context and spread across culture (Deadhead stickers on Cadillacs and whatnot). Likewise, as the swing revival faded, elements of the culture that had launched it spread.
In the fall of 2003. Two and a Half Men premiered, with Charlie Sheen starring as a lascivious songwriter who was almost always clad in camp-collar shirts with block patterns. They were his character’s signature.
Sheen’s shirts weren’t found in the back of a parent’s closet or Salvation Army counters. They were new, made of silk and linen. Sheen’s character was a perpetually horny sleazeball, but the upmarket shirts gave him the touch of elegance that money can bestow on even the most inveterate louche. The bowling style made him seem irreverent and casual. The bowling shirt was no longer associated with bowling at all. It wasn’t ironic, subversive, or suburban. It was the uniform of the moneyed, comfortable, Californian, broadcast into the homes of millions of Americans every week. Casual triumphed over formal. Nostalgia inspired the new.
Types of Guy
Three years after Two and a Half Men debuted, America met a restaurateur from California who had entered a competition to star on Food Network: Guy Fieri.
In promo photos for his first show, Guy’s Big Bite, Fieri is in an upmarket camp collar shirt similar to Sheen’s. With his tattoos, piercings, goatee, penchant for flip-flops, and spiky hair so bright it might be radioactive, Fieri looked like a living cartoon among his Food Network peers. But to millions of viewers, he was a stock character. The same type of guy could be found at car shows or cheering on a classic rock cover band at the state fair. He was the new American man of leisure.
The set on Guy’s Big Bite was pure space-age bachelor pad: chrome lamps, Googie wallpaper, a tall red bar stocked with martini shakers and decorated with trophies—perhaps bowling trophies. It looked like a set from the “Walkin’ on the Sun” video. And indeed, Fieri and Smash Mouth’s singer Steve Harwell were often mistaken for each other.
After a year of Guy’s Big Bite, Fieri took his show on the road. Driving a classic convertible (though not one with fins), he visited the types of businesses that had sprung up across the American suburbs and exurbs with screaming Googie architecture. They were what the show was named for: Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives.
Even though he wore bowling shirts on Guy’s Big Bite, Fieri told the Wall Street Journal that their presence on his new show was happenstance.
I get a call to do “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives,” and they said, “Bring a short-sleeved collared shirt.” I’m pretty much a T-shirt-and-jeans guy. Shorts. Flip-flops. I’m not a real fashion icon. I had this one Dickies work shirt that was gray on the sides and had a dark gray panel in the center. When the show got picked up, that’s what I had worn in the pilot. They go, “That’s the wardrobe.”
The essential part of this story is that Fieri had a bowling-style shirt. What’s more, it was ostensibly a shirt made by a workwear company for some type of physical labor. The shirt was double-duty Americana—a bowling pattern on a laborer’s uniform.
It made sense that Fieri had this shirt. It made sense that he would be on TV in a groovy apartment with vinyl and formica and hubcaps on the wall. It made sense that people would mistake him for the singer of Smash Mouth. It made sense because these guys had evolved out of the postwar American experiment. They were Gen Xers who quoted Swingers and loved old cars and diner food. As they got older and made more money, they went for brand new recreations of the clothes their peers had found at thrift stores. Nothing about anything Fieri did seemed anomalous to anyone who was familiar with the malls and middle-class white suburbs of the 1990s. It just made sense.
Don’t Forget the Food
The food Fieri championed was American, too. It wasn’t always just monster burgers or piles of fried onions. It wasn’t unusual to see Fieri scarf down a dish that infused flavors from Asian or Mexican cuisine. Infused is the key word. Fieri wasn’t a traditionalist. But the new flavors he brought to the televised palate were usually attached to a more domestic dish—a spice rub on pork chops or toppings on a pizza. One of the restaurants Fieri founded is called Tex Wasabi’s. The menu of another one of his restaurants, named Guy’s American Kitchen, includes pastrami egg rolls and cajun chicken alfredo.
The country Fieri traveled on TV was one where everything blended together into something that was distinctly America-shaped.
None of This is Real
Ever taken a road trip across the USA? How often did you encounter a genuine diner, drive-in, or dive? The businesses that once dominated the nation’s roadsides gave way to identical outlets of chains at interstate exits. Those that remain are tourist attractions.
In a way, Fieri helps these businesses by giving them attention. The restaurant industry is tough. Publicity can make or break a business.
In another way, Fieri provides a limited view of what these restaurants can be, and pushes them to a familiar set of expectations that work well for his tastes and the TV’s presentation. He celebrates a world that no longer exists and creates a false version of it that endures. He builds the simulation on top of the ruins of the original. He creates a new type of chain, united by a uniformity of offerings rather than corporate ownership.
Irony, Melting like American Cheese
In 2012, Pete Wells’s New York Times review of the Times Square branch of Guy’s American went viral. The piece was a list of questions aimed at Fieri.
Why is one of the few things on your menu that can be eaten without fear or regret — a lunch-only sandwich of chopped soy-glazed pork with coleslaw and cucumbers — called a Roasted Pork Bahn Mi, when it resembles that item about as much as you resemble Emily Dickinson?
…
Has anyone ever told you that your high-wattage passion for no-collar American food makes you television’s answer to Calvin Trillin, if Mr. Trillin bleached his hair, drove a Camaro and drank Boozy Creamsicles? When you cruise around the country for your show “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives,” rasping out slangy odes to the unfancy places where Americans like to get down and greasy, do you really mean it?
Or is it all an act? Is that why the kind of cooking you celebrate on television is treated with so little respect at Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar?
Nearing his conclusion, Wells asks: “Is the entire restaurant a very expensive piece of conceptual art?”
I’ve thought about this line a lot. Fieri is not joking. He’s a business man. He’s a brand. The way he packages his product and presents his brand is simultaneously authentic (he’s a type of guy that exists in the world) and completely contrived (the type of guy that he is evolved through so many layers of irony and adoption, through cynicism and sincerity, that there is no way it could be natural).
Fieri reminds me of Jesse Thorn’s description of Evel Knievel in his manifesto on the New Sincerity, a post-ironic aesthetic/way-of-life that’s always had a slippery definition.
Let’s be frank. There’s no way to appreciate Evel Knievel literally. Evel is the kind of man who defies even fiction, because the reality is too over the top. Here is a man in a red-white-and-blue leather jumpsuit, driving some kind of rocket car. A man who achieved fame and fortune jumping over things. Here is a real man who feels at home as Spidey on the cover of a comic book. Simply put, Evel Knievel boggles the mind.
But by the same token, he isn’t to be taken ironically, either. The fact of the matter is that Evel is, in a word, awesome. His jumpsuit looks great. His stunts were amazing. As he once said of his own life: “I’ve had every airplane, every ship, every yacht, every racehorse, every diamond, and probably, with the exception of two or three, every woman I wanted in my lifetime. I’ve lived a better life than any king or prince or president.” And as patently ridiculous as those words are, they’re pretty much true.
The New Sincerity, as Thorn describes it, is “more Hedwig than Rocky Horror.” It’s an earnest way of approaching something that someone might otherwise approach ironically. In his book Say Hello to Metamodernism, Greg Dember calls this kind of idea “Ironesty.”
Ironesty is irony/sarcasm/sardonicness/snark employed in the service of making an earnest point or expressing a heart-felt emotion. It’s kind of a way of saying, “Hey I get that what I’m about to say is kind of corny, but…” and then truly caring about the thing that comes after the “but.” Or it’s a way of delivering a humorous, clever ironic message, but softening it with a “Don’t worry … we’re not too cool for you, we have sincere feelings just like you.”
I quoted Thorn in a review of dueling Evel Knievel documentaries I wrote for Salon a few years ago. One of the docs featured Guy Fieri as a talking head. Which, like everything he does, made perfect sense and no sense.
Fieri’s presence is particularly surprising, but also oddly perfect. Here is a man who also glorifies an America that isn’t really sustainable and perhaps never really existed—a showman draped in a form of realness that is both unreal and unreachable by the audience. When Fieri says of Knievel “the man knew how to hype the game,” it’s clear it’s coming from a man who also knows.
Asking whether Fieri is engaged in an art project is asking a question that’s out of date. There is no project, except for the fact that it’s all a project. No one with hair like that is unaware that they are constructing an identity. No one who has spent two decades on television is unaware that their personality is a marketing tool. He is effectively performing an identity that is sincerely held. And the bowling shirt is central to it. His own closet inspired the wardrobe for the show. He’s like Colonel Sanders for the postmodern age.
No Time for Lovers
Irony didn’t die or get replaced by something new. Like nostalgia, it piled so high that it collapsed into an all-encompassing meaninglessness.
After Wells’s review, it became cool to like Fieri. I had friends who took trips to Guy’s American Kitchen that they hyped so heavily on social media, I briefly wondered if they were paid junkets (they weren’t). This spirit culminated in a four-minute comedy routine by Shane Torres on Conan that asked why everyone hated Fieri so much, when “all he ever did was follow his dreams.”
The routine reminded me of Carl Wilson’s book Let’s Talk About Love, in which he tries to set his own self-conscious sense of cool aside and find out why so many people love Celine Dion. In a section on how popular taste changes over time, he briefly mentions exotica music. What was once “a pathetic seduction soundtrack on the hi-fi of a smarmy insurance salesman” was, to a new generation, “charmingly strange, governed by a lost and thus beguiling musical rulebook.”
Something similar is happening with Fieri. The people I knew who were rediscovering him weren’t watching him on Food Network. They knew him through references and reputation. To a Millennial in 2015 or so, the idea of someone driving a convertible to retro diners on cable TV was as distant as bowling leagues were to a Gen Xer in the late ‘80s (though Fieri was still on TV in 2015, just as league bowling was still happening in the ‘80s). It inspires its own nostalgia, and its own embrace of what used to be square. Fieri’s self-conscious performance of a real type of authenticity seems almost refreshing to the modern eye.
But in the world of New Sincerity/Ironesty/etc, there’s a crucial difference between a Gen Xer wearing someone else’s old bowling shirt and a Millennial posting about how Donkey Sauce tastes good, actually. Fieri is the face of Food Network. Literally; his image appears at least four times on the network’s “Shows” page. (Ina Garten appears in name only.) Celebrating Fieri is rooting for someone who already won. And you’re rooting against…who exactly? People like Wells who build a career by having trusted opinions on whether a restaurant is worth your money? People who don’t like to see American food defined as anything and everything that fits into the deep frier?
The idea of Poptimism in music criticism began as an attempt to draw serious consideration to music that didn’t meet ideas of authenticity that were based in the standards of rock music (singer-songwriters, analog instruments, etc). The approach has prevailed in ways that go far beyond music, and far beyond professional criticism. In some cases, it justified fans’ treatment of commercial success as not just a criterion of cultural importance, but the most vital criterion. It perpetuates mass appeal. “If a lot of people like it, you should like it, too.”
It’s good for people to like what they like (with obvious exceptions for things that are actively harmful to other people). It’s also good to like things in different ways. Degrees of authenticity in appreciation can lead to different types of appreciation—a more well-rounded satisfaction that comes from a more nuanced view of culture. Otherwise, it’s just different levels of love with no room for critique, for nuance, or for keeping a distance from something but not shutting the door on it entirely. The world becomes binary—something is good or bad, beloved or hated. The simulation is as real as the original.
Without nuance, culture is just something to consume happily or condemn heartily. Meaning is pointless.
A High Fashion Moment
Prada sells bowling shirts. So do Dolce & Gabbana, Versace, and Gucci.
Sort of.
They call them “bowling shirts,” but they’re all variations on the camp collar short-sleeve shirt. The bowling name is a catch-all, a way of appealing to search engine algorithms after a few fashion influencers say the “bowling shirt is back.”
It’s back. But it never went away.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gabebullard.substack.com/subscribe
