Roger White celebrates a third printing of an etiquette book with some key pointers:
The relationship between an artist’s work and attire should not take the form of a direct visual analogy. A stripe painter may not wear stripes. …. The artist’s sartorial choices are subject to the same hermeneutic operations as are his work. When dressing, an artist should imagine a five-paragraph review of his clothes—the attitudes and intentions they reveal, their topicality, their relationship to history, the extent to which they challenge or endorse, subvert or affirm dominant forms of fashion—written by a critic he detests.
And:
Communicating an attitude of complete indifference to one’s personal appearance is only achievable through a process of self-reflexive critique bordering on the obsessive. Artists who are in reality oblivious to how they dress never achieve this effect.
Once that is under control, the artist can move on to proper introductions and “netiquette.”
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