What Is Tacky? Photo Essay

Warning: This post contains many "fair use" pictures and may overburden some devices.

This post is a long (and visual) answer to the question Pbird raised at https://howtomeowinyiddish.blogspot.com/2022/10/does-anybody-really-know-what-time-it.html: What does "tacky" mean to Americans?

It has two meanings. Literally, it describes things that are in the process of drying or setting, but are still sticky and unstable, like paint or glue. This is an objective meaning with proper translations, pegajoso in Spanish, collant in French, Google says klebrig in German, etc.

Figuratively, it's a subjective word describing a value judgment. Things that are "tacky" in this sense are second-rate, downscale, or unflattering. Voluntary acts that are "tacky" might be merely tasteless, or might be worse: nasty, mean, vulgar. Describing a person as tacky is a fairly harsh judgment. Anybody might acquire tacky belongings, and even wear them with pride if they were gifts from a loved one, but being a tacky person implies more selfishness and refusal to consider others. There's a song at the blog post linked that describes a person whose tacky clothes and car match his tacky character. He has forty-three bumper stickers, wears orange pants, and also takes off his shirt while waiting in line at the bank. How often this happens in real life, I don't want to know. 

One reader at the blog post linked said that in Mexican Spanish, which borrows English words freely, the translation for "tacky" is tacky. For other dialects of Spanish Google suggests vulgar and cursi, neither of which completely includes all the possible meanings of "tacky." French has lots of words that can express one figurative sense of "tacky" or another; Google recommends moche. For German Google recommends billig, with the warning that billig really means something closer to "cheap" and can describe a good bargain as well as a bad one.

One should not assume that a person whose clothes, car, or furniture are tacky is necessarily a tacky person, because everyone makes fashion mistakes now and then. It's almost as if little eddies of tackiness were swirling around in the atmosphere, waiting to settle on someone who usually either has good taste, or consults friends who do.

Consider our First Ladies. Though the First Lady's qualifications to set the standards of taste and style aren't supposed to be taken into consideration in evaluating the President's qualifications to serve as Chief Executive, the men selected as presidential material have almost always been married to women who were so qualified. 

It's even perceived as a barrier to the election of a woman President: we don't have a clear idea of exactly what the First Gentleman would do; he could hardly be a model of style and etiquette for women. As a vice-presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro really had a chance at the feminist vote in 1984, until her husband publicly confessed to white-collar crimes that were perceived as tacky. Hillary Rodham Clinton, likewise...despite the qualifications she had in abundance, and before she pled brain damage a second time and thus basically told me she's ready to retire, her biggest problem is a husband who is not a gentleman. Bill Clinton is so tacky as to border on being trashy. It's not the totally hollow "friendly" manner, or even the philandering, tacky as those things are; it's the way he always took credit for the few successes he achieved with other people's help, and always blamed the other person for the majority of bad ideas he developed with other people's help. Considering the Obama Administration, it would take a lot of nerve (and border on being tacky) for Michelle Obama to run, but one asset she would have is that, whatever mistakes he made as a Chief Executive, Barack Obama did manage to act like a gentleman. 

But if our First Ladies were not naturally good examples of etiquette and fashion, they all had abundant help to present themselves as such. 

Nevertheless. This visual documentation of their fashion mistakes begins in the 1940s because that was when reliable photographs became available. 

Was that really a pet rat perched on Eleanor Roosevelt's shoulder? We all knew she was from New York, but....

It was actually fashionable in the 1940s to drape not only the coats, but the actual stuffed bodies, of small furry animals around one's neck. The animals' eyes were usually replaced by beads and the carcasses were treated in ways that made them smell more of chemicals, some now banned as carcinogens, rather than carrion. 

For a close-up view of what may have been Mrs. Roosevelt's worst documented fashion mistake, plus a selection of her best quotes, visit https://www.scarymommy.com/eleanor-roosevelt-quotes .Most of these pictures come from photo archives, but the one above comes from a page worth reading.

Bess Truman was usually known for dressing well, and when this photo was taken she'd lived long enough to know that that neckline was too low. Sometimes there just isn't time to correct a mismatch between underwear and dress fit...

Mamie Eisenhower modelled the "New Look" version of long full skirts, fitted waists, hats, gloves, and trimmings. Most of the time she did it beautifully. What went wrong here was only partly the 1950s idea of seeking "balance" by wearing warm-toned colors if you had a cool-toned complexion. The hairstyle was pretty bad, too. It takes `a long time to grow enough hair to make that Jane Eyre hairdo work.

Jackie Kennedy could get away with almost anything. Some say the tackiest thing she was ever seen with was her second husband. Nevertheless, some fashions did nothing good for anybody.

At least it wasn't a miniskirt, but Time disclosed no valid reason why Lady Bird Johnson appeared to be wearing a tent. The stiff, curtain-like material that matched the curtains so well may be an explanation. Did she want to hide? From a husband who picked up dogs by their ears?

White was not Pat Nixon's color, and nobody believed it meant what an all-white dress was said to mean. She had such glamorous children.

Even as her hair faded, Betty Ford was still an Autumn who could make yellowish tan look good. And she was thin enough to get away with horizontal stripes. However, nothing could make the sagging of a no-waist dress look good. (And what about being seen with Tony Orlando? No comment!)

While she was First Lady, Rosalynn Carter was generally well advised, at least about clothes. (About causes and people...well, she had said nice things about Jim Jones.) Afterward, she showed the world that although it's possible for a fading redhead to look good in red, it's not possible for a fading redhead to look good in black.

Nancy Reagan generally dressed nicely, so why...? One possible reason: bad advice. To my eyes, everything about this outfit--the shiny yellow leopard print, the tight fit, the skimpy skirt, the button right over the bustline, the hooker heels--looks tacky as tacky can be. Nevertheless, the source from which I ganked this photo featured this dress on a list of Mrs. Reagan's best looks. 

If you ask Google, "Barbara Bush's fashion mistakes" were all made by the young one. The First Lady always looked like the perfect archetypal grandmother. As this unfortunate jacket shows, part of the archetypal grandmother's look can include sagging.

Most of Hillary Rodham Clinton's pantsuits were at least flattering to her bottom-heavy figure. Most, not all.

Laura Bush's image was so nicely nice that I find myself wondering whether she wore this outfit to avoid looking better than someone else. Lessons learned: A horizontal line right across the wide part of the hips, and another one right across the knees, will make anyone look short and fat (Mrs. Bush was neither); and with a skirt as skimpy as that one, you need flat heels.

A whole web site was dedicated to chronicling Michelle Obama's fashion mistakes. Actually, despite being much bigger and taller than the average woman, most of the time she looked pretty good. Then there were days like this one.

Graffiti is tacky. A graffiti-print raincoat is on the tacky side. A raincoat with a printed message that says "I don't care & neither do U" worn at the beach or for a stroll in the park, might be merely whimsical, but on the way to publicize weather disaster relief, this raincoat looked profoundly tacky. Even on Melania Trump.

No use hiding behind the big glasses, Jill Biden. You're old enough to know that a ruched, clingy bodice with an off-the-shoulder neckline looks tacky on any body...even if the way it looked on yours is the sort of wardrobe malfunction to which most of us older women can relate all too well. 

Finding these published images is easy. Type each First Lady's name in sequence, plus "fashion images," into a search engine, and up they pop. Each of these fashion mistakes leaped out from a page of classic, charming outfits. Each of these women was surrounded by people competing to supply her with perfectly fitted clothes in which she looked good; most of the time each of them did look good. And even so...tackiness happens.

As ordinary women grow older, it happens much more often. Recently I had one of those life-passage milestone moments of realizing how blessed I've been. Women who don't work in fashion, theatre, or television normally reach a point at which we don't need to spend hours looking at ourselves in the mirror every morning. We've seen our faces before; we know the people with whom we work have learned to live with them too. We looked carefully at what clothes did for us before we bought them, and now it takes us less than five minutes to grab something weather-appropriate out of the closet, throw it on, and rush out of the house. If able to leap right into an air-conditioned car we may arrive at work without sweat having soaked through the clothes yet. 

And then one day we get to work...and it's not just that the undergarment is giving out. It's that the body is giving out. We wash our hands, check the mirror just to make sure nothing went wrong on the way to work, and oh noooes, the shirt that always used to look decent on us now looks like Mrs. Biden's fashion disaster. Even clenching those middle-back muscles up until they cramp won't fix it any more. Even if everything about us, from our given name ("Jill" is derived from a Latin word meaning "baby fluff, a child/animal/chick so young it's not even grown adult-type hair or feathers yet"), through golden-blonde hair and the bone structure that goes with the longevity gene, through always being seen with someone ten years older, has been making us think of ourselves as young...one day, y'know, we're not. 

I'm proud of my white hair, as much of it as I can grow in between glyphosate episodes, but that saggy look is sooo tacky. 

Styles that wouldn't generate a blip on observers' tacky-radar screens when ordinary people wear them, one of Pbird's readers explained, look extra tacky on people who publicly voice tacky, hypocritically self-serving ideas. Tackiness oozes out of certain celebrities, soaking through their clothes. Beard stubble on Richard Nixon is tackier than beard stubble on the pizza guy. Sagging on Jill Biden is worse than sagging on me. 

That's nice, but then there's another theory of tackiness that holds that tackiness on oneself is worse than tackiness on other people. It's not so bad if Al Yankovic prints his resume in Comic Sans, because he's supposed to be a comic, but if the vagaries of the Internet cause my resume to open in Calibri, that's terrible, because I'm not supposed to make mistakes. It might be normal for a body as old as Jill Biden's to lose its shape, but if mine does, that's a disaster, because I'm young enough to be her...illegitimate sister (she was born the summer before my parents' wedding). Because Joe Biden looks so much older at eighty, people tend to forget that his wife is seventy; people of her own generation would like to forget that, if we're not seventy yet, we soon will be.

If you spend enough time trying to compare the relative awfulness of the effects of an eddy of tackiness on you, and the effects of the same eddy on someone else, you realize that spending any serious amount of time trying to compare lapses of personal style is a tacky, second-rate way to use the gift of life.

Tackiness is forgivable, really, except in the area of character. A person who was always considerate of others would be rare and special enough that person could probably start a fad for wearing pink sequined Crocs. (With pink and green plaid trousers and purple and orange striped socks, even.)

Traditionally older people sat around channelling our envy of younger people's health and energy into caustic comments on the tackiness of everything they did. That behavior pattern just might be even tackier than a sagging body is. Especially for a generation that's dominated the commercial media the way mine did. We don't think of our opinions on topics like eyebrow piercing, shaven heads, or miniskirts as judgmental about the younger generation at all, because we remember very well that those were our ways of looking tacky. Apart from the publishers, employers, scholarship committees, etc., who want "diversity" so desperately they'll consider White candidates only if those candidates claim to belong to "sexual minorities," another factor in the increase of reported gender confusion could be that that's about the only fad that's not a rerun of ours. (We didn't have cell phones but we had the urge to call friends every five minutes.) So it's not the opinion that bare navels look tacky that is tacky; that's a settled habit by now. It's the sitting on the sidelines, gossipping about other people, while failing to have lives of our own, that is irredeemably tacky. 

Which means this meditation on tackiness has gone on long enough, and should last me for several weeks.