Haiti Style

Article from January 21, 2010, reprinted in today's Sunday Styles section of the New Yotk Times

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Disaster Coverage Without Having to Roll Up the Sleeves


TIGHT SHOTS Sanjay Gupta, left, with Anderson Cooper during a report on Haiti.

By GUY TREBAY
Published: January 21, 2010

ABOUT the last thing on anyone’s mind since an earthquake turned Haiti into a scene from Dante was what people were wearing. The indelible images showed dazed survivors caked in dust, garments in tatters or altogether torn away.

Yet an odd thing happens in a disaster, and that is how it bares the underlying language of clothes. It underscores the information that clothes traditionally transmit about where people stand in society, who they are and what tasks they perform. Particularly in Haiti, where the social fabric was frayed at the best of times, the sight of people in official-looking garb suddenly became a visible symbol of the stability the earthquake destroyed.

“No one is focusing on the semiotics of fashion” in a disaster, said Valerie Steele, the director of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. “But there’s an important function, when people are desperate for some kind of infrastructure, in someone wearing a white coat or some kind of quasi-uniform.”


CNN's Jason Carroll reports on an aftershock that rattled Haiti on Wednesday morning.

For the soldiers, doctors, aid workers, United Nations forces, firefighters and search-and-rescue teams on the ground in Haiti, uniforms are standard issue. What responders hang on their backs is less personal choice than functional tool.

Journalists, on the other hand, are less bound by conventions — or have been, anyway, since the post-Watergate era, which was about the last time most reporters felt the need to wear a dress or a tie in the field.

The slow process of dismantling the sartorial clichés of the trade probably began even earlier, when somebody retired the fedora with a press pass tucked into its hatband. Next to go was the Harris tweed sports coat, then the blue button-down oxford, and the belted Burberry trench coat worn by male and female journalists alike. If journalists in Iraq still wear heavy armor for whatever protection it provides against I.E.D.s, certain journalists in Haiti are also armored, but with outsize pecs and gym-bunny arms.

Viewers tuned into CNN’s blanket coverage of the earthquake this last week were bound to be struck, at some point, by the appearance of correspondents who looked a lot less like the usual harried, disheveled examples of those in the profession than like bendable action dolls.

You could call it the Anderson Cooper effect. Mr. Cooper has rarely missed an opportunity throughout his career to showcase his buff physique (as anyone knows who remembers him stripping to a bathing suit to quiz Michael Phelps.) But Mr. Cooper is no longer the only CNN correspondent with a self-conscious taste for form-fitting charcoal T-shirts, accessorized with a tiny microphone clipped at the neck.

Looking somewhat sheepish about it, a newly sleek Dr. Sanjay Gupta moved through the ruins of Port-au-Prince wearing a snug gray T-shirt, his hair styled in the obligatory CNN crop. His colleague Jason Carroll, reporting on Wednesday’s aftershock, and looking like a guy who had dropped to the ground and done 20 quick pushups before going on air, wore a T-shirt so snugly revealing it called into question whether a disaster zone is the right place to flaunt one’s gym physique. A spokeswoman for CNN declined to comment, but in journalism, as in most things, old standards of decorum are clearly on the wane.

“We know the rules of what journalists look like have changed a lot,” Ms. Steele said. They have shifted from the military style favored by, say, John Hersey, who was pictured on a United States postage stamp in a combat helmet and uniform. “That’s simply a part of where society in general is going,” she added, referring to the shift away from formality and the hierarchies suggested by wise old owls like Walter Cronkite, with their sandy mustaches, their elbow patches and pipes, toward sexy entertainment news and correspondents with “that international superstar journalist look.”


CNN's Gary Tuchman reports from a retirement home in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where the struggle for survival continues.