The Meaning of Dad Aesthetics

Loneliness, ambiguity, and self-giving. Oh, my!

(Photo credit: Shutterstock)

I HAVE FOUR DAUGHTERS. In our house, the most challenging part of the day is the morning. My girls are early risers, and our morning routine more closely resembles the chaotic kitchen of The Bear than the cheerful family breakfast routine you see in cereal commercials. I usually get myself ready with whatever time is left after I’ve finished the essential tasks: packing lunches, clumsily braiding hair, refereeing conflicts, and trying to coordinate a pick-up and drop-off itinerary that resembles nothing so much as a municipal transit schedule. 

One winter morning, however, I found myself with some unexpected extra time, so I put a bit of extra effort into looking nice. I was going to be guiding my undergraduates through Montaigne’s Essays that day; surely the progenitor of the modern “art of living” would approve of this small indulgence. So I put on a white Oxford shirt and a tie, then layered on my new J. Crew “shacket”—a “heavy chamois workshirt” in a color described as “old forest”—and pulled on a nice pair of corduroys. Both shacket and pants had been purchased with Christmas money from my mom. 

I thought I looked pretty good, to be honest—good enough that I decided to pull out my phone and take a photo of my “fit” to post to my Instagram story. At this vulnerable moment, my 13-year-old, who is not allowed to have social media, interrupted me with a reminder to pick her up after student council. When she saw what I was doing, she laughed, and then, after barely a moment, asked a calamitous question: “Dad, why do you dress so preppy? What are you prepping for at your age—death?”

The pain of getting bodied by a 13-year-old is dulled just a bit if the child bodying you is your own daughter: You can at least take some pride in her wit. But this savage rhetorical blow also prompted some reflection: Why do I, a father of four pushing 40, dress like I’m auditioning for a nonspeaking role in Whit Stillman’s Damsels in Distress? Without realizing it, my daughter was participating in an unaccountably popular discourse—our endless cultural conversation about the aesthetic preferences, expression, and productions of dads.

Why, for instance, do we all love Master and Commander? How do we explain the enduring appeal of the “sad dads” of the National? Is New Balance, a dad shoe brand if there ever was one, poised to take over the sneaker world? And what do we make of Gen Z’s vexing fondness for “dadcore”? (As the Cut puts it, “Everyone is dressing like a dad now.”)

It wasn’t very long ago that “dad” was synonymous with a sort of anti-aesthetic, not with a particular style but with the studied absence of one. Dads’ pants were too high, their minivans were dorky, and before their “dad bods” were culturally transformed into vessels of sexual allure in the mid-2010s, their belly paunches were taken to signal that they had simply graduated from the desire to be desirable. Consider other tokens of dadliness, some of them still in limited circulation: business suits, Horatio Hornblower, John Ford, mustaches, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Hawaiian shirts, paintings of horses, paintings of ships, Hemingway, manicured lawns, Sinatra and Randy Travis, tube socks and jorts, fanny packs, M*A*S*H. The aesthetic signifiers of dads in the not-so-distant past indicated that these guys didn’t seem to care what anyone thought of them (admirable) or they didn’t have the time or energy to care because they had devoted it all to their kids (plainly heroic). 

The aesthetic situation of your contemporary dad is more complex, and I don’t think the change between paternal generations can be chalked up solely to Millennial self-absorption. Classic jorts-clad, lawnmowing dads—who are, in my view, usually better called “fathers”—seemed to think comparatively little about aesthetics because patriarchy gave them a more limited script to follow in performing their cultural role, which included a distance from the desire to appeal to their children and, to an extent, the opinions of others. Held in place in the world by thousands of years of cultural sediment, fathers had weightier things on their minds than beholding and being beheld. And they certainly didn’t have Instagram.

When men of a certain age start opining about beauty, you can’t help but worry it’s a prelude to some humiliating expression of midlife desperation, a variation on the theme of the narcissistic and ineffectual “longing man,” as writer and critic Merve Emre typifies him. But the aesthetics of contemporary dads are less troubling than those of the longing man because they seem to grow from a healthier existential seed: uncertainty about our place in the world. To be a dad nowadays is to have put away or lost the traditional patriarchal scripts while having to figure out how to approximately fulfill the role for which those scripts were written. 

So why do I dress so preppy? I suppose my pastel shirts and novelty socks (I’m trying to quit!) are something like an anti-business suit: If anything, I wish to downplay the imposing distance that age and experience can create. I want to show that I’m approachable—we can talk, you know? Some dads wear band t-shirts or ironic caps they hope someone will ask them about; others dress like they’re on a never-ending camping trip; some favor the suit, and signal through it an interest in starting a conversation about menswear with whoever is around; still others don athleisure and Hokas because they’d rather be running than sitting on a bus, but since they’re sitting here next to you, they’d love nothing more than for you to follow them on Strava or ask for training tips. The way we dress always communicates something, and in the main, dad fashion expresses a desire to close the gap between a dad and his kids—and, ultimately, between himself and the world. 

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I HAD BEEN RECITING the opening lines of Master and Commander with buddies for at least a decade before I learned it was a cliché for men, and especially dads, to love it. It is a foundation stone of the dad canon. Dads love the movie because of its straightforward depiction of male friendship, which is a balm in a time of crisis for such relationships.

After all, being a dad can make friendship much harder. Consider how a bedraggled dad comes across to present or potential friends, especially if they don’t have kids of their own: The dad has less energy, less time, less money, and an unbecomingly overt need for companionship. Just last month I joined two of my childless friends to watch Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, and, to my eventual embarrassment, slept through the entire thing. Dads can’t make a clean break for a night or a week away, either: Your enjoyment is compromised by how much you miss the very kids you need a break from, or by the guilt that your partner is doing all the work alone. 

The loneliness of contemporary fatherhood is exacerbated by the awareness that it doesn’t make any sense to be surrounded by people you love, people to whom you have devoted yourself as a caregiver, and to feel lonely nonetheless. How can you defend such an unaccountable feeling? This gives dad loneliness a strange aura of illicitness, and so we sublimate the feeling through interests in fashions, music, books, shows, and movies that both interpret that loneliness and offer alternatives to it. We all want to be Bluey’s dad, Bandit, or the “Dads on Duty,” but we can’t escape the feeling we’ve got more in common with the sad intensity of Bill Murray as Rushmore’s Herman J. Blume.

While it’s obvious that dads would love Master and Commander, the rest of the modern dad canon is a bit less predictable. It includes the films of Noah Baumbach, Richard Linklater, and Terrence Malick and the novels of John LeCarré, Jonathan Franzen, and Marilynne Robinson; video games like Breath of the Wild, Counter-Strike, and Mario Kart and auteur television made by women: 30 Rock, Girls, Fleabag. For music, there’s the War on Drugs, Wilco, Dawes, and Sufjan Stevens, but also Phoebe Bridgers, Joanna Newsom, and noted the National collaborator Taylor Swift.

As the deans of contemporary dad rock, the National occupies an illustrative place in the modern sad dad canon of music. Theirs is music for dads by dads. I can tell Matt Berninger has a daughter roughly the same age as my oldest—which he does—because of what the National’s duet with Taylor Swift did for my ability to convince my kids to let me put on The First Two Pages of Frankenstein when we’re shuttling around town in our Honda Odyssey. 

The National’s recent standout single, “Eucalyptus,” illustrates dad aesthetics almost perfectly: Berninger, a happily married dad notwithstanding his struggles with depression, sings about a breakup he hasn’t experienced. The song’s verses evoke a conversation dividing up a couple’s shared possessions—“What about the glass dandelions? / What about the tv screens?”—while interspersing breadcrumbs of middle-aged introspection like “what if I reinvented again?” and “what if we moved to New York?” All this leads up to a contrapuntal, passive-aggressive shout: “you should take it / if I miss it, I’ll visit!” It’s a sparse but ably realized vision of domestic loneliness, the kind you don’t need to go through a breakup to experience. The album ends with a tender, wistful instruction to “Send for me / whenever, wherever.” It’s parental chauffeuring in an existential key.

In the New Yorker’s recent profile of the National, Bridgers was quoted as observing “middle-aged men and teen-age girls” share a need to find themselves despite being “kind of self-conscious” about it. This might take us part of the way to understanding dads’ affinities for shows like Lena Dunham’s Girls and Tina Fey’s 30 Rock. As Dunham appreciator (and fellow dad of four) Ross Douthat has pointed out, Girls captures the ambivalence of young women negotiating the terra incognito of a world in which “any kind of confident male authority or presence was simply gone.” For Douthat, the show’s refusal to conform its narratives to the idealized egalitarian outcomes of the social liberal imaginary—to refuse a feminist utopia—is both a sign of Dunham’s artistic integrity and an argument against a facile acceptance of that imaginary as a destined point of arrival in a person’s moral evolution. But surely this logic applies to dads at least as much as it applies to young women: We love our songs of loss and change because they are our allotment of life in a post-patriarchal culture.

The appeal of Girls is, for my money, about the difficulty of friendship and community amid the sinking of an old order and the whirlpool of elective identities it left behind. For Hannah in the finale, as for contemporary dads, having a baby isn’t a straightforward answer to any of the modern questions surrounding identity—becoming a parent instead pushes you into another set of even more vexing questions. 30 Rock improbably (but fittingly) resolves Liz Lemon’s quest to “have it all” by figuring out that she needs to be “the dad” in her relationship. This a role she’s basically inhabited for all seven seasons: She’s always on the outside of intimacy, constantly pulled between tradition and liberation, and slowly facilitates the “unsharkulation” of Alec Baldwin’s Jack Donaghy as he surrenders the trappings of classic patriarchy and sails off toward an uncertain future. 

The dad canon accepts the irresolvable ambiguity that is so close to the heart of the contemporary sad dad. The specific virtues of Girls and 30 Rock also illuminate the failure of other shows that attempt to collapse that ambiguity into a simplistic narrative of growing, recovering, healing. Ted Lasso is the obvious example. The show, about an American football coach who brings his aw shucks, let’s all learn and have fun shtick to the cynical world of English football, puts its spotlight on a sensitive dad and is even replete with dad jokes, but I’ve never met a dad who could tolerate it beyond the first season. The problem with Ted Lasso’s treatment of dad loneliness and male friendship has to do with its palpable desperation to wish that loneliness away with therapy, the talking cure, which is presented as an elixir of spiritual life that one must simply have the courage to take in order to experience its beneficent effects. The show confuses its assertion of non-toxic masculinity with an account of the conditions in which such a thing as “non-toxic masculinity” becomes possible. Ted’s physical distance from his son is sad in a one-dimensional way; the fact that he might still feel it when he returns to Kansas City, and the idea that he won’t have a simple way to collapse that distance inside himself when he feels it, remained—sadly—unexplored.

As single, childless philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote, “Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the horizon?” In quiet moments, sad dads have been wondering this for a long time. While the modern dad canon leans into loneliness, Ted Lasso has nothing to say to us about life after the transvaluation of values.

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DADS ARE DRAWN to cultural productions, to art, that express and analyze loneliness through beauty. Whatever the metaphysical properties of the beautiful, experiences of beauty are often profoundly ambiguous. To behold something beautiful is to experience completion—Kant calls it “purposiveness without purpose”—in a way that leaves us more aware of our own incompleteness. We most often feel this in the ache of sexual longing, but the encounter with beauty is more interesting when it’s not related to eros. We want beautiful things, but what we want from them is simply not available to be taken or received. Dads, I think, live out this experience every day in our relationships to our kids. 

Not only are children beautiful—what is “cuteness” if not a kind of beauty that transforms the classically masculine “abstract rage to protect” into a desire to nurture—but as dads, we are permanently trying to close the gap we feel between our kids and ourselves. The loneliness of fatherhood comes not only from this need to secure affection, but from the concurrent awareness of the brevity of childhood—of mortality. Whereas moms begin from a place of intimacy—often literal, physical closeness—dads start from an emotional distance, and as we make our way in to develop more robust relationships with our children, the experience changes us, leaves us different. While I don’t think the modern category of the dad, as opposed to the father, is necessarily limited to men, becoming a dad is a catalyst—an identity cataclysm, even, for some—that men who have never questioned their sexual or gender identity might not otherwise experience. 

The specific loneliness of being a dad comes not only from the distance built into paternity, which dads work to close all their lives, but also from the moments you, as a dad, succeed in feeling the intimacy you’ve sought. In these best moments, you can see your kids as something beautifully complete without you. It might be an older sister giving her youngest sister an ice cream to replace one that had fallen on the ground, a perfectly executed sonatina, the fervid concentration on the face of a 4-year-old coloring in the entire picture—or even the moment your teenager quietly checks to make sure you weren’t really upset about being told you were too old to be preppy, how she thinks to say that you really did look nice.