Does anyone else out there find it as amusing as I do that whenever a topic to do with Lubavich comes up the Lubavitchers online always end up saying, or at least intimating, how great they are, regardless of what the truth is?
As I’ve written in the past in other threads, I’ve been around Lubavicth circles for a long time and I know quite a bit from firsthand sources. The reason that it has become the trend for Lubavichers to wear their shirts out – it wasn’t always that way – is definitely because the Baal HaTanya holds that the beged has to be worn when it is an amah wide, regardless of how wide it is when pulled tight. I first heard this many many years ago from a mashpia in Morristown, and since then I have heard it from numerous mashpi’im in numerous cities all over the world.
It has nothing to do with the “tziyur of a real chassid…” or the lack of interest in gashmiyus and chitzoniyus, as mentioned by someone earlier. Go to Vizhnitz or Belz and look at the chnyuks there whose hats are bent out of shape, whose long jackets are torn, patched and stained, whose shoes are scuffed and worn down. They all have no interest in gashmiuys yet they all have their shirts tucked in.
And do those Lubavichers who “aren’t interested in gashmiyus” ever forget to put on their pants or their socks. Rather it is an image they try to cultivate, and they certainly have their own colleagues fooled into believing that they don’t care about gashmiyus.
I once heard the story of a Rebbe who walked into his beis midrash in Europe and saw one of his chassidim wearing a patched and ntorn a kappote stained with herring etc. The Rebbe stopped in front of him and asked, “How long did you have to stand in front of the mirror to perfect that look?”
Interesting too how the very chassidishe wives of these same very chassidishe mashpi’im don’t have the same disdain for “looking nice” (I don’t want to go there again. If you don’t know what I mean look at chabad’s own websites about the problems of dress vd”l.)