While
the turning of the New Year brings resolute behavior to many of us, it doesn’t
seem to move the needle much when it comes to ill-advised fashion choices. Despite the availability of well-made,
stylish and flattering clothing at exceptionally reasonable prices, it seems
like an impossible majority of people still look like they dress themselves
without the assistance of friends, mirrors or indoor lighting. Fashion advice abounds, in almost every
conceivable medium, and yet, its like there’s been a conscious effort to avoid
any employment of the same. The only
explanation that I can come up with is that the abundance of “what to wear”
advice has become so overwhelming that no one’s bothered to offer a similar
volume of advice of the “what not to
wear” variety. As it turns out, however,
fashion is much easier to screw up than to get right, and so, in the hopes that
I might be the catalyst of a cascade of criticism, here are three things you almost certainly should
not be wearing:
1. Faux-ssociation. There have always been, and there will always
been certain pastimes, hobbies and other activities with a sort of cool caché;
an implicit sense of fashion forwardness that is validated solely by the
activity itself. For the west coast crowd,
this mantle has traditionally been borne by skaters and surfers and, in recent
years, by the mixed martial arts crowd.
Now, while I am perfectly happy to see these free souls find a way to
make a living doing what they love - by selling their duds to the public - the
sprawl of these styles (by way of shopping mall brands like Pac-Sun, Tillys,
Zumiez, etc.) has rendered them a staple of modern dress no more remarkable than
Levi’s, Old Navy or the Gap. But what is
even more troubling than the mainstreaming of this counterculture, is the almost
unbelievable swagger that it seems to engender – as though simply by wearing
the same clothes, these double-digit
IQ mouth-breathers have adopted the carefree and well earned bravado of these
modern-day cowboys. Sure, in my day, we
wore the apparel of our favorite heroes, both large and small, but I was also
sure that wearing my Hulkamania t-shirt didn’t make me a wrestler, nor did my
Air Jordans give me the ability to dunk a basketball. So to be clear, your Billabong shirt doesn’t
change the fact that the only things you’ve surfed are your parents’ couch and
the Internet; your skate shoes don’t make you a skater, they just make you too
lazy to buy grown-up shoes, and your TapOut shirt does not make you a fighter, they just make a jerk off with anger issues and
a grudge against your ex-girlfriend. The clothes don’t make the man, especially when they
come with screen-printed logos.
2. Big
Timers. As the cell phone has become
more and more ubiquitous, it has come to replace any number of previously
cherished personal items: our calendars, our address books, and perhaps someday
soon, even our wallets. But perhaps
nothing it has replaced has been so obvious or unexpected as the
wristwatch. I truly can’t remember the
last time I was compelled to wear one of these anachronistic pieces. There is just no need, as the accurate time is always at my fingertips, just the push of a button
away. And so, the watch has ceased to
function as a necessity, and is reduced to solely
a fashion accessory. You might think
that, relegated to this status, the watch would become a subtle accent piece –
the pocket square of jewelry, if you will.
But of course, you would be wrong.
The modern day wristwatch has grown to ludicrous proportions, both in
size and "bling." And as women have
taken to wearing watch sizes previously reserved for men, men, not to be
outdone, now wear watch faces that could serve double duty as drink
coasters, with numbers large enough to be read from across the room. Look, the bottom line here is simple, if the
diameter of your watch face, in inches, starts with the number two or higher, there’s simply no chance
that you have anything of value to offer the world, and you may as well just wear that
watch into traffic – at least that way it can finally serve a useful purpose,
noting the time of death of one more douche.
3. Size
Shmedium. It’s not like I don’t get it. I was a late bloomer. I get that an appropriately small t-shirt can
lend a measure of credibility to a torso that just doesn’t have any hope in
something that actually fits. And there is a time in a man's life when this is the sort of
thing I could overlook – and that time is high
school. So unless you’re making
Friday night plans to see the football game, or trying to figure out who to take to the
Prom, you really need to find a shirt that actually fits you. There is nothing more desperate and pathetic
than a grown man wearing a shirt
tight enough that you can count his ribs.
Seriously, who do you think you’re fooling? Here’s a quick test, gents: raise your arms
above your head – if your shirt has now produced a bare midriff it’s not the right size. Want to know a secret? Women can tell how big you are no matter what you wear. That’s right, just like black stretch pants that have a better chance of hiding a chalk stain than a big butt – they’ve got us
figured out – and now you just look like a five foot ten inch tall stack of
self-esteem issues. Honestly, a shirt
that tight couldn’t be any less masculine if it was hot pink, bedazzled and
covered in rainbow glitter. What’s
worse, they actually cut and size modern
t-shirts to produce the look you're going for – so you’re only foiling the efforts of much more talented designers (and looking even dumber in the
process) by refusing to size up. Do us
all a favor, ask for some size help at the store, and for the sake of all of
us, get the “Large.”
* *
*
Despite
all of the options out there, it’s
really not that hard to figure out what not
to wear. All you need to do is put
yourself in that same cruel and relentless mindset you used to take to middle
school every day. You know, that awkward
time in your life where you going through so many changes that the only thing
that satiated your own terror was pointing what was wrong with everyone else? Yup, that’s the one. Channel that inner demon child and sidle up to the
closest full-length mirror and take a good long
look. If your mind begins to spin out of
control with the requisite flood of mockery, it’s time to head back into the
closet and try again – maybe this time with the lights on. This process can be repeated until the only
decent insult you can come up with is: “you look like a big stupid grown up” – then
you’re finally ready to head out the door. Because
keeping in touch with your inner child is only a good idea if you don’t let him
pick out your clothes.
Posts
