To Save or Splurge?

Chapter 73

Last week's installment ended on a bit of a downer, tone-wise, with the sombre warning that the totality of our modern, advanced way of life will come crashing down about our ears if the delicate infrastructure of electronics and communication is disrupted -- and something as simple as an EMP will disrupt it quite thoroughly.

Let's continue in that dark vein this week, and we'll do so by looking at the economies of dressing well, and in the process cast a sideways glance at complete global economic collapse -- an utter financial meltdown.

It's not a foregone conclusion, but unless something is done very shortly, money in general will be tight for everyone, no matter where you live. America is borrowing and spending itself to bankruptcy, then through it, and far beyond, with deficits in the trillions, and no end in sight. The Euro is faring no better: the financial experiment that is the European Union is rapidly devolving into a shell-game between national banks.

A word is beginning to be bandied about more and more, and that word is austerity. It sounds drastic; so drastic that France took the "damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead" stance recently of ignoring the problem's existence entirely. The more socialist one's country leans, the more difficult it is for one to fathom decreasing one's reliance on the government; but decrease one must, if a debt problem is to be resolved.

The solution to over-spending is very simply to spend less; this works remarkably well with individuals, families, nations, or planets. Simple self-restraint, self-control, and budgeting -- in other words, living within your means -- is called for. Much of this can be achieved on a national level through one's individual actions. To continue the theme of last week: be content with your lot in life. Your most valuable commodity is time. Live with a conscious attention to the amount of free time that modern technology affords you, and take renewed possession of that leisure time and enjoy it to the full.

You may need to take a step back and evaluate if your financial reach exceeds your grasp. Far too many men are living lives pursuing huge bankrolls while simultaneously racking up huge debts. Are you one of those men who equate contentment with acquisition of stuff? Perhaps you should dial back on the "bigger and better" and the rat race, and simply pay off your existing debts. You may find life more comfortable with less stuff, plenty of leisure time, and completely in the financial black.

Voluntary austerity isn't as drastic as it sounds in our Futurific twenty-first century. In a remarkable study, it has been shown that as far as amenities and quality of life are concerned, the typical "poor" household in America is living the middle-class standard of 10 to 15 years prior. In other words, the middle-class luxuries of 1970 became de rigeur for those living at the poverty line in 1980. This means the "poor" of 2012 are equal to the "middle class" of 2002. The "poor" of 2002 are equal to the "middle class" of 1992, and so on.

The argument becomes largely academic when you realize the poorest Americans today live like kings compared to men of a mere century ago, with access to unimaginable luxuries like refrigeration, air conditioning, cable televisions, automobiles, and cell phones. For that matter, most Americans "in poverty" live in larger houses with more amenities than most Europeans. And they live in regal ease when compared to today's average in underdeveloped third world countries.

Humans have lived remarkably hard lives for millennia. The past hundred years have made men soft. Understanding that is the first step to appreciating what you have and making the most of it. If governmental decisions or terrorist activity take that soft living away from you, it will be a less jarring step in re-adjusting to your new life, without drastically changing your quality of life where it counts.

Applying this to what you wear isn't a great step of logic, but it does bear mentioning. It is possible, nay, imperative, necessary, and needful, to be properly dressed no matter your financial standing. A Captain of Industry may be laid low by a financial collapse and subsequent hyperinflation; a factory worker will have nothing to do without electrical infrastructure; a disabled vet will be left with his savings when the government can no longer write a check. There need not be any difference between the attire of these three examples, amongst themselves, or on either side of their fortunes; nor need the world plunge into Mad Max-style skins and rags.

The prevalent byline on the Blogosphere of Men's Fashion is usually something along the lines of "Buy the very best that you can afford." This is, I think, overly simplistic. Not the least of the errors is equating price with quality. The larger question is what defines "affordability?" Most men think this means 'take as much money as you can part with and buy as few things as possible.' Not so -- not so at all!

Let's look at when to save and when to splurge on your clothing, and how.

Surprisingly to some, I do not recommend buying bespoke as a rule. The level of art and exactitude and quality in a bespoke suit is unmatched. A bespoke suit is something akin to a lifetime commitment, a big-ticket purchase to be passed down to your heirs. Do you really want to wear the same suit for forty years? Will your body shape even remain constant that long? Do you want to be known as "That guy with that suit?" It may be more cost-conscious to rotate through more suits more often, purchasing and moving on, and retaining a tailor to alter your suits as necessary. We've discussed taking your own measurements,  going on quick-strike hunts at secondhand shops, and focusing on classic fit and style in previous installments, also covered in the Book.

Purchase used, hardy, provenanced articles, fine-tune the fit yourself or with a tailor's assistance, and rotate your suits out every couple of years, and you will have a personalized, elegant, classic, and continually updated look without appearing nouveau riche or "trying too hard." The same goes for ties, coats, trousers, sweaters, and shirts. Buy what fits, on the cheap, and rotate it out periodically.

The exception to the rule, the one time that bespoke is practically required, is formal wear. A dress suit is not the time to skimp; it is an long-term investment and splurge-worthy. Don't even think about wearing white-tie-and-tails without having it made for you. The cost will be breathtaking, but if you are invited to a white-tie event you will be able to afford it. Ditto the boiled-front shirt, detachable collar, shirt studs, cuff links, pumps, et cetera. Think of a dress suit as the masculine monetary equivalent to the wedding dress -- the difference being, if a woman is lucky she will wear a wedding dress only once; if a man is very lucky he will wear tails more than once.

Dinner suits should be bespoke as well, but as the cut is much more forgiving, bespoke is within the financial reach of the average man -- and the opportunity to wear it is much greater than for a dress suit. At the very least, in a pinch, a good tailor should be able to take a "bespoke-but-not-for-you" dinner jacket and alter it accordingly. The pique shirt and accessories are not a place to skimp, either. This really is an example of a suit you will buy once and use throughout your life, so you'd better make it count.

On the issue of undergarments, save; don't splurge. Hand-woven silk tee shirts and elaborate Italian socks may seem luxurious, but anything directly against your skin should be treated as disposable. It will wear out just as quickly as the cheap stuff from the box stores. If you pay a premium for fancy briefs, you will be temped to hold onto them until they are past their prime. Don't wait until your tee shirts turn grey, your elastic loses its snap, and the heels wear through your socks! Rotate them out for new items before these things happen, and you will feel better with fresher underthings more often.

Shoes, on the other hand, are an area in which to splurge. New shoes that fit and conform properly to your feet, are not only supportive and comfortable, they are better for your back and your posture. You should have several pairs in rotation, for shoes need to rest after being worn, and they should be treated to proper shines regularly. With care, shoes are an investment that will last for decades. The old saying is true: you're on your feet all day, so you need to treat them well.

Hats walk the fence between the realm of "splurge" and "save." Most new hats for everyday use are either too expensive to wear with insouciant abandon, or too cheap and shoddy to be any good. A good, lightly-worn vintage hat can be as well-built and serviceable as new, but yet not so dear that it will ruin your day if it blows off into the mud. A hat with some years on it can be re-steamed and bashed to your preference, will fit with a comfortable and broken-in "set," and can take a day's worth of constant doffing and donning. If you are a true hatophile, splurge on "Sunday hats," a black Homburg to wear with your formals, or a specialty new or refurbished hat for special occasions.

Enough of the doom and gloom! Next week we will eliminate the negative, accentuate the positive, and get back to the business of dressing well, despite the ridiculousness that happens around us. Stay tuned!

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The Futurists Lied To You

Chapter 72

For those of you who haven't been paying attention, we're well into the first quarter of the twenty-first century. Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, we've been told how much easier our future was going to be. Books, magazine articles, and lavish displays at dozens of World's Fairs have assured us that the future was going to be one of push-button ease and luxury. The newest and most ingenious time and labor saving devices were going to save us hours of tedium each and every day in the next fifty years. Well, the "next fifty years" came and went, then came and went again, several times. We're well beyond the year 2000, darn it. The future is here, now. We're living smack in the middle of it...so why aren't we living like the futurists claimed we were going to by now?

We should be saving so much time with our time-saving stuff that we'd be living in Utopia, where the largest problem we have is figuring out what to do with all of our free time. So why do we as a collective society work more than ever, with less free time than ever, and multitask our way into endless, stressful, thankless toil? You hardly see anyone who truly enjoys themselves on their down-time anymore -- nose down, buried in cell phones, texting away, pushing the next contract, making the next connection, constantly, always working. You'd think we had fewer hours in a day than ever before.

The futurists got it wrong, for one simple reason: they underestimated the power of human nature. For humans are stupid; yes, stupid and greedy. Instead of enjoying our newfound leisure hours, we pack the extra time with more work. Life in centuries past forced us to relax from time to time: for example, when the sun went down, you stopped working, because you couldn't see. Time saving devices have not given us more free time: they've taken away what free time we had, and filled it with a twenty-four-hour work cycle that follows us wherever we go. And stupid and greedy humans that we are, we will work ourselves to exhaustion -- because we can. It's a never-ending pursuit of more money, to buy more stuff, with even less time to enjoy the stuff we have.

Lest you think you have stumbled upon a socio-economic essay; no, this is still about dressing like an adult, and here's my point: dressing properly is dismissed by many otherwise intelligent men, because it is a "waste of time." Busy men, that are too busy to put on a shirt, tie a necktie, go shopping for a decent pair of shoes, or have their suits made by a tailor. Busy men, who can only be bothered to wear the same childrens' clothing day after day, unless the occasion calls for a formless, shapeless sack suit bought off-the-rack, sight unseen, from a warehouse of identical bland suits.

Balderdash, I say! It is high time you freed yourself from the endless speeding treadmill of labor-saving-devices, and let those same devices actually save you some time. Start living in the future you deserve; the future that you should have been living all along. Like the frog in the kettle who allows himself to be slowly par-boiled, you are unaware of the cumulative effect of a hundred years of innovations that, instead of freeing your life, pack your life ever tighter around you.

For thousands of years of modern human history, we'd done things pretty much the same way. Only in the last few decades of the last hundred years has our way of life profoundly changed. The power of steam multiplied our ability to produce work a thousandfold. Then a century later, the power of electricity increased our breadth of communication a thousandfold. And now, another century later, the power of the Internet, fueled by electricity driven by steam, has increased our breadth of knowledge a thousandfold. It's easy, too easy, to assume that the world we have created for ourselves in the past five years is indispensable, that our lives would be unlivable without the constant lifeline of communication and electrons that connect us.

Strip the layers of invention away from the things you take for granted, and discover how much leisure time you really have. You awake in the morning, and it is chilly, so you turn on your electric furnace, and within seconds warm air is blasting out of your register vents all over the house. You've already saved time: it would have taken a good ten minutes to pad down to your freezing basement to manually shovel coal into your furnace from the scuttle, and then you have to wait for your radiators to boil. That radiator system is itself a time-saving device: you'd save a good half-hour in not having to crack anthracite and carry it in buckets to your fire grates, revive the ashen embers from the previous evening, and repeat for every room in the house. And coal grates saved time; for a fireplace demands you split and carry wood, arrange the tinder, and light and care for the fire, for each fireplace, which can easily take an hour if your wood is even slightly damp. So there you are -- as soon as you awaken, you have freed as much as an hour of your schedule. Consider that an electric furnace is completely maintenance-free, and doesn't require polishing and cleaning of soot and ash, and several more hours are saved every week.

Next, you eat breakfast. Mister Coffee (or that most sublime of British inventions, the Teasmade) has your cuppa ready for you, and your English breakfast is out of the refrigerator and ready in a flash thanks to your microwave oven and stovetop. You then put the dishes in an automatic dishwasher. And just like that, you've freed up another hour, without having to stoke the ovens, prep the meal, and clean up afterward.

Then you turn your attention to hygiene. You hop in a shower, soap up in steamy water, and you're done, saving you the trouble of drawing a bath, heating water on the stove, or filling a wash-basin. The benefits of internal plumbing alone save at least fifteen minutes, and an electric shave saves you ten minutes of stropping your straight razor and whipping up lather.

So what about all this I'm-too-busy talk now, Mister Big Shot? You've barely rolled out of bed, and you have compressed a morning routine that would have taken an hour or two into a mere twenty minutes. Enjoy your leisure time. Don't try to pack more stuff in -- use the time that you've actually saved, by not cracking coal and stoking your oven. Read a book, take a stroll, or more importantly, put some extra time, effort, and thought into dressing for the day.

This is just the tip of the metaphorical iceberg. You can go through your entire day and find all sorts of "lost time" that is simply squeezed out and re-filled by all the modern stuff. You perhaps take for granted that you have a car that starts instantly and takes you effortlessly along broad concrete byways? Consider the half-hour you save every time you turn the key, by not having to pack grease cups, top off oil and water, lubricate the valvetrain, prime the cylinders, and crank the engine. Think of the time you save by driving at 60 MPH on smooth roads, instead of 25 MPH on plank roads and rutted wagon trails. And then add another half-hour of free time simply by not having to vulcanize a rubber patch on the side of the road to repair the inevitable blowout. Even as slow and cantankerous as they may seem today, the earliest automobiles were a blazing time improvement over the time it took to tack and saddle Ol' Gray, and were much faster than a horse, even at full gallop. For thousands of years, life moved at a walking pace. Remember that the next time you're in line at the airport: you're not wasting half an hour in line -- you're saving two weeks.

Going to send a text? Email? Phone call? We take instant communication for granted -- enjoy the time it saves you. Try waiting for a clear party line, then getting an operator to connect you. Still, that was a massive time-saver compared to walking down to the Western Union office to have a telegram tapped out and delivered hours later. And that was lightning fast compared to a letter, that may take weeks to reach its recipient.

But it's the Internet that has changed the world. There's an entire generation now that can't conceive that a scant couple of decades ago, if you wanted to learn something, you went to the library and spent hours poring over card catalogs, and miles of shelves of the Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature. If you were lucky, you found a lead, and if you were very lucky, the library would have it available. Otherwise, you just didn't discover what you wanted to learn. Having the entire repository of the planet's knowledge at your very fingertips IS The Future. Too bad we chose to use it for LOLcats.

Don't get me wrong; I love the Internet, and all the labor-saving devices that we have at our disposal. I'm not one of those guys that wants to live a retro-Edwardian gas-lit lifestyle. The Internet makes this blog possible, after all. A weekly missive like this one, read the world over, would be impossible otherwise, especially with a complete accessible backlog of previous weeks' installments. Otherwise, Dress Like A Grownup! would probably be a mimeographed zine, run off and distributed once a month, which would take many extra hours a week. Mimeographing would certainly be a time-saver over devoting my life to cutting copperplate engravures, typesetting, printing flyers, and mailing them out, which would take the better part of a week -- unless I got a deal with the weekly newspaper, which might sell me space, but only for local readership.

So when you get home after work and turn on the lights, think of the time you've just saved over lighting a gas mantle, which saved time over lighting an oil lamp, which saved time over lighting candles. It's a century-long piggyback of inventions that were unthinkable in the mid-nineteenth century.

The "Electrical Servants" of the turn of the last century do more to save our time than anything else in the history of modern man. Embrace the mid-century wonder of machines that do your work for you...but don't use them as an excuse to pack in more work. Live the Future as it should be lived. Work in moderation, enjoy the fruits of your labor, let the machines do the work that you would have had to do otherwise, and bask in the leisure time that you will find surrounds you. If you are unsure what work is being saved that men of the last century had to do with their bare hands, use the Internet and look up some history.

Before long, you will find time for many sartorial pursuits that you may have previously thought you were far too "busy" for. Victorian gentlemen were ridiculed for having time to change clothes several times per day...but you may notice that when you take true advantage of your "time-saving devices," you have more leisure time than Victorian gentlemen ever did. Time for careful dressing in the morning, certainly. But also time to get fitted for a new pair of good shoes, and find a tailor to alter your clothes. Time to expand your wardrobe to fit your new leisure pursuits. Now that we're into the torrid heat of summer, it's a fine time to attune your wardrobe for outdoor vs. air-conditioned activities, and change accordingly throughout your day. Perhaps most importantly, you have time to change clothes and sit down for a proper dinner with your family. Even time to spend in the evening with a smoking jacket and a good book, before changing into a dressing gown for bed.

Remember, one EMP will make it all go away...so take advantage of the benefits of electricity while it lasts. Our modern future-wonderful life is built entirely on an increasingly fragile card-house framework of delicate electronics to support our communications, transportation, and services -- and if anything happens to that card house, we would find ourselves instantly plunged into a pre-Industrial nightmare. And on that cheery thought, I shall leave you until next week!

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Proving the Rule

(Part Thirteen of the series, "Dressing the Average Guy.")

Chapter 71

You might think this week would be my traditional look at recent formal awards ceremonies in the media, for there have been a couple noticeably influential ones: The Tonys and the Cannes festival. In fact, that was my plan going into this week: but something much more interesting has come up. Besides, we've covered formal wear quite a lot this year, and there's much more to Dressing Like A Grownup than mere tuxedos.

The impetus for this week's change of venue was a typical sort of what-are-the-stars-wearing feature on the web's MSN. At first blush, just another filler article chock-full of jiggling Kardashians. "Stars who don't dress their age," or some such fluff. Nothing to see here, move along. But then, a fascinating subtext hit me across the face, and I knew it had to be this week's installment -- for this is a perfect, in-your-face, textbook example of the Second Great Secret of Dressing Well.

For those of you unfamiliar with the format, last year, I posited Great Secrets, that the average guy who was just getting started along the path to sartorial excellence needed to know. The first one would seem to be common sense, despite millions of men who ignore it: "The purpose of clothing...is to make you look better than you really do." The second one is cautionary in nature, and a warning: "Left to himself, a man will dress back to the era in which he was happiest, or imagined himself happiest."

So let's look at some fabulously wealthy famous men -- who are in the media's glare, have the public's eye, and can easily afford to wear anything, absolutely anything, they want. Given an entire planet full of fashion with hundreds of years of clothing history, what do these men choose to wear when they could wear anything at all?

Let's start with John Christopher Depp, II. Johnny is 49 years old now, born June 9, 1963. He got his start in the mid-eighties on 21 Jump Street, but didn't really hit his stride until he teamed up with Tim Burton on Edward Scissorhands in 1990, when he was 27 years old. What followed was Depp's decades-long golden era of movie after successful movie. Now observe his choice of clothing. Does this look like the suit of a 50 year old screen actor, or a 27 year old bleeding-edge hipster circa 1990? Behold the Second Great Secret in action!

Next, observe Calvin Cordozar Broadus, Jr., a.k.a. "Snoopy Diggetty Dogg" or something like that. He styles himself as some sort of singer. He was born on October 20, 1971. Snoop was a Crip gang member while in high school. Shortly after graduation, he was arrested for cocaine possession and spent six months in the cooler. His music career began in 1992, at age 21. "Doggystyle" catapulted him to unimaginable worldwide fame. His attire? Still that of a child: arrested, so to speak, in his late teens in the early ' 90s, despite now being 41 years old.

Similarly, Robert Matthew Van Winkle was born October 31, 1967. In 1990, as "Vanilla Ice," at age 23, "To the Extreme" became the fastest selling hip hop album of all time. (Let that sink in.) After a failed suicide attempt in 1994, he re-evaluated his life, got married, and focused on motocrossing and jet skiing for awhile. He then studied real estate and renovates and sells houses. But do you see a 45 year old realtor here? Nope, from the askew hat to the annoying soul patch to the sloppy skate duds, what you see is a hippy-hoppy teenage kid in the late 1980s -- which was Vanilla Ice's Camelot.

What is this, an age-progression of Miley Cyrus? No, it's fifty-nine year old Philip Andre Rourke, Jr., who was born September 16, 1952. Poor Mickey was perhaps too good at everything he did. From 1964 to 1972, Rourke was an amateur boxer tallying up 27 wins (17 by knockout) and only 3 defeats. He then turned his attention to acting, and by the mid-1980s, thanks to Kim Basinger and 9½ Weeks, he was a bona fide leading man. In 1991, Rourke decided that he "had to go back to boxing." Following some messy bouts in the ring and facial reconstructive surgery, in 1995 he retired from boxing and returned to acting, where plastic surgery was more "voluntary" and less "life-saving." With multiple acting awards and boxing wins under his, er, belt, this outfit is befuddling. It's certainly not the dinner attire of your average 60 year old male. Whether it's that of a brash 18-year old boxer in 1970, or just the sad result of forgetting your pants due to one too many blows to the head, is something only Mickey knows.

Adam Richard Sandler was born September 9, 1966. He was hired as a writer for Saturday Night Live in 1990, when he was 24. After making the move to the front of the camera, he rode the wave of popularity to the silver screen in the late 1990s, in such films as Billy Madison, Happy Gilmore, The Waterboy, and others. He's 46 today, but his attire still dates him as a post-teenager in the mid 1990s in New York, churning out jokes for cash.

Steven Victor Tallaricco was born on March 26, 1948. This is perhaps the most tragic example of slavery to the Second Great Secret. Aerosmith's run on the airwaves was from 1970 to 1978: in many ways, Steven Tyler's music defined that decade, for better and worse. When the folks at American Idol (for those worldwide who didn't know, yes, we have one too, and we're just as sick of it as you are) rolled Steven Tyler out of cryogenic storage and defrosted him to serve as judge, apparently no one told him what decade he was in, or how old he is. This poor 64 year old AARP retiree is rattling around in the glam rock threads of a 25 year old in the 1970s, right down to the danglers and chains, the lank greasy hair, the platform heels, and the bell-bottoms made of Chrysler upholstery. It's just a constant reminder of just how old and out of touch he is, and how much he desperately wants to be that young man again.

Compare to William James Murray, born September 21, 1950.  Everyone knows Bill's Golden Years: beginning in 1976, at age 26, on Saturday Night Live, and a string of successful motion pictures through the 1980s, including Meatballs, Caddyshack, Stripes, Tootsie, Where The Buffalo Roam, and the Ghostbusters franchise. So it should surprise no one by now that Murray's "Festival of Plaid" suit at Cannes this year places him sartorially squarely in his late 20s, and in the early 1980s. But where Bill Murray differs from similarly-aged Steven Tyler is in the execution. Instead of a sad sort of historical costume, it evokes the past without being slave to it. This is not a bad suit at all. Does it show Murray as a 62 year old guy lost in the 1980s? Sure, but more as an homage: he is able to have fun with it. It follows the strictures of the Second Great Secret, but Murray makes it work for him. It's a good example of color and pattern matching, and as a breezy summer suit, it works as a whole without being ocularly jarring. In short, he uses elements of that era over which he ruled, and incorporates them in such a way that it becomes comfortable for him, while keeping the cut and style thoroughly classic. In other words, a proper method of the working-out of the Second Great Secret.


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