One must use extreme caution when weaving symbolism into their satorialism. Colour, texture and fit form an aesthetic logic divorced from reality. The cufflinks relate to the suit but to nothing outside of it. Not the environment, not your job and not the occasion. Clothing is an exquisite grammar happily lacking the distraction of content.
I do not believe in appropriate dress. Only in varying degrees of logical dress.
Where there is an isomorphism between cloth and reality, I believe it should always go to our biological roots rather than our cultural surroundings. No matter what it is, anything that reinterprets that connection might succeed. Anything that fails that test will simply fail.
Perhaps this is due to some aspect of my nature as expressed by a different sort of test. The internet might be right and I might be an INTP architect. (Should the RCMP be reading this, I believe I just saved your analysts some profiling time by using your diagnostic tool upon myself.) As if such a crude little instrument could diagnose me. You know, a census taker once tried to test me . . .
But aside from, because of and to express my personal predilections, I believe symbolism should always be treated with a great deal of caution. If one starts thinking beyond their suit, they may quickly find themselves in a costume.
As an example, I saw a fellow at fashion week who wore a nice suit. The problem is that he was dressed exactly like a 1930s gangster. The suit did not express its fundamental logic or the internal logic of his character. Rather it was a recreation of a cultural archetype that he related to. That is a costume.
I could leave the house dressed exactly as an Edwardian gentleman or in Roman toga. I could have a replica of Beau Brummel’s suit built. But, as Dandyism.net warns: “It’s easier to dress like Baudelaire than within his dictates.”
I don’t dress like anyone any more than I take dictation. I am, however, concerned with principles.
And it is a thin line between suit and costume, between art and pretension; one that different people will draw in different places. Should that fashion week fellow’s hat been different he might have looked good. But, sadly, he lacked imagination, went strictly by the book and became Al Capone without the tommy gun or criminal empire. And those are the most important part of that character.
It’s a line that I have occasionally crossed. Doubtless, in my explorations, I will cross it again. It’s the danger inherent in my goal of dressing with equal conformity and weirdness for 100 years in the past and 100 in the future.
These mistakes do not concern me. They’re errors and, once recognized, can be quickly corrected.
Quite different from the costume, both in philosophy and execution, is what the screaming giantess, Tyra Banks, once called “Stepping it up.” One cannot be afraid to take risks, to attack previously undefended territory and seize it.
Although each suit has its own independent logic, it must also and always relate to the man within it. He is the common point of reference. There is the self contained truth of a suit but also the constant relationship it bears to that man; what he has worn before and what he will wear after.
Each suit is a chapter but the man is the novel.
Should one refuse to step it up and move the story forward, they risk becoming a Tom Wolfe. The same white suit repeated forever. An exciting bore.
The most interesting thing about the human imagination is all the ways it finds to fail. I’m sure half its efforts must be dedicated to that very subject.
You can fail through conservatism or costume. You can go too far or not far enough. You can find the exact right point and fail by remaining there too long. Just as in kicking a drunk out of a bar, there is no right way to do it but there are a lot of wrong ways. The best you can do is to avoid those.
Having just returned from my tailor with two new shirts, I am going to confidently state that I have straddled the abyss and managed not to fall in. I have stepped it up. My wardrobe now has a new option. A nuclear option.
The shirt that aroused my greatest curiosity about its final result was a red and white one with the slightest traces of blue. Its collar is an absurdly high four buttons and requires a pin. Its cuffs are fluted and contain secret buttons. It is as much a feat of engineering as it is one of tailoring. And it looks terrific.
But only under certain circumstances.
This is not the sort of shirt to be worn casually or with just anything. In inexpert hands it could become costume. In mine, it will not.
Tension is one of my favourite tools. Between conformity and oddity, between the rules and their breaking. More than the construction worker shouting vulgarities at women on the street, I like the slightly off-colour remark in the secure situation. The rushing blush it occasions. I prefer the hot breath on the neck to the orgasm. Tension. Between propierty and its collapse.
This shirt is a study in such tension. I will not wear it without a black suit. Only that most morbid and dull of colours could reign it in. Only the sharpest eye, unbeholden to the initial shock, would notice the relationship to the shape of the jacket cuff and that of the shirt. The obscene and the absurd pull against the bland and the concise. It is a rope stretched tight.
My wardrobe has stepped up into another order of reality. I never suspected the existence of such a place until I stood before my tailor’s mirror, looking at the mushroom cloud. It was a Los Alamos moment. My world has changed.
But not because it will be repeatedly used.
Just as a nuclear bomb renders all other forms of warfare polite, this has rendered all of my other suits and shirts, be they bright orange or pink, absolutely conservative and perfectly pedestrian. That’s just by existing. God only knows what it will do should it ever be used. I expect annihilation.
