“A man should look as if he had bought his clothes with intelligence, put them on with care, and then forgotten all about them.”
--Sir Hardy Amies
“The first person I saw who looked totally brilliant was in late ’74 at a bus stop in Kentish Town. He was called Matt Scottley and he had blue two-pleat pegs, plastic sandals and a blue mohair jumper, with a blonde wedge.”
--Simon Withers as quoted in Jon Savage’s England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond.
In the suiting room of the men’s shop where I work there’s a beautiful black-and-white mid-‘60s photo of a tuxedoed, harmonica-playing Stevie Wonder. If any customer ever asks me what Stevie is doing presiding over men’s suiting, I’ll tell him it’s a reminder that you have no idea what looks good on you and it’s best to leave that judgment to professionals.
There isn’t a women’s shop in the whole of the world where that joke would fly. And, restricting ourselves only to America, there are maybe only ten percent of all the men’s shops in the country where it isn’t apt.
For some time now I’ve supplemented my writing and teaching income, such as it is, with retail work, often in bookstores but in the last seven years selling men’s clothes, especially suits. I’m lucky to work with people I like (when I started six years ago, I had the good fortune to work with a group of younger men who treated me, nearly twice their age, as the little brother who was shown affection by picking on him). And there’s real satisfaction when someone who comes in looking to be outfitted for their wedding or graduation or prom—or, unexpectedly, needing to find a suit for a funeral—leaves knowing not only that they will look good but that looking good is a possibility for them. Some men approach buying clothes as an unbreakable, alien code. For those genuinely looking for guidance, it’s the seller’s job to show them that it isn’t, and that there are options for them that they maybe haven’t considered.
What’s dispiriting about the job has to do with the typical downers of retail work: the inadequate pay, for one thing, but also having to be civil to customers who are often rude to you and having to subordinate your own better-informed judgment to their whims. But the biggest downer are the men who are so resolutely dull and unadventurous in their clothing choices. The ones who, given a selection of chinos, will go right to the olive drab and battleship gray. The ones who look at a patterned shirt as if it were the most outrageous drag. The ones who have no interest in being guided, who admit their ignorance but see no reason why they should get beyond it. Or the ones who come in talking about wanting to break the rules when they haven’t learned the rules in the first place. (For them, the appropriate wall hanging wouldn’t be a portrait of Stevie Wonder but a Jackson Pollack to show them that before you can be an abstract expressionist, you have to learn draftsmanship.)
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