CLOTHES IN REAL LIFE

If looking good is important to you, (and the number of people to whom it does not seem important may be the majority,) you will want to get the knack of looking well dressed and casual at the same time. A little extra education is required, plus a little courage and a bit of personal creativity. Once you get it, though, you’ll be thrilled.

But first, let’s review:

• Level 1: Tee shirts and sweat shirts; cut-offs or shorts; unpressed garments; any garment with an excess of pockets; athletic clothing and footwear (including socks); any garment with tears, rips, worn-out spots, logos larger that ½ inch, or writing of any kind on it; baseball caps.

• Level 2: Collared shirt, knit or woven, solid, stripe, plaid or check; turtle-neck or mock-turtle; jeans that fit; trousers – cotton, wool, elegant casual or relaxed-dressy – with a crease, a belt, and clean leather shoes. 

Simple, right? That’s the point. Just like my grandmother said about manners, it’s pretty much just common sense. Perhaps the harder part is figuring out which occasion calls for which level of dress. Here’s a tip: If it involves cleaning products, a garden hose, participation in some athletic activity, or any exposure to tools, garden implements, dirt, or animals, it is a Level 1 function. Dress accordingly.

Level 2 activity is anything that you probably won’t get dirty doing; situations in which it is unlikely you’ll get paint on yourself, or be in danger of getting your clothes dirty, torn or caught in machinery. Levels 2 has a range of possibilities from hanging around the house on Saturday to going to your job, if you work in a casual atmosphere or if you are self-employed. Level 2 is where the vast majority of American men will spend their day-to-day lives.

Level 3 is the next plateau, the conceptual-sartorial span between average day-to-day and The Suit. Level 3 is where your personal style is most noticeable. In case you were day-dreaming during that last sentence, let me repeat it, with emphasis: Level 3 is where your personal style is most noticeable.

Why? Because almost everybody looks good in a suit. After all, the hardest part is taken care of: the trousers match the jacket. The dress shirt and the necktie complete the conventional well-dressed definition. But Level 3 introduces another element; it means taking the foundation of Level 2 dress, getting your clean, well-ironed slacks and shirt together, and putting on some sort of tailored garment, some topper – it can be either an outerwear piece or a conventional sport jacket – to bring the outfit up one notch. Choosing the right shirt with those trousers is a daunting enough challenge for most guys; add to that the choice of the right jacket, whether a blazer, a patterned sport coat, or an unconstructed shirt-jacket, and you have a project requiring education, some courage, and a willing sense of style.

Let me illustrate this with an anecdote from my experience. Once, at dinner at a club in

The difficulty most men will have with this Level 3 concept of dressing is getting the elements of it that work together, and the only advice I know to give men is to tell them to go to stores where they think the people working there have style. It’s not brain surgery. You may be color-blind or otherwise clueless, or just too concerned with the rest of your life to ever learn it yourself, but you could do worse than to have one of the great ones teach you. It’s better than going through life looking bad.

Of course, the boundaries of these levels are sometimes vague. A man in a navy blazer with dark gray slacks, white shirt, solid or neat-patterned tie, pocket square and polished oxfords is as formal as any suit-wearer; he is probably good for most Level 4 occasions. And a cotton or linen suit, worn with a crew neck or a collared shirt but no tie, is Level 3, sports wear. It is only the attitude you want to project, the venue, and the time of day, that dictates the level of dress a man needs. The intention here is to give some form, some memorable pattern to getting dressed. As far as how each level is defined, I am confident you’ll get the groove, especially since you’re interested enough in the subject to have read this far.

My Short-Lived Tennis Career 

My parents had lofty aspirations for me. Despite my obvious lack of athletic prowess, my mom signed me up for tennis lessons when I was eight or nine. Hatherly Golf Club, in Scituate, where we went in the summers, had some courts and a pro. I must admit I loved the gear. She got me a beautiful, white and brown T.A. Davis racquet, gut strings, the whole thing, with its own head cover, which had the fancy TAD logo and zipped up the side. I also had a wooden, trapezoid-shaped press with wing nuts that you put the racquet head in and fastened to keep the head from warping. Fred Perry shoes, white crew socks with blue stripes at the top, and a white Izod shirt. I thought the alligator was weird, frankly, but one of my friends, one of the Casey boys, maybe, was more fashion savvy than I and told me the alligator was definitely Cool. The whole shirt was weird, actually. It was made of cotton, but it felt hard, like cotton wire. The back was longer than the front. It was nothing like the shirts my Mom got at Bamberger’s. But after the Casey kid told me it was cool, I thought I was pretty fly in my French tennis shirt.

I took a couple of lessons and then ditched. I had more fun wading out to Elephant Rock at low tide or netting crabs down by the Lobster Shanty in Minot. I still know how to play tennis, at least as well as I did after those couple of lessons, though. So it wasn’t in vain, though I’m sure it hasn’t helped my social standing any.

FYI    Renè LaCoste was a Frenchman, a famous Jazz Age pro tennis player with the nickname “le Crocodile.” He won

The Polo 

I am not sure how or why the knit shirt that everybody on earth owns at least ten of came to be called the polo shirt. You know what I’m talking about – the one with the knit collar, a couple of buttons and short sleeves. When I was a kid it was called a tennis shirt, regardless of color or design. It doesn’t look like what polo players wear. I can’t help thinking that it was its association with Mr. Lauren’s label that really christened it.

            I can tell you that despite his manifest talents Lauren struggled in business for years until he found some Southern knitwear maker to embroider his horse-and-polo- player logo on the chest of an otherwise unremarkable knit shirt. Izod LaCoste was at this time in full retreat and the Polo/Ralph Lauren polo shirt sold like funnel cakes at a county fair. It was probably the cash from knit shirt sales that enabled Ralph to buy my father out. (He’d already done a Dozi on my dad by putting his name on the label – after the Polo.

            Thirty-five years later we call any knitted top, whether long sleeved or short, cotton or wool or even the new techno-blends, solid or striped, virtually anything that looks like it, a polo. In Italian it’s called il polo, in French le polo.

            The versatility and functionality of this garment make it a staple of everybody’s wardrobe. Under a sport jacket or even a suit it can be an elegant-sporty look, somewhat more youthful and carefree than the shirt-and-tie look, a definite Level 3 thing. With dress trousers and a nice belt and shoes, particularly in its long-sleeved version, it is at home in the Polo Lounge at the

            The knit shirt, just because of the nature of the fabric, tends quickly to lose its color and shape. Mrs. America wants to wash out the chocolate ice cream her husband dripped on his shirt, and the manufacturer want to sell eighty million shirts a year, and these two criteria make everybody want to say you can wash and dry them like your Budweiser T-shirt. The result is that after three such washings what started out a pristine golf shirt is now fit only for Level 1, wash-the-dog use. Here’s something to remember: care and cleaning instructions are designed and edited with two things in mind, and neither of them is concerned with how to keep a garment in pristine wearing condition. The universally accepted criteria given the writers of care instructions to follow are, first, Give Instructions Which Do Not Scare The Customer and, second, Do Not Be Concerned With Optimizing Appearance; Merely Instruct As To How To Avoid Outright Destruction. If you would prefer to keep your $150 polo shirt in nice enough shape that you can wear it with dress slacks and a sport jacket to a Level 3 event, you’ll have to be careful. Cold water, gentle cycle, no dryer, flat dry, and press with a cool iron. That’s it.

            The finer varieties There is great variety in this; too much, in fact. Suffice it to say that piqué and interlock knits, commonly knitted of a variety of cotton known as Pima, have a heft and a softness that makes them more comfortable, but, like their oxford button-down cousin, less formal looking and less likely to look dressy after a few launderings. The Mercerizing process, by which cotton yarn is made harder and stronger, results in a more formal looking shirt, easier to care for but less comfy. Other types of cotton knits, like John Smedley’s 32 gauge

Noteworthy also in regard to knit shirts is that the old-fashioned method of manufacturing, known as “full-fashioning” makes a big difference in how they fit and feel. The best knits are fully-fashioned, meaning that the entire garment is knitted together, the way Granma used to do. The sleeves and the collar of the garment are fashioned together by knitting, rather than by cutting the material and sewing it. There are no seams, nothing to pucker or bump. Less expensive “cut-and-sewn” knits are stitched together – sleeves, collar and shoulders attached from separate pieces, creating at best an approximation of fit. Full-fashioned knits conform to the neck and shoulders with no seams, just the little tell-tale fashioning marks, if you know what to look for. And if you do, you’ll know that any full-fashioned knit shirt deserves to be cold water washed and line dried and cool-ironed. If you bought a Ferrari would you bring it to the Jiffy Lube? Cut and sewn knits are expendable. If you have bought a fully-fashioned knit shirt, you’ll want to keep it looking like new.

            A final tip on buying any knit shirt is this: Make sure it fits. Yes, boys. This means you have to try it on. Because most of the American brands could do double duty as car-covers and the Italian ones are tiny. Even if the body fits you the neck is sometimes too wide, so that it opens around your shoulders, or too small, the sleeves too long (or too short.)   

            Another head-scratch-inducing sociological phenomenon is the average guy’s reluctance to try anything on before buying it. This may be akin to not wanting to stop and ask for directions, but I think it’s more complicated than that.