Legacy of the Cowboy Show: “Wovens”
The real fashion influence in my early life was not Cary Grant. It was Roy Rogers.
I craved anything western, from suede jackets with fringe and brown plaid shirts with contrasting stitches in pointy arcs, to red cowboy boots and a dad-gum wide belt with bullets and a holster. Howdy-Doody and Buffalo Bob had the same effect on me, but to a lesser degree than old Roy. (It was probably the gun thing, right, Dr. Freud?) And the most lasting influence of this infatuation has been in my choice of shirts.
My favorite picture of myself as a kid is of me standing outside the farm stand where we bought our pumpkins for making Jack-O’Lanterns. One foot on the wooden steps, smiling bravely at the camera, I have on a navy shirt with a little red windowpane check and pearl-covered snaps and pockets with flaps, green corduroy pants held up by a Indian-patterned, beaded belt, chaps, a holster, red cowboy boots and a brown rolled-brim hat with beads around the crown. Like Jesse James out in front of the Dry Gulch Saloon, I was.
I realized, some time in my adulthood that the picture was taken at Halloween. We were buying pumpkins. I was in my costume! This led to a kind of epiphany about dress, the appropriateness of certain kinds of clothing, and of the nature of dressing in costume versus dressing for my regular life. I know there is a fine line, perhaps, between the two, in as much as I dress in a business costume sometimes, when I dress for important business occasions, for example, but costumes are always artificial.
I am convinced that costumes are fine for masquerade parties and Trick-or-Treating. All other occasions, (including the Academy Awards ceremony,) call for more conventional, authentic dress.
The Roy Rogers Howdy-Doody influence is not insignificant. I daresay that while Ralph Lauren and Alan Flusser may have been listening to other muses, inspired by the sartorial splendor of Cary Grant or Adolphe Menjou, as Armani was by Al Capone, most of America’s men were trying to get the Howdy thing. The patterned sport shirt is everywhere. In all places and for all occasions between really casual and dress-up, in any weather, in short or long-sleeved versions, it is appropriate today. In the workplace it has replaced the suit and beat out virtually all other modes of professional dress. It has shed the stitching details, the pocket flaps and the pearl snaps that Roy and Howdy favored, but the basic look of it remains. It says I care about my appearance. I am not casual. I am thoughtful and I am comfortable. I am ready for work but I am also modern, unpretentious, and down-to-earth. It is the very essence of Level 2.
Always? 100%?
Yes, with some important qualifications.
There is one important, even challenging characteristic of the sport shirt. It is made to be coordinated with the rest of your outfit. Regular Guys hate this. It is erroneous to assume that you can just grab any patterned shirt and wear any old trouser, although we are not saying that this is seldom done. The range of colors and patterns available in shirts is infinite, and so are the possibilities for error. Thus is Mrs. Regular Guy’s assistance sometimes required in the buying stage, as well as in the remembering stage, as in: “Honey! Which shirt did we say went with the green pants?”
It is dangerous to own clothes that “go” with other clothes, for the obvious reason that they require different kinds of care and may not always be simultaneously available. It is even more dangerous to buy a bunch of stuff without being sure that it makes a cohesive wardrobe. That shirt in the weird brown check, which we thought might go with those moss-colored pants, which last week we gave to the Ladies’ Auxiliary Rummage Sale; that kind of thing happens a lot.
This is why we have come to accept that a very wide range of tan shades, from off white to almost brown will go with anything, and a wide range of grays, from pearl to nearly black, are basically neutral. Pink regatta stripe shirt with sand color chinos or grey flannels? Fine. Even baggy, pineapple-printed, short-sleeved Hawaiian shirts go with tan. And a purple plaid shirt with acid green highlights from that famous London shop can be worn with charcoal whipcords or off-white cotton gabardine slacks. It makes one wonder whether the colors have some underlying commonality that makes them agree, or whether it’s just convention. We’ve seen blue and grey and tan together for so long that we agree they go together. Or it may be that tans and blues and greys, the colors of the sea, he sand, the earth and sky, are just compatible because they are natural, and frequently observed in nature together. Interesting.
Anyhow, choose your sport shirts carefully. Even in those Level 2 settings, like church, or in your office on a “casual” day, make sure the pattern and color of the shirt is coordinated, or, at the very least, neutral.
FYI These shirts are known in the business as “wovens.” An unfortunate term, perhaps, since almost all shirting cloth, even the finest dressy solids, are woven. But it serves to differentiate them from knits (which are known by the equally confusing term “cut-and-sewn,” since “wovens” are also cut, and inevitably, sewn.)