Rightwords... Prudent Conservatism

Where slovenliness is a fashion statement!


Perhaps it is the wives that push their spouses into what appears to be unwashed and unpressed outfits these days. Or, perhaps it is the typical laziness of men to want to look like they just got up from sleeping in their clothes, and to display an unshaven face all day. How did we manage to make bums look good and regular men look bad?

Tonight I scanned a catalog from a reputable store looking for pants and shirts. All of the pants were weird-looking, either shaped like jeans, or had drawstrings instead of a belt, or pre-killed to look old and worn--in which they succeeded. They appeared to me to be PJs in corduroy, not something to wear outside. The shirts were horrible, both in color and in looking like they had been shrunk in the wash and never pressed. And only $79!

Then I thought of shoes. The shoes on display were fit for a forester or a Dutch farmer, or not even that good because of the holes all over them. Crocs, I believe is their name. What an abomination for a shoe! So I turned to the coats, hoping to find one that I could wear on cold nights outside. There was a good selection of coats, in all the colors I like, so I spent some time to read the prospectus on them.

I am not used to paying $300 to $400 for a parka-like coat in these days of miracle fabrics and machine cutters, but that was all there was. Oh, they would keep you warm down to minus 30 F, which in my case would be a huge overkill. So I found some that came apart into three different coats as the temperature changes. This sounded nice, until I thought about it further. I go out in the afternoon wearing the light version, race back home to put on the next level as the sun goes down, and bulk it up to level three when I go out at 10 or 11 pm to walk the dogs. I would spend a lot of time just going home and changing the damn thing. The it dawned on me that the coats were as bad as the shirts and pants! They were all wrinkled and sloppy-looking, not like a $400 coat should look.

Later, as I was walking the dogs (in my old coat), I really looked at the men I encountered, noticing their coats, pants, shirts and shoes. It was as if they had just walked out of the pages of my catalog! Scruffy, unshaven, pants and shirts shrunken, bland colors, sloppy coats and crazy shoes--even sandals in November-- was all I could see. Or, as one guy went past, I noticed he had on loafers without socks. Every one of them seemed to have spent about $800 to $1,000 on their outfits, only to be readily mistaken for panhandlers.

The worse part of it is that they go to work like this! Not your old IBM blue suiters any more.
Does this degradation of clothing standards correlate with our loosened moral state?

Labels: Men's Clothes

# posted by Mannning @ 10:49 PM