In and Out of Uniform
Conforming and not conforming, and my own menswear villain origin story.
Last month I had a conversation with Chris Echevarria, the designer behind Blackstock & Weber, and more recently, the prep school-inspired Academy. The purpose of our interview was a Robb Report story I was writing on his new label, and naturally, the topic of school uniforms came up.
Unlike Echevarria, whose brief prep school career met an untimely end owing to dress code nonconformity, I lived my entire pre-college student life in uniform. From the 1st grade to the 10th, which I spent at two different now-shuttered Catholic schools, that meant a pair of khaki pants and a polo shirt (green in grade school, blue in high school) most days, with a buttoned shirt and tie prescribed for mass days.
It feels nonsensical now, but I vividly recall the wearing of the button down shirt as an extreme hardship. Even into middle school, I felt as if donning it would require an extra ten minutes of my time each morning to tinker with all of its buttons, and resented mass days for it. For reasons of personal orthodoxy I now voluntarily wear a button down shirt virtually every day, and getting it on never requires more than a few seconds.
The other command I resented, starting in high school, was the order to keep our polo shirts tucked in. Maybe the polos were cut particularly blousy, but I remember thinking that it made me look stratospherically uncool. Each day I played untucking as a long, slow game, pulling out the shirt slowly in installments so that I could never be accused of being “fully untucked” and thus earning demerits.
I learned to dislike features of clothing that I had no vocabulary for. I recall despising the double-pleated Land’s End pants (and worse, shorts) that factored in my grade school rotation, and wishing that my mom would just buy me normal pants. The immovable problem in this scenario is that I didn’t even know what pleats were called (let alone their function) precluding me from asking for pants without the feature.
In my long Catholic school years, there wasn’t much to play with in terms of the uniform. That changed once I began 7th grade at the high school, which introduced a new twist—cardigans. Navy blue and long-sleeved with a v-neck, they could be worn by both boys or girls, although only the latter was ever seen wearing them.
Undeterred, I asked my mom to order me a cardigan, and showed up as likely the only boy at Cardinal Brennan High School to ever wear one. My apparently gender-nonconforming knitwear—paired to the simultaneous decision to neatly part my hair at the side and slick it back with gel—received a less than enthusiastic response from the student body. Things seemed to have reached a near crisis-level by the end of the school day, when a cousin in the 10th grade pulled me aside and gently suggested that it might be best if I didn’t wear the cardigan to school the next day.
I didn’t, and after a few more days of stubborn side-parting, I put the hair gel away too. And yet, I never lost interest in the idea of wearing a cardigan, and slicking my hair back, two impulses I’m really at a loss to explain in my teenaged-self. They just stayed on the backburner for the rest of my time at Catholic school, and also for my junior and senior years spent at a jacket-and-tie prep school.
My life in uniform ended when my freshman year of college began. Among the first things I did was buy a v-neck cardigan from Ralph Lauren Rugby, and slick my hair back with a part in the side.
14 years later, the cardigans are shawl-collared and from The Armoury or Drake’s, the hair product matte and more conservatively applied, but my own uniform hasn’t changed much.
Cut, Make & Trim
Had a few fun, black tie-adjacent stories at Robb Report over the past week: a story on opera pumps and their possibility as casual ware, and one on wearing robes beyond the home, which also appeared in print.
Two fine look books arrived from some of my favorite brands, Anglo-Italian and Bryceland’s. They’re each worth mining for inspiration—I have to show up for jury duty tomorrow, and might borrow from one of AI’s grey flannel suit looks—and the Bryceland’s look book is accompanied by a moody but slightly sexy playlist that fits the brand perfectly.