The Best Part of Dressing Up Is Dressing Down
Or, in defense of wearing a suit on Thanksgiving.
Last week I celebrated the year’s best holiday, Thanksgiving, with my own budding family consisting of myself, my wife and our infant son. Despite the fact that there were three celebrants, one of whom cannot yet recognize their reflection in a mirror, I chose to wear a suit and tie for our little platoon’s Thanksgiving dinner.
Granted, it was an olive green corduroy suit, and a purple tie emblazoned with pheasants. And yet, I realize this self-imposed formality was highly impractical, in that I was repeatedly tucking said tie into my shirt to protect it from both gravy stains and spit-up, and that it would be seen by no one else aside from my wife and son.
So, why dress up? For one thing, I still believe in the power of dress to elevate a moment or influence a mood, in the same way that gathering to consumer a large flightless bird transforms an ordinary Thursday in November into a special event. In short, dress is ritual, and an effective one at that.
Then, of course, there’s the pleasure of dressing up, particularly for a clothes horse weirdo like myself who’d been waiting weeks for an excuse to wear a new suit. But that pleasure isn’t limited to the period when the tie is knotted and the shirt fully buttoned to the neck—in fact, it grows more satisfying as the hours pass and you allow yourself to become more casual.
Think of the one occasion on which men still don suits, or even a tux—weddings. As such a self-confessed weirdo, I look forward to doing so immensely. But what I enjoy most are the late hours of the reception, when the cake’s half-eaten and your jacket now hangs from the back of the chair, and you’ve decided to unbutton the top button of your shirt and maybe pull down the tie a little. If it’s summer, and you’ve been dancing, perhaps you’ve even rolled your sleeves up.
Doing any of the above to start would be pure affectation. But when the occasion demands peak formality at its beginning, slowly peeling the layers away as time goes is great fun, and something that’s paradoxically rarer to practice the more casual life gets.
For my own experience last week, that meant wearing the suit and tie from roughly 11 a.m. to five p.m., after which I ditched my neckwear and traded in the suit jacket for a thick shawl collar cardigan. My attire on Thanksgiving evening—green corduroy trousers, a checked spread collar shirt with its top button undone and the grey cardigan—isn’t something I’d ever start the day in. But now that it’s happened organically, I’m itching for the chance to repeat the look. Maybe Christmas will provide the opportunity.
Cut, Make & Trim
A little quiet on the writing front this week, aside from publishing the ol’ Best New Menswear roundup over at Robb Report.
I tend to talk about Drake’s… a lot. But I’d be remiss not to shout-out their recent look book shot in Maine, which aside from the great clothes and Byzantine layering combinations I expect from the brand, really captures that weird stuck-in-time quality that I love so much about the state.
I assume your eyeballs have completely glazed over with Black Friday related content by now, but I wished to give a callout to Wynona, a Canadian menswear brand I’ve referenced here and written about in the past. Right now, much of the brand’s fall collection—its first—is discounted around 25%. It was enough for me to pull the trigger on its Enzo coat, a wonderful-looking duffel I’d been scheming on for weeks, which feels like a steal at around $550 (compare that to the also great-looking duffel from Ralph, which is over $1,000 even with the current 40% promo).
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