On Facebook, I said:
I don’t get my fashion tips from Buzzfeed or other Internet sites. I take my fashion cues from old Cary Grant movies.
This, gentle reader, you know is true.
I forget what bit of Internet advice I saw that set me off about this, but I know I saw something about how hipsters roll their sleeves that identified Buzzfeed as someone whose fashion advice I’ll avoid from now until when Buzzfeed is as relevant as Geocities. I took offense because I roll my sleeves the way the forefathers of this great nation rolled their sleeves if they’d have rolled their sleeves, which I’m not sure they did because eighteenth century fashion and twentieth century fashion (not twenty-first century fashion, thank you) differ.
Where was I? I don’t know.
But not soon after I made that quip, I saw an abomination that reminded me one more place I don’t take my fashion cues from: fashion ads in slick magazines.
Look at this:
This is a real ad for Canali. Which is, I’m not kidding, an Italian men’s clothing company servicing the luxury market. Luxury means in Italian, I’m guessing here, “Children over the age of twenty-one with trust funds who want to dress like Doctor Who.”
Calm down, Brian J., you say. Is this worse than purple pants?
Yes, yes, it is. Purple pants are an error of judgment on one’s lower regions. Red jacket over peach leggings with sockless bowling slippers is a failure of epistemology. Also, it might lead one to believe that an organic diet from youth is more emasculating than the hormones pumped into dairy cattle is purported to be, yes sir.
Great God! I’d rather be a yokel bedecked in a cap backwards worn than that.
Fortunately, I don’t have that choice. Because I lack fashion sense. And by that I mean I’m not riven by the tides of stupidity lashed by uneducated and even uncultured (note: pop culture is not culture) coastal change-chasers.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to button up a cheap collared shirt, slip on a pair of $18 slacks from J. C. Penney’s, and a classic fedora and think myself put together.
I get my fashion advice from my father and grandfathers. I want to look like them: modest, middle class Deep South.
But I am now barraged with fashion information that I cannot comprehend. My wife, who is a completely unpretentious small town woman, has a depth of fashion knowledge that I had not known before our daughters began dressing themselves. The three womenfolk have a term called “matching.” It is not enough to simply put on a shirt and pants. They do not universally combine, as I had always believed.
Now my daughters may spend up to a whole minute each morning deciding what to wear. This is in contrast to my approach at their ages, which was to simply put on the pants at the top of the pants drawer and the shirt at the top of the shirt drawer each morning.
Women are mysterious creatures.