Reading through men’s fashion magazines, after a while, becomes a lot like reading Peanuts over the course of a lot of years. No matter how great the content[1], you become familiar, after a while, with the built-in calendar.

“It must be March,” you might say to yourself, “since they’re trying to get me to wear off-white jeans, classic sneakers, ‘summer-weight sweaters’ and unlined blazers again.”

Or: “Ah, September has rolled around again, and with it comes the latest crop of pea coats. I wonder if we’ll be concentrating on herringbone or glen plaid this year. Probably an artful mixture of the two.” And on and on like this year after year.

Getting dressed, as a man, used to be easy. What happened to that?[2]

In response to this, the dovetailing predictability of menswear and the increasing difficulty a man faces in the marketplace, TUMULT would like to salute the uniform.[3] As is usually the case, we’re finding a lot of inspiration for this dispatch on menswear from the world of women’s fashion. In this instance, The Uniform Project, in which a woman is wearing the same dress every day for a year.

If it were up to us, men everywhere would buy three identical unlined chino suits, one or two shades lighter than navy blue – but far from light blue – and have a variety of shirts, ties, shoes and accessories to wear with them. You could dress up the suit with layers during the colder months for warmth, and remove those layers in the warmer months for comfort.

However, we cannot find a dark blue chino suit anywhere.

Why? For one, it’s fall. And chino is the fabric of summer, according to most fashion designers.[4]

Secondly, fashion designers are in the business of selling you clothing, and, God bless ‘em, they’re not in the business of selling you a perfect thing that you would never have to change, because then they would be out of business. You can’t really blame them.

Our sartorial advice, at the moment, is this: It’s a tough world out there, economically and emotionally, and things aren’t going to get any easier any time real soon. So it may improve your outlook on the world if you were to develop a uniform of your own.[5] It needn’t necessarily be based on Our Holy Grail – the dark blue chino suit. It could be a grey suit. It could be jeans and white t-shirts.[6] Whatever. As long as it provides an empty enough canvas for you to continually express yourself while simultaneously saving yourself a great deal of time and energy, you will have our support.

Jean-Baptiste Noir is TUMULT Magazine’s Chief Fashion Correspondent

[2] Actually lot happened to that. Mostly the realization that the thing that made men the ‘dominant gender’ in society, physical strength, doesn’t really matter so much on a day-to-day basis in our society. Anymore, it’s rare that a man has to get into a fight or to lift something heavy. As a result, men everywhere have been left with a lot of time to think about things like clothing and video games and rare collectibles. [This is actually a much bigger discussion for another time. – ed.]

[3] Which is another thing that men’s magazines do from time to time. We’re probably a little bit more serious about it, but we’re no better than they are. At press time, we garner no income from fashion advertisers. As soon as we do, though, we’re confident our tune will rather quickly change.

[4] We disagree, of course, citing climate change, air conditioning, and the extreme versatility of chino as our primary reasons.

[5] In our estimation, Michael Jordan didn’t unretire just because he felt the need to compete. He also craved, we think, the iconography of the uniform. We imagine him thinking, ‘In a uniform, I am the best that ever did it. Out of it, I am another guy in another boardroom in another building, or on another couch in another house, just like every other sucker. Damn all that. I should suit up.’

[6] Imagine how much longer Marlon Brando or – we can’t believe we’re saying this – Eminem would have stayed relevant if only they had stuck with the jeans-and-white-tee-shirts uniform.

Quentin Tarantino has long been identified with the black Blues Brothers suits that his characters wear. The gangsters wore them in both Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. Pam Grier wears the black suit as the titular character in Jackie Brown. The Crazy 88 sport black suits in Kill Bill. Even when his characters aren’t wearing the iconic black suit, Tarantino typically has his characters “suit up” in some way before they get their hands dirty. See, for example, Beatrix Kiddo’s Bruce Lee-style jumpsuit from Kill Bill, or Stuntman Mike’s silver jacket from Death Proof.

With his new movie, Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino faces a wardrobe challenge that he hadn’t dealt with before: How do you get your characters to “suit up” when most of them are already wearing uniforms designed for war? Tarantino, in response, rises to the occasion chiefly by including a moment in which Mélanie Laurent – who plays a “civilian” character – applies makeup in preparation for action, and also by filming the most elegant and interesting costume designs of his career.

In fact, when audiences meet Marcel, played by Jacky Ido, he is wearing perfect menswear for the fall. Inglourious Basterds takes place during World War II, but Marcel’s outfit is put together so well that it could translate to any period, including this one. Marcel belongs in a movie lineage of men impeccably wearing clothes that men actually wear, alongside Robert Redford as Joesph Turner in Three Days of the Condor and Dustin Hoffman’s Ben Braddock in The Graduate.

Jean-Baptiste Noir will be updating this article as soon as he can find a decent picture of Jacky Ido wearing the outfit described in this piece.

Lately we’ve been sensing a growing impulse among men that involves abandoning the shoulder bag. This shift does not necessarily owe to the idea that men equate shoulder bags with ladies’ purses. Men got over that years ago. It has more to do with the reclamation of masculine images and objects like the traditional businessman’s attaché case.

The virtues of the boxy rectangular attaché case are many. They are, for example, extremely utilitarian. They hold several files, some pens, a laptop, a few of legal pads, a flash drive, a couple of pressed shirts, and your lunch. An attaché case, however, does not hold all of these things at once. Part of the allure of the attaché case is that it suggests, by its contents, that its carrier is capable of making important decisions. The act of packing a briefcase is one of stripping away excess under the guiding principle that it is difficult to be disorganized when you only have the shit that you actually need.

So much of what makes the attaché briefcase desirable in these times is not that which it lacks, but what it simply does not include. This is an important distinction, illustrated by the attaché’s inability to bisect a business suit with a thick nylon strap. This strapless-ness also eliminates indie rock pins and dangling noisemakers. The sides are made of leather – optimally a dark brown or a cordovan – which makes it especially difficult for designers to fuck it all up by adding a screenprinted flaming skull on the side. Nothing lacks a screenprinted flaming skull. We shouldn’t have to tell you that. It’s just that things that are good simply don’t have flaming skulls screenprinted onto them.

The early adopters – or really re-adopters – of the attaché in TUMULT’s editorial department cite chief among its attributes the way that that it naturally conveys the image of a person ready to conduct business in a business setting rather than that of a person you can count on to four-star “Green Grass and High Tides” during a particularly intense Rock Band session.

Jean-Baptiste Noir is Hungarian and double-jointed.

Your problem is that you don’t really care what your hair looks like. All you want to do is not look like an idiot. This is not actually a problem. You are a guy. As long as you don’t look like an idiot, you shouldn’t care what your hair looks like.

This mentality, however right, does present a bit of a dilemma, though, when you try to get your hair cut.

“What are we doing to your hair today,” asks the barber stylist.

“I don’t know,” you say, because you don’t know. You don’t speak Haircut.

Solutions to this predicament have been offered in the past, but they weren’t of much use to anyone. You don’t want to be, for example, the guy at the barbershop holding a picture of a dude that you clipped out of a magazine. Because then everybody knows that you’re the sort of guy who clips pictures of dudes out of magazines when you think they have cool hair.

Here’s what you do:

Sit down in the barber’s chair. Accept that it’s not as awesome as the one pictured above. That one’s at Freeman’s Sporting Club in New York. Before they snap that horrible smock around your neck, put whoever’s cutting your hair on the phone with your girlfriend. Have your girlfriend tell that person how she wants your hair to look.

That’s it. Tell your girlfriend you love her and hang up the phone. You don’t care what she told the stylist. For one, your girlfriend does speak Haircut. Moreover,  you can trust that she won’t tolerate being seen with someone who looks likes an idiot.

The key is that she’s on the phone, and not with you in person. This keeps you completely out of the discussion. If you participate at all, you will have defeated the purpose of the exercise entirely by looking like an idiot before you even got your hair cut.

Jean-Baptiste Noir is TUMULT’s fashion correspondent.

Thanks for nothing, Damien Hirst*. Between you and Jack Sparrow the world’s population has been inundated with images of skulls nonstop for the better part of ten years. Your diamond-encrusted skulls have made tattoos not cool, and that’s no mean feat. Tattoos have been awesome for millions of years.
This skull shit has been going on for so long now that we can’t even see one on a rock poster or a tee shirt without thinking about the Bush administration – which dovetails perfectly with the equally-annoying conspiracy talk from that same era that reminds us of the Baron Samedi / Papa Doc paranoia from Graham Greene’s The Comedians.
What?
Okay.
Skulls are, anymore, lazy and in poor taste.
At TUMULT we recognize that bad style is going to exist for as long as does good style. It is something that we all must tolerate lest we all look the same. And we also accept that the UFC has to sell tee shirts if they’re going to continue to bring about the end of civilized society. And that the poor souls who work for Ed Hardy need to eat and to pay their bills.
So we beseech these people, like Damien Hirst, these mavens of ugly fashion, that they might switch from skulls as a defining theme to spiders. Spiders are not yet as totally dead as skulls are. And they’re just as scary as skulls, if a little less macabre. They have the added benefit of being things that a person has a much greater likelihood of actually encountering in their lives than a human skull. We’re sure you guys could sell just as many spider things as you do skull things. A diamond spider would actually be kind of neat. Mr. Hirst could present them as Louise Bourgeois visual puns.

Jean-Baptiste Noir’s entire wardrobe consists of the fine suits he inherited from his grandfather. He is TUMULT’s chief fashion correspondent.

* At TUMULT, we consider Damien Hirst to be the Kevin Garnett of the fine art world. When he did that thing where he took his new collection directly to auction, eliminating the gallery system’s involvement in his handling, it might appear as though he “broke the bank” in the same way that Garnett did when he got that $126M contract extension with the Minnesota Timberwolves. Whether or not the fallout associated with these events – in Hirst’s case a dramatic decline in fine art sales, and in Garnett’s the NBA lockout that soon followed – actually had anything to do with these individuals is debatable. But Hirst and Garnett remain symbols for bloated institutions riddled with irresponsible spending and in desperate need of reform.