Am I still in uniform? Then I ain’t retired – Pete Rose
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
[1] Peanuts may be a bad example for this. We asked for art critic Yap Winston’s opinion on Peanuts, and he responded thusly: “You could make a pretty convincing argument, to me at least, that [Peanuts creator] Charles Schulz is both the greatest visual artist and author in modern American history. Peanuts does have a built-in calendar, but so does your own life.”
[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.
