I will start off by saying I have a suit. This has not always been the case. I didn’t have a suit until last April. I only bought one because I needed to go to my job interview up in Seattle and hadn’t brought a suit with me.
Not that I owned a suit in Florida either. I did have one, but I don’t think it fit me anymore. I had bought it five years earlier when I had an interview with Disney to be a speechwriter. I didn’t get the job, even though it was a great suit.
If you see a pattern here, you’re not alone. While I do spiff up quite nicely, I find suits kind of lame. Oh sure, you feel a bit powerful in them. You look crisp and professional. You may even intimidate others, all because you’re wearing some nicely assembled cloth.
Unfortunately, it has never really suited me. It’s a shame too. In this little joke I sometimes call my life, I was born with superb taste in ties. I have some absolutely outstanding ties in my collection. But they just hang in the closet, lost in purpose because their owner doesn’t put a suit on, except when he absolutely has to.
Believe me, it is rare. I don’t wear suits to funerals. I did wear one to a wedding once, mine, which comes pretty close.
There was a time when I did suit up quite often. An old girlfriend of mine liked to buy me suits. I guess she thought it would get me out of the mailroom. It eventually did.
In high school and college I had really great suits. Yes, you know the kind. They were made for leisure. Miracles of polyester and polyester blends, accented with Quiana shirts. I had three or four to my name.
That could be the reason why I don’t take kindly to suits these days. Wearing a leisure suit, even when they were the height of fashion, teaches you that fashion isn’t always right. Sometimes fashion goes horribly askew.
Such is the case with suits, at least where I am concerned.
My current suit: black. Well, not really. It’s more of a charcoal gray. My old Florida suit was black. I thought I would mix it up a bit that last time around. I have to laugh though, thinking back to my Florida interview. There I was, a good Northwest boy flown down by The Mouse to interview, and what did I wear? A nice Northwest black suit. To Florida. At the height of summer. I must have really looked like a fish out of water.
Unfortunately, they don’t sell Miami Vice suits in Seattle. You’d be hard pressed to find one, even in the the dead of summer when one would actually make sense.
So off I went, black suited Seattle guy. I’m sure they are still laughing at that one.
Being anti-suit, or at least suit agnostic, I’m sure you’ve figured out by now that a tux isn’t exactly on my fashion horizon either. You are right. I have worn a tux just once. It was a cream colored little number with dark brown velvet trim with a humungous bow tie. If the brand name “Gunne Sax” rings a bell then you know the last time I wore a tux.
I think it was my ex’s senior prom, so let’s say 1978. I know people love tuxes. I certainly know that women like to see a guy in a tux. Various significant others have pleaded in vain with me over the years to wear a tux for one occasion or another, only to find my face totally blank with disinterest.
It’s not that I have a problem wearing clothing that other guys have worn recently. Like Macklemore, I pop a tag now and then at my local thrift shop. I know they pretend to dry clean rentals between wearings, but I know what guys do in their suits. I did it myself at prom. And man did I do it a lot!
Yes, I sweated. First, you’re on what is obviously a Big Date. Yes, capital letters. They denote the level of date where you actually make reservations for dinner and some kind of pinned flower arrangement is required that looks as though your date’s bosom has exploded into full bloom. That kind of Big Date.
It was also May in Seattle. May can be unseasonably hot or miserably cold and damp. On this particular day, it was the former. Cars back in the 70s didn’t have air conditioning. Well, they did, if you count pulling open the air vent so the hot air outside flowed into and through the car. But as we all know, you can’t have windows rolled down on a Big Date as your date’s hair will be a total mess before you even get to the restaurant.
So there I was, totally stressed out, on a date with my future ex-wife, all bound up in a rented tux some guy probably got laid in the night before, walking around in equally rented shoes made of the skin of some kind of insanely shiny brown animal, trying to be on my best behavior, trying to stay cool in a car with all the windows shut tight.
Small wonder I did it a lot that night. After the dance, I also did it. No, not sweated. On a very steep hill in Kennydale, a site that is now a fancy housing development with smashing views of Mercer Island and Lake Washington, I finally got out of my tux. In the back of my mother’s 1974 Mustang II, in the throes of passion, swept away by teenage hormones and the thought of rummaging through those hundreds of layers of Gunne Sax that made it look as if my date would suddenly inflate and float away to Kansas carrying a wizard.
The tux went back to the rental shop the next day. I’m sure they “dry cleaned” it and spread some kind of miracle polish on the insanely shiny shoes which were severely scuffed some by all that frolicking in the back deck of mom’s car.
Every time I drive by that spot on the hill in Kennydale, even today, my thoughts drift back to prom night. And I think to myself, “What the hell was I ever doing in a rented tux?”
In the Emerald City, thinking of wearing a tie to work just to screw with people’s minds,
– Robb