A Good Dressing-Down : Poking Through What May Be Closeted Reasons for an Annual Sartorial Snub
ONCE AGAIN, a year has rolled around, and the Tailors Council of America has published its annual list of the “Ten Best Dressed Men in America.”
And once again they have seen fit to leave me out.
For 10 years, at least, I have eagerly awaited the list, hoping to find myself included among the most sartorially noteworthy of American men. I have been repeatedly disappointed.
If I were not, by nature, inclined to think the best of my fellow men, I would suspect the tailors of prejudice against individuals of my profession and economic level.
I notice that, as usual, the 10 best are all successful in their fields, and presumably men of means. It is true, I suppose, that to dress really well a man needs a liberal bank account. But it seems to me that the tailors ought to make room on their list for one or two men whose good taste supersedes their budgets.
I grant that I am not poor, but I doubt that I would spend more money on clothes even if I became rich. I don’t think a man needs $800 suits and $200 shoes to look sharp.
Perhaps I was excluded again because there was no category for journalists. The closest categories were comedy (Don Rickles) and television (Arsenio Hall). I suppose television would include such news anchors as Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather and Peter Jennings, but it obviously does not include newspaper columnists and reporters. Are we pariahs?
Other categories were government, Mario Cuomo; motion pictures, Michael Douglas; sports, Pat Riley; industry, Malcolm Forbes; business, Michael Milken; design, Mr. Blackwell; entrepreneurial, Donald Trump, and music, Placido Domingo.
As far as I know, all those gentlemen are snappy dressers, and I don’t resent their selection. Honesty requires that I examine my own wardrobe for some fatal flaw, some gauche costume that left the tailors no choice but to include me out.
I wonder if it could be the lime-green jacket my wife ordered for me from a mail-order house. It’s light, fresh and pretty and fits fairly well, except for a kind of hunch between the shoulder blades. But it isn’t easy to find accouterments suitable for a lime-green jacket. Maybe one of the tailors’ scouts saw me that time my gray slacks were at the cleaner’s and I wore the lime-green jacket with blue slacks. I have seen lime green and blue in nature (lime-bearing trees against a blue sky), but on a man they don’t look too good.
Also, I might have been blackballed because of my pale plaid jacket. Its colors are pink, green, gray and yellow. I bought it off the rack for $50. But the first day I wore it, alas, I put an uncapped pen in the breast pocket and it leaked a large black stain. The cleaner couldn’t quite get it out. Not that that kept me from wearing it.
I suspect, though, that I was undone the night I spoke at a dinner in the Four Seasons Hotel. That’s just the sort of place the tailors’ scouts would haunt. It was black tie. My tuxedo is 10 or 15 years old but still serviceable. What I didn’t know, though, until my wife pointed it out, was that I had forgotten my cummerbund. My pleated dress shirt tended to pooch out under the jacket button. That certainly would have been enough to disqualify me.
On the other hand, it might not have been my formal attire that did me in but my athletic attire. I suppose what one wears to the gym is as important as what one wears to a black-tie dinner. I admit that I have been rather careless in the togs I wear when I work out. I sometimes wear a T-shirt that says, “How can I be expected to cope with life when I can’t even program my VCR?” But I think it would be petty of the tailors to disqualify me because of my technical ineptitude.
I can think of only one other thing. It might be my shoes. Ever since I suffered nerve damage in my right leg, I have worn a pair of black deerskin shoes. They are very soft and pliable. It is true that after several years they have become wrinkled and shabby looking. I wear them with every outfit, whatever its color. I wear them with my tux.
So that’s probably it. They won’t select me as one of the 10 best dressed because my shoes are tacky.
It’s either that or they’re prejudiced against newspapermen. It is the nature of our jobs that we are always being thrust into different environments, at different social levels--a Skid Row murder in the morning, an interview with an ambassador in the afternoon. It is difficult to dress properly for all contingencies.
It was once said of journalist Heywood Broun that he looked like an unmade bed. Don’t we all?
