Non-Iron Shirts

He was months out from the election but the party was working hard for him early. They had brought in Portman to stump for him. Portman is a fiery guy with lots of zest and was great at getting crowds into a fervor. He’ll jump up to the stage, push the men’s and women’s buttons, get everyone going in the direction of a singular opinion. When he leaves the stage the mobocratic mothers in L. Pulitzer are always left slobbering, waiting for anyone with a semblance of diction to take the stage, telling them what cause they should support and how they should support it. Portman could really soften a crowd up. 

In the local community college gymnasium, Portman bounced up and down on the stage. The seat candidate wiped his forehead. It was hot. A geriatric complained about the current seat holder.

“Fuckin’ goddamn sonevahbitch is gonna cut everything and spend all my taxes and turn this nation into goddamn Saddy Araybia or goddamn Chaina. We gotta get that sonevahbitch outta there if it’s my last vote. Won’t leave my grandchildren that fuckin’--”

The candidate was swept away by his aide. Portman had finished.

It was now his turn to talk. To talk about what he was going to do.

As he mounted the stage, the stageboards creaked and swayed. Perhaps he should get down so some one could tighten things up. He pushed the thought from his mind and walked to the microphone. His sweat was cold and his legs felt old. This shirt he was wearing, it really didn’t breathe, did it? It locked all his body heat up which made him woozy. Well, at least he didn’t need it to be ironed.

“Fellow Americans of....”

He stopped. Coughed. Something went up and then down in his throat. Then, “Fellow residents of the great state of...”

He stopped again. Coughed again and then went to cough again. Instead of coughing, he yakked. Just a little baby yak. Yellow and milky and soupy and not too gross. It fell out of his mouth and onto his shirt. Just a dollop, really.

He looked out to the crowd.

He looked to his aide, stage left. 

He looked back out to the crowd 

And then everything went red.

And then everything went white.

And then everything went blue.

And then everything went black.

He woke up laying on the floor in the lobby. Some random woman was dabbing his forehead. She was morbidly obese, about his age, and smiling at him. The candidate’s red tie was covering up his yak stain. The yak had soaked through his undershirt and he could feel the warmth on his skin. His aide walked up to him with a washcloth full of ice cubes and pressed it to his head.

“We’ll have to get you a new shirt before you meet those contractors,” the aide told the candidate. The candidate looked at his aide, not quite able to comprehend what had just happened.

The room was silent but was next to the gym, so you could hear the noises happening within. It sounded like Portman was back on stage. Removed from the mob, the silence was awkward.

“They make non-iron shirts. They should make non-stain shirts too. We sure could use something like that,” the aide told the fat woman. Or maybe the candidate. “Heh, we could probably use something like that in one of your entrepreneurial speeches. Y’know, fostering new ideas and stuff. That’d be great. The garment industry in the southern part of the district would be all over that. God, what would the world do without us?” The aide smiled as his phone began to vibrate. The aide stood up and took the phone call.

OSB

There’s something horrifically efficient about Oak StreetBootmakers initial years. I believe that their shoes first went online sometime in mid-2010, though I could be wrong. I see them around and I live in a slow part of the world, which would indicate a certain level of success.

The first kicks premiered around $200-$275. They cornered their market – post-college/early middle aged duderonis with money to spend – and got them to buy into their brand. The price of a pair of boots has increased roughly by $75. The Vibram Trail Oxford was roughly $220 in 2010. It retails now for $296.

Is their product nuts good? That is not entirely clear but reviews from their early stuff are positive. However, the years in which we can see the difference between a quality shoe and a crap shoe are approaching for those guys who bought their shoes in 2010 and 2011. Consumer Reports leaves out the “Reliability” for first year models in their car issue. Makes sense right? OSB product is likely worth it but we can’t really know for sure.

These new boots are handsome. Man, Vlagos knew what he was doing when he started this. 

Dork

Denim suits are dumb.

So is this one, in the practical sense.

Taylor Stitch has a denim suit for something like 350 of only slightly inflating dollars.

You could, and should, wait this one out.



The blue is the blue of pleated denim.

See there, I didn't even have to give you a value judgement for the pleated denim and you got the value associated.

Yet, as I sneer, if you wore this, my third party would slow clap. Maybe.

Dress like a dork. Dress like a professional bocce ball player. Dress like you drive a '93 LeSabre and smoke grape cigarillos -- but not in the house for either of those activities.

Dress like those things here.

Don't worry, we definitely won't be wearing the same thing if we see each other in public.

The Despair of Street Style and WIWT Shots

I am most often reminded of it when I’m riding in a bus – a charter bus with big windows. When you ride in a bus you are have this odd removal from space and time. The non-linear continuum hums loudly and has A/C, which is not what most physicists would suppose since, y’know, noise operates within time. I see it through the tinted windows that I rest my forehead on. I see it in unimportant people scraping happiness out of their free time. It’s when I see a middle aged man in a camo hat awkwardly step down an embankment with his fishing rod by the river to get to a better fishing spot. He’s enjoying his free time, trying to find a little bit of sweetness in his passage of time. Maybe he has a bunch of annoying kids, trying themselves to continue the joys of youth by pissing away the afternoon, but now I’m just positing a reality on such a man. I see it in young women walking down a street in the middle of the day to enjoy the bodily things of an ice cream parlor or a quick stop at the salon. I just see it for a second, removed from the world by a bus trucking through the small town that we happen to pass through. This is straight forward, name-it-as-you-see-it, DFW, Sartre, Camus, and bunch of other bullshit writers that tumblrs like to pretend they are, despair (Did you know that there are thought catalog girls who sign their articles Johanna de Silentio? What the fuck is that? You think you’re the female Kierkegaards? Wait, you just write about the philosophy of relationships non-ironically? Get the fuck off the internet.) This is despair is "weightlessness," or "smallness" -- y'know -- an existential crisis  impending over their heads just waiting them to come up for air out of their small pleasures. It makes me a little sick because I know I’m taking my own notion of reality and pushing it upon these characters that I just glimpse. The sort of sick where your lungs feel deep and heavy and like they’re falling out of your chest. 

Menswear bloggers take pride in how they look. WIWT pictures are a great way to consult with others about what should be worn together and how garments should work. Bloggers learn from one another and spend time enjoying garments. It’s great. Enjoying a hobby that is no longer considered “fruity” or “emasculating” is something that, with our free time, we find a lot of joy and fulfillment from. Some men are even able to make a job out of it and pursue this pursuit of menswear aestheticism for a major portion of their lives. Sometimes I see a WIWT picture and I see someone who takes a lot of pride in their hobby. Sometimes I see a street style shot and I see someone who is meticulous about their presentation to others. It seems to be a subjective happiness a lot of those guys have. That’s good and that’s great because subjective happiness is a sort of apex about how you should approach your free time.

            

But sometimes….

Sometimes I just see a self-conscious guy taking a photo of himself, dying in the despair of his small hobby that he toys with just to save himself from the real world. Sometimes I see a street style shot of someone who pursues the small things, tries to make a jump into the real world of taking about small things for a job, and can’t fill those lungs that are falling out of his chest. Sometimes I just see a bunch of small, petty, sad men.

I’m probably just creating this idea for us. Hell, I’m writing it. But, heh, I know you guys.

It could very well be true.

The problem with street style and WIWT shots isn’t that they’re full of peacocks or people who want to distribute sartorial ontologies to get themselves into a position of blogging volume, even though many people would have you believe this. The problem is that we just are hiding from the fact that we are so small. 

Can I be happy with being small? 

Can you be happy with being small?

Reproduction Reeboks

Every time I see a reproduction retro pair of Reeboks for sale I get the grins. 

OiPolloi

I have an old pair of Workout Mids so I have a personal connection to old white Reeboks. There’s a hole in the toe and they’re just about retired after 5 years of wear. I guess I am overly sympathetic given my connection but I will pretend I am unaware of my tangentiality. 

But you usually see middle aged men in cheap Hustler denim -- with a rise that never lowered for the Millenium -- wearing an old pair of beaten Reeboks. They work in autobody shops or maybe at hardware stores. Reeboks are their weekend wear and the grass that the lawnmower pitches up stains the sole a green that is green like America during the summer: baseball and watermelon and brauts and Miller Lite and screaming children and grouchy wives and community swimming pools. These are the guys that wear old Reeboks. The funniest part is that the Reeboks that these men wear are not reproductions. It’s been their weekend wear for two decades. This is brilliant. This is Michael J. Fox. This is allegedly authentic caricaturism.

You can buy reproductions of old Reeboks. They’re cool. I like them (which makes them cool?). But know this:

Clothing doesn’t make you another character, as Patrick Swayze is never laced into a pair of jeans. It doesn’t connect you with the past, you’re not suddenly imbued with proletarian sentiments when you wear old selvedge. It doesn’t make you cool (duh, duh, and duh). Clothing makes you fictional. You are still you. But you’re projecting a fiction to others.

That’s why clothing is so cool.

And why I get the grins when I see that I can purchase something like this.

A Decade Later: When Broken Is Easily Fixed

In about a month, Silverstein’s When Broken is Easily Fixed will have been out for about a decade. My brother bought it for my birthday a few months after it came out. I was twelve years old and, being a whiny piece of crap (little has changed), I was all about every track on the album. It was Silverstein’s debut full-length and it did not disappoint. The production is certainly poor. The guitars seem to slide into a tone that fluctuated between notes and are amplified with amps that have no low end. The bass sounds like it’s cheap. The tone is dead and sometimes appears to be there just to supplement the drums, which could very well be the case. The drums sound like they were recorded quickly, maybe in only a few tracks. The vocals are scrapey and have little depth. Some of the songs are pretty weak -- err, maybe half. But despite all this, the twelve year old me did not have a developed enough taste to discern that this album is off. This album was my angst.

I have no doubt that When Broken is Easily Fixed had a major impact, along with albums like Sing the Sorrow and Deja Entendu, on my life but it is uncertain on how much impact that When Broken is Easily Fixed had on culture at the time. Actually, we’ll say that When Broken is Easily Fixed is a reflection of culture at that time rather than an influencer, y’know, Hegel ‘n shit. Plus, it's not like every kid ever sat down and listened to this album. The Beatles Silverstein is not.The singles and the videos accompanying them are crap. We’ll take a walk-through.

 Silverstein is wearing what Express has been trying to sell us for the past decade in the “Smashed Into Pieces” music video. There is something to be said about this and I think that it’s that culture as a whole has been trying to wear ties and jackets for about a decade now, probably more. Trying to, at some extent, work a image of formality into a youth culture of rebellion. We’re not particularly good at it, as Told’s white tie and red shirt tells us. We’re buying our rebellion within capitalism which doesn’t work. The oil, a reference to the album cover, continues to show that extraditing yourself from culture is a self-sacrificial action -- or something along the lines of that. The ties in the video are cheap and in bad taste. The shirts, as mentioned previously appearing to be the sort of thing Express has been selling for years, look... so... unhealthy -- like Banker’s Vodka, Cheez-its, and a new found appreciation of other people’s prescription medications.

When Broken is Easily Fixed helped Victory Records begin their upswing into relevancy. Over the next two years they would release albums from Spitalfield, Streetlight Manifesto, Bayside, Atreyu, Hawthorne Heights, Straylight Run, Taking Back Sunday, and Aiden. Victory made money off of Warped Tour and an increasing disposable allowance of 13 year olds. Victory was an early tween and teen exploiter and they did fairly well for themselves. Though now they’re stuck releasing Terror albums which is the equivalent of releasing new Iron Maiden albums.

THIS VIDEO.

“Giving Up” has to be included for entertainment purposes. There is little to be learned from it, other than that you’re a mean person and will laugh at other people’s work when given the opportunity. Why are they using that camera-lens? Why is that guy in the video so ugly? Why did they shoot this video? Were cassette tapes still used in 2003?

Notice the baseball t-shirt on Boshart (lead guitar). Every couple years a clothing brand tries to sell these sorts of things as essential or useful for a summer wardrobe or American because BASEBALL. They’re not really warm and they don’t keep you cool. They’re like mid-weight suits. GENERALLY USELESS is the phrase that I am familiar with. They’re OK if you like having lots of things in your closet.

Silverstein is a “growing pains” band. They’re pretty bad right now. Sometimes they try to bring back a more hardcore sound to their albums but they tend to fall short. That’s OK. I still enjoy the old stuff because it reminds me of 7th grade. There’s nothing wrong with taking a look at the past every now and then. I mean, you do it every day when you check in on ACL.

Chacos

#menswear likes to pick up its oddities. Y’know, shawls and antiquated hats are very of-the-moment #menswear. Something recent that I’ve noticed, are the inclusion of Chacos in S/S lookbooks. What’s a Chaco? Like a Chaco-Taco? Or wait, Choco Taco? Those things are alright but kinda’ dumb (it’s an ice-cream taco, so... there) and don’t count as anybody’s culinary essential -- unless you’re 16 and you learned recently that, you too, can spend money at the grocery store. Chacos, like Choco Tacos, do not fall into anybody’s essentials -- unless you’re in college and going through that phase where you like things just because they cause people to rethink society’s definitions of normal or acceptable. Far out man; like far out and above other people.

Wait, what’s a Chaco?

You don’t know?

Where do you shop? JCPenny? Woost’s new pantheon?

Aight, aight, I’ll back up.

And from there we’ll go.

So, you know Tevas, right? Their sandals that have the three strap system that is held together with velcro. They’re definitively dorky. They were developed by a geophysicist so claiming their dorkiness would make sense if we extend the inventor’s profession to his rafting footwear creation. Tevas have a fairly thin sole and wear our rather quickly if you spend loads time trapesing around in stream-beds and grassy dales (I know you #menswear dudes do a lot of this). However, they’re more useful for outdoor activities than the regular thong sandal and more useful than hiking boots as boots can really suck in the summer and when participating in any activity where water is involved. Athletic sneakers would be a decent substitute for summer trapesing activities but, hey, Nike is the modern day Ba’al Zabul. Their run-ins with the media during the 90s for their sweatshops in Asia would have been occurring as water sandals, and the cultures that were accepting them, were gaining popularity. So is there an alternative that lasts longer than a pair of Tevas? You fucking bet there is.

Chacos, man. Chacos have a sole the size of Tristan Thompson’s ass, which, for those who don’t know, is so big you couldn’t park it in downtown Cleveland and nobody -- absolutely nobody -- parks in downtown Cleveland. There’s something about Chacos -- the JNCO appeal perhaps. 

They’ve also started to appear in #menswear lookbooks. Do you remember how Wolverine stormed into the scene to compete with Alden Indy boots? Wolverine appeared (and was) very ready to compete in the menswear world as they offered a pair of boots for a bit less than a pair of new Indy boots. There was a large marketing push of the 1000 Mile Boot and I am under the impression that it was reasonably successful given the amount of men I see instagramming their feet with Wolverine boots on -- though my sample size is not ideal. Wolverine is owned by Wolverine World Wide (WWW). WWW purchased Chacos in 2009. Most Chacos featured in the lookbooks I’ve seen probably aren’t brand-name Chacos but it’s funny to think that WWW has been pushing their product the same way they were pushing 1000 Mile Boots. Check out The River’s (Japan) lookbook from S/S ’13 where they appear to be using some derivative of Chacos extensively.

Also notice the larger brand Beams using Chacos in their S/S ’13 lookbook. Still, Chacos are not permeating menswear, as I’ve only pointed out 2 lookbooks where they have been featured. 

A Patrik Ervell version of the Chaco is featured in the Manu and Pascal photoshoot from Four-Pins. One could argue that this could be a Teva derivative but given the thickness of the sole I’m leaning towards Chacos. Either way, the Patrik Ervell version is a “reinterpretation” of a stupid-strapped-sandal.

Chacos.

They’re probably not good. But they’re there.

So, who wants to do a product round-up? 

Photos from Selectism.