In which a Buzzfeed/Gawker/Jezebel writer writes an unintentional fiction about #menswear because they need things to conform to their world-view

Men have been dressing way better recently, right? I don’t know, maybe. People still wear Jets hoodies at the bars I go to but sometimes I see a guy wearing a blazer and jeans or maybe even a tie and shit, and I, like, totally swoon, right?

Where did this come from? How can I explain this phenomenon? It’s probably because women are earning more money so men have to gussy up a bit. I took a feminist studies course one semester so I’m an expert about changing gender identities. Yeah, that’s totally it. Woman power is causing men to up their game and not look like a goat vomited up a sweater. Once one guy discovered that wearing classy, Paul Newman-esque, things, then everyone realized it works. Guys think with their dicks so totally.

Why do #menswear writers make rules lists? I just stumbled upon #menswear blogs so I'm an expert now. Don’t they know that everything is subjective except for the things that I don’t want to be subjective? Here I say, “something really misinformed about the menswear industry.”

Men want to dress well because they’re all fuckin’ conformists. Yep, that’s it. You all wear those ties and jackets and boots and look like a clone and I hate it. I wish everyone dressed grunge because that’s how I dress and I want to be able to say, “I dressed grunge but now I dress like I’m from suburban Calgary and need to wear a parka everywhere because everyone dresses grunge now.”

Something provocative and obviously wrong to drive pageviews from #menswear acolytes leaving comments after a couple people link this article on their twitter and a Valet mention.

A run on sentence about socks.

Men dress well now because they want to be their grandfathers. This is it. I need to make statements like this because it was what I was trained to do. Make conclusions. Consider but discard other formulas. Let us simplify things because this post would be far too long. #menswear identity can be summed up in a shitty internet post. Humanity can be summed up in a shitty internet post. Do I get free coffee and maybe a daily column now?

If I'm wrong it doesn't matter because #menswear is a conversation we need to be having. Communication breaks down barriers. Just to show you that I'm right.

LEAVE A COMMENT BELOW AND LET ME KNOW WHAT YOU THINK BECAUSE WERE HAVING A CONVERSATION ABOUT THIS. COMPLAIN ABOUT THIS TO YOUR FRIENDS, I NEED PAGEVIEWS.

BUT-REALLY-DOE-I-JUS’-TAKE-PITCHERS-OF-MAH-FRIENDS

Big #menswear movement. They’ve been taking over “the game” and you don’t even know how to handle how they interpret style through their lenses. 

Their pictures just get you, man.

So stylish.

Brilliance.

Giving men an apex to climb to and all else is trash. 

The movement started in 2005.

This shit is 8.

What is an #influencer?

“BUT-REALLY-DOE-I-JUS’-TAKE-PITCHERS-OF-MAH-FRIENDS” photographers have been presenting the best of the style world for a number of years and have plenty of published works. They make up at least half (nah, more than that) of tumblr. They’ve been featured on GQ, Esquire, and yours truly (nah, not really, might be cool though? prolly not, i hur they got ‘tude). 

The Sartorialist, Tommy Ton, Guerreisms, some other shit, I think maybe some girl’s facebook albums, and a variety of other experienced photographers have been takin’ over influence. 

“BUT-REALLY-DOE-I-JUS’-TAKE-PITCHERS-OF-MAH-FRIENDS” photographers go to awesome events like Pitti Uomo, Paris Fashion Week, and NYFW and take “BUT-REALLY-DOE-I-JUS’-TAKE-PITCHERS-OF-MAH-FRIENDS” photographs. 

iPhone? Nah, “BUT-REALLY-DOE-I-JUS’-TAKE-PITCHERS-OF-MAH-FRIENDS” photographs take photos with the best equipment. They get to paid to take “BUT-REALLY-DOE-I-JUS’-TAKE-PITCHERS-OF-MAH-FRIENDS” photographs so premium production would be expected.

There are even short films about “BUT-REALLY-DOE-I-JUS’-TAKE-PITCHERS-OF-MAH-FRIENDS” photographers. It’s an art-form.

“BUT-REALLY-DOE-I-JUS’-TAKE-PITCHERS-OF-MAH-FRIENDS” photographers have guided us towards what we should be and how we should act and “if you’re thinking about red then you should think about these pictures of my friends that I took.”

Logic is photos which are light and dark and texture and reblogs.

*puff*

People have written pontification pieces about “BUT-REALLY-DOE-I-JUS’-TAKE-PITCHERS-OF-MAH-FRIENDS” photographers; this piece included.

Goddamn, right?

Can’t wait to see 30 more in my Feedly. It's like I'm creepin' on y'alls facebook profiles. Which, who knows, maybe?

Shop Matters

Hippy dippy would appear to still sell well, if cool stockist are any indicator. 

I’ve written about Birkenstock’s before and return to them because they’re an interesting piece of footwear. They have a variety of contexts outside of men who write about clothes on the internet and their odd ideals of how the “piece” was worn in the past. Yet, one of those contexts that the Birkenstock clog is partaking in is men who write about clothes on the internet. The cool, hard-to-find Birkenstock model, The Maine, is carried at a number of “hip” establishments. 

They’re carried by Oi Polloi, Albam, Unionmade, and... 

Zappos?

Zappos? The Amazon hydra head? The non-hippy-dippy, non-coffee drinkin’, non-Warby Parker wearin’, non-jean tearin’, and non-cool factor sharin’ corporation that ships your mom’s walking shoes to your front stoop?

Are the hard-to-find Maine’s just a shoe that you wear to church? Have they fallen from the graces from the sartorially esoteric pantheon and down to Champs trash available to *gasp* people whose favorite restaurant is Cracker Barrel? #elimanningwear

Have they fallen to where kids whose blog posts are just made up of rhetorical questions feature them?

Either way, the question I find entertaining is the following: Does the shop matter?

Does it matter in person?

Does it matter when you're ordering on the internet?

Being a cheap-ass, my subjective answer is no.

Though I am unsure if everyone will answer exactly as I do.

Ken Burns

Watching a lot of Ken Burns requires quite the attention span. One could interrupt me a la “at a loud party style” with a loud interjection:

OH GAWD I LOVED ‘THE WAR’

I LOVED HIS BASEBALL SERIES

ASHOKAN FAREWELL

And then divert the conversation somewhere actually interesting a la “some NYT editorial about new epiphanies a new mother has because no one in the world has ever been a mother before so this is really uncharted territory.” Which will be good, because Ken Burns is boring and not a great small-talk subject.

Some people like boring, or what they would say is beauty in details only they can see. These people are (insert interest)-philes and a subsection is the targeted audience of this piece.

Well, Ken Burns likes to include photos, over a century old, of people in baggy, slightly short clothing covered in dirt in his films. The clothing sort of hangs on their short frames and you can tell it had as much wear as the photo has a century into it’s existence. There aren’t a lot of places you can get clothing that makes you look this dated. It would be silly, really, to sell it OTR. You’d look like a re-enactor, a notoriously weird group of people who spend weekends traveling to historical towns and doing things like churning butter -- which is reasonably absurd like writing about clothes. Most would have this sort of thing custom made from deadstock material or from a mill like Woolrich. Or you can buy it from Mister Freedom. It’s not cheap. It’s a bit silly. But the online store is the only place you can buy stuff like it. Unless you’re in Hollywood. 

Hacendado Jacket

Ranchero Shirt

Hacendado Trousers

Drover Blouse

Gunslinger Denim

California Blue Jeans

NOS Chambray

An experimental sartorial theorist could give you a scheme like, “wear it with all modern pieces and it’ll get incorporated into your own modern sartorial era,” which could very well work but I don’t quite know what one would do with this stuff once one gets ahold of it. Wear it in public? Pan slowly in and out with a video camera and have a haunting Ashokan Farewell piece play in the background? Get someone with out-of-date prescription glasses to talk about them on camera? 

It’s cool and Christophe Loiron’s vision appears to be boundless. It looks like really wonderful stuff to me and has for as long as he’s had a website. Each collection appears to be reasonably unique but with comparasions between them (which makes sense given that each collection takes into account different time periods). But maybe it’s best to leave sleeping dogs lie. Or “It is nought good a slepyng hound to wake.” 

The recurred past may be similar but it is never the same.

#influencer

It’s very hard being an #influencer. 

Lots of brands looking for promotion. Lots of livelihoods on the line.

#influencers determine how much brands bring in because of the campaigns we are involved in.

As #menswear bloggers have become more and more lifestyle #influencers, more and more lifestyle products are looking for #influencers to promote their products.

For example, alcohol brands know that to make any sort of money, they have to start ground roots campaigns to sell their products to the hip and #influential.

Beck’s had a marginally large campaign recently as they reached out to #menswear bloggers and gotten their endorsement. They reached out to GTBT but, since my #influence is so large, I didn’t want to rock the boat. Also, GTBT is unique. #influencers don’t follow other #influencers. #influencers don’t just reblog other #influencers.

Instead, I decided to use my #influencer weight to endorse a product that gets little screen time. Like, TIME archive photos only it’s a product that you can buy.

While they never reached out to GTBT, Banker’s Club is a brand whose message and vision is the same as GTBT. Banker’s Club is GTBT in alcohol form. 

Sam and I decided to share our favorite cocktail to make with Banker’s Club Vodka (our favorite):

12 fl oz Banker’s Club Vodka

2 Ice Cubes

It’s called Vodka and Ice.

Drink up!

Being huge #influencers, we also made a promotional video to start the #influencers campaign with Banker’s Club. 

Check out the campaign video. #influential.

Michael Bastian S/S '14

I liked Michael Bastian’s S/S ’14 show. I wasn’t there, so I couldn’t tell you if the soundtrack was appropriate. I listened to some old Hatebreed while I flipped through it, so maybe that’s the trick to creating the correct audio environment to enjoying the show but I wouldn’t know since the experience cannot be repeated. 

But regardless of what crap is going through your speakers, the clothes looked pretty cool. The pineapple pants were probably the end-all for the event as a sort of final putsch of the excessive utilitarian thing that I know I was snorting. I could continue to discuss various pieces and looks but you could probably just read some NYT writer who is more talented at conveying what exactly leopard print pants mean (masculine ferality and our general symbiosis with fleas). It’s supposed to be, like, french holidays or whatever but I think somebody else can give you a better press release.

You’ve already seen all of these looks but I’ll post the pineapple pants for reference and then tell you a subjective sense of what I got from the show. Hopefully you’ll have something to relate to it but, if not, I’m sure the next thing on the internet will be genuinely entertaining for you.

About two months ago, my brother and I were at a Holiday Inn near Hammondsport in New York. Hammondsport was built up fairly well as it was an old vacationing town surrounding a finger lake but there were few people to see. It was a large echoing shell of a town, sort of like Wildwood in November. 

They’re really nice places, Holiday Inns, if you don’t get a smoking room. My brother and I had a non-smoking room on the second floor that some folks perceived to be a smoking room so, subjective views had overruled the objective rule set in place by the corporation and it smelled of American Spirits (fancy). Despite being old, with liquid marks on the wood stain from big glasses of sweating water or just big glasses of sweating cheap gin and an AC unit that rattled just like in the movies or when you stayed at that Red Roof, the room had that youthful “fuck you” to it that you only find in kids who know they’ve got jack shit to look forward to. Perhaps that was just the cigarette smell speaking. 

At the same time as we were in the hotel, there were clowns residing on the first floor. They were there for a Rotary Wounded Veterans event. It was a community event. 

Around 6:30am one morning, we met an elderly woman, about 80, and her mentally challenged daughter who had been living at the hotel for about a year. Their house had burned down the previous fall. The hotel coffee was watery. 

One of the evenings we stayed there, I turned on the TV. The local channel was showing old French movies, with no subtitles. The TV could not change channels. The actors in the films were superb. I felt rather like a fancy cinephile, being able to interpret each eyebrow raise and excessive arm gesture. 

The next morning I rode a bike around the lake. It was the middle of July and the town wasn’t quite what you would call busy. Cars were more sparse than my small hometown. Old boats creaked in the grass of the nostalgia of probably just a decade or two ago. A bar looked like it got sort of busy at night. The town looked good. The air smelled good. You’d think the town could sell nostalgia to just about anyone. 

You’d think, right?

For some reason, when I flipped through the pictures of the show, I thought of my weekend in Hammondsport. I hadn’t thought of it in a month. The weekend didn't end well for my brother or me. The nostalgia of some other vacationing family was quirky and delightful but I’m not sure I’d go back. 

No, I wouldn't go back. I didn't have anything there. 

Endless Hobby

Hi, my name is Mark and I’m a professional hobbiest. 

Well, I do it for a living. I just do hobbies. Like model airplanes and drawing other people’s sneakers.

Nope. Nobody pays me.

My Mom sort of does with food because she loves me.

And a bed. A bunk bed.

Yeah, I read that post. I didn’t like the marketing slash business aspect of it. I think that some people try to sell out too early and end up just selling out their personal brand, right? So cashing in is really hard.

Yeah, well that always drives me nuts about some of these guys, like, shouldn’t they be concerned with telling us what is important and creating content that is authentic rather than creating content for someone else under their own name?

Well, they could always eat cold ravioli. That’s what I do. No, you don’t need money.

I think they should separate job from blog and hobby, y’know? Like, if you can be self-sufficient then you could spend free time creating content without having to sell your personal brand, right?

Well, I figure you could do like 1 post every two weeks working 40 hours a week. I guess you couldn’t have a family. Hobbies are your family, right?

You could work part-time, I think, and just live meagerly. Don’t get a hobby that requires significant funds or significant apartment space.

If you don’t have time for a post of anything just have your friends take pictures of you doing your hobby. That’s basically content.

Well cameras are cheap, right?

That much for a camera? No way.

Well, cold ravioli man. It’s what I do.

Yeah, it is spartan and generally unhappy but you gotta’ sacrifice for the good of the hobby and the authenticity of the content.

Whatever, man. No, I can’t give you the employee discount, that’s against the rules. Just get the blue-light special, it saves you like the same amount. 

I’d probably get fired if I did that. 

At least I’m authentic, right?