Coming Soon to a Paris Runway Near You

There’s something that’s been percolating through my grey matter for a few days, and it’s finally reached the surface. A while back I read a blurb about a guy who was looking ever-so-stylish in a custom-tailored four-button coat.

Four buttons! Wow! Can you believe it? That guy has some brass!

Four buttons.

One time, many years ago, I went into a suit store (lacking the funds to pay someone thousands of dollars to make a jacket for me with one more button) and asked for the suit that would be the farthest thing from the Standard Male Uniform without offending people who expected to see me in the SMU. (Nobody I knew was in the ‘expecting to see’ category, but there was a funeral or a job interview or a wedding or some tragedy like that that required me to look ‘respectable’.) I ended up with a fairly nice suit in a borderline scandalous dark dark green that utterly failed to bring out my eyes. It looked, to my eye, like just about every other suit I’d ever seen.

If someone from a non-suit-wearing culture were to visit me in a suit-required situation and apologize for mixing up our names by saying ‘you all look the same to me’, I would nod my head in agreement. Women have fashion, men have the SMU. Men are reduced to the necktie to express who they are through clothing. Unfortunately, the necktie has turned into the business equivalent of gang colors. It’s not an expression of individuality; it’s your membership badge for whatever pathetically irrelevant subset of suit wearers you imagine yourself to be. There is the Power Tie (ha!), the School Tie, the Invisible Tie, and (the only one backed by a shred of honesty) the Family tie. I like the Family tie. It changes with the holidays, is sometimes horrible but carried as a badge of honor. “I’m wearing this polyester disaster because it will make my family happy.” There’s a good chance it will deflect bullets as well. The Family tie is cynically wielded by gray-haired salesmen.

Back to the buttons. You read it here first, kids… the TRUE FASHION REBEL will have no buttons at all. Velcro, baby. Imagine the clean lines of your suit jacket that is in every other respect just like what everyone else is wearing. No buttons! The Scandal!

Velcro. It’s the new black.

21 thoughts on “Coming Soon to a Paris Runway Near You

  1. Wow you own a suit?? I donated all my suits back in the mid 90’s. Too passe for me (ok..I look stupid in female suits no matter how much cash is thrown at the attire).

    Wait…did your suit survive the flood?

  2. Interesting the new MOH was searching for “Jerry Seeger MOH.” Too bad there are so few details for said searcher to be rewarded with their tilte. Mesterious MOH from Far Away….

  3. Oh, anybody else in San Diego (let alone the World) besides me still running Netscape 7.1? Nice try, but I declare you pervious.

    Really pL, I wouldn’t have expected such a cynical, desperate attempt to cling to power from you. Mr7k, sure; but not you.

  4. Seems I owe you an apology, pL.

    Well, yeah, sure, about comparing you and Mr7k: you’re right, no one deserves that.

    But I just checked SiteMeter and I see it didn’t record me as a TimeWarner San Diego customer as it has in the past. So you didn’t have the three clues I was counting on: MOH in the search, Netscape 7.1, and San Diego.

    Imagine if you will my delight, while working at home on work laptop, at visiting MR&HBI and discovering from the counter I was penultimate to MOH-dom. Well, I dashed over to my home computer, which doesn’t have a favorite link to MR&HBI (have to keep it from the kids – look what happened to Carol Ann!). So I had to come up with a quasi clever search to log my visit on SiteMeter. Thanks for noticing.

  5. Lydia – no, not disco wear. Skinny wear. I don’t think I’ll be wearing 29″ waists again any time soon.

    Keith, welcome to the ranks of the redepervious.

  6. Jer, ROFL 29″….nah you found a crepe place in Czech-land. Keep it under 39″ and you will be doing well given that fare.

    Jerry’s family…post pictures!! LOL Sorry had to be said.

  7. Lydia … You want pictures?

    pictures

    Oh, wait, you mean, like, pictures of people? Um, those are harder to come by. I’ll have to track some of those down; meanwhile, there are a couple of me that show up in the haiku rotation from time to time.

    [ebjff]

  8. Oh, and speaking of San Diego … it now looks like some sort of plan to bring Black Magic there for the New Year’s regatta may materialize after all. We’d be bringing two boats, but Zorro and I are both on very low budgets (yeah, I know, an extremely odd situation in the world of yacht racing) so we’re looking at a very low-key trip.

  9. Carol Anne, I believe Lydia is requesting Jerry’s family post pictures of him circa 1979 with a 29″ waist, preferably in a polyester outfit with bell bottoms and wide lapels.

    Note to self: the job of MOH has really fallen on hard times to be reduced to interpreter between commenters. In the good old days, a pervious MOH or similar minion would have jumped in and handled the duties, and the current MOH would never have had to get his hands dirty. *sigh*

  10. *snicker* she knew that but was amusing us all with the choices of pictures in her world. Mine are at Pikers but have some good ones hidden elsewhere (shoves the discs far away from her puter pretending like she’s not paparazzi)

  11. I took the liberty of fixing the above link, though I was tempted to “accidentally” get it wrong. Interesting that we’re in the ‘pets’ section…

  12. Yet, see first thing I noticed was Jerry, even back then, was looking through bottles.

    I am sooooo glad my family for the most part are clueless about the whole blog bit and my existance in the cyber world. My ‘wall of shame’ for my 40th birthday was enough to scare me (so many bad hair choices).

  13. “Robert McCleery, who completed his dissertation at Texas A&M on urban and suburban squirrels, outfitted squirrels with radio transmitter collars and found that 80 percent of them died under the tires of a car or truck.” (AP)

    Where, besides Texas A&M, can someone major in squirrel studies?

  14. European diploma mill seeks students with bags of nuts for squirrels and bags of cash for tuition.

    I can see Dogbert’s tail awaggin’.

    Is Muddled U the next get poor quick scheme?

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