Clothier Fashionista

I swear there was a time where I was perfectly capable of dressing myself. I can't prove it, but I nevertheless feel quite certain it existed.

Looking back on childhood pictures of myself, I had cooler clothes during the 80s than at any other time of my life. The current version of me would kill several faceless drifters for the ability to locate and fit into the kiddie clothes my parents dressed me in. But my clothes throughout the 80s were not of my own choosing and I certainly cannot take credit for dressing myself back then.
At best, I can thank my parents for not making me look like a complete hump.

But then in the 90s, I wrongly assumed I was equipped to rebel against a system that was in no way broken. Suddenly disallowing my folks to dictate the clothes I wore, I opted instead to choose my own clothes. What resulted was nearly a decade of XXL t-shirts oddly printed with hip-hop renditions of Tweety and the Tazmanian Devil worn with track pants emblazoned with the Nike swoosh on the side.

I don't know why all that happened, but it did.
I'd like to take it back, but I can't.

Nevertheless, I swear there was a time I dressed okay. Thinking back, I don't recall feeling awkward about my clothing. I got hired at various jobs, so I couldn't have been presenting myself as a total tool, right?
Over three years ago I moved to Baltimore and began dating a girl there. Back then I wore a lot of trucker hats and board shorts. But back then, everyone was wearing trucker hats and board shorts and this girl thought me very stylish. I admitted to her that I wore what I liked and what I liked at the moment happened to be popular.
Maybe this was when I was stylish: in the autumn of 2003 and into the summer of 2004.
This girlfriend at the time was flipping through old photos of mine and came across a handful of pictures from the previous summer.
"Wait. Is this what you wore last summer? Like, all the time?" she said disgustedly.
I glanced at the series of photos prompting this question and replied that yeah, that's how I dressed.

I'll never forget the look she gave me. It started as a solid eyeball-to-eyeball stare down and eventually shifted to a slow-burning head-to-toe-to-head once-over.
Some of you have read my thoughts on the head-to-toe-to-head glance in a blog from the summer (entitled "No One Hates Women Like Women Hate Women") where I stated that a head-to-toe-to-head glance is not what you want to receive.
The look of absolute acidity on her face was something to behold - as if she could see the beast of unfortunate fashion gestating in my soul; daring to hatch and recoil out of my body again.

"But," she said confusedly, "look at those shoes. Are those Reeboks? You wore Reeboks?"
I didn't know what to say. And in the absence of my words, she added a few more of her own.
"Does the shirt you're wearing in this picture say Mossimo? Why were you doing this to yourself?"
I laughed, but on the inside I was panicked.

When I was 13, I buzzed the sides of my hair and parted the remaining hair on the top of my head, straight down the middle. I also didn't start shaving until I was 14...
...despite growing the opening hints of a mustache at the age of 12.
My favorite shirt at the time was a Nike Bo Jackson shirt that said "Bo Don't Know Diddley" on the back. The shirt was neon orange, the same color as three Long Island Ice Teas vomitted onto the backseat of gray car apholstery.
And when people run across pictures of me in this state, I immediately turn beet red and look for ways to completely embarrass and belittle the person who discovered the picture.
Why do I do this? Isn't that an accurate depiction of who I was in 1993?
Yes. And that's the problem.
The me of 1993 never stopped to think about what he looked like wearing neon orange or athletic socks with worn elastic in them. But the me from 2004 totally hates the me from 11 years previous. The me from 2004 wanted to represent a youthful exhuberance brought to life with tan skin and playful board shorts. I wanted my long hair to flop in my eyes and offset the crooked trucker brim haphazardly sitting atop my head. That's the me I wanted to be.
And you know what, when my wife looks at pictures of the 2004 me 10 years from now, I'm not going to want her to linger too long on those either because I'm sure I'll no longer desire to emote careless exuberance.
Or maybe I will and I'll be really pissed that I didin't save those trucker hats, 'cause by 2014, they'll be awesomely vintage.

All of this is troubling because I've recently been shown that I still haven't got a stranglehold on fashion yet.

Did you know that wire hangers are really bad for... well, hanging? Not just sweaters or pants, but pretty much everything.
Did you know that sweaters and hoodies shouldn't wallow on hangers, but should instead be folded and placed flat?
Did you know that the top two buttons of shirts should always be clasped so as to better maintain the shape of the collar?
Did you know that a Gap sweater from 2004 is visibly out of style when compared to a Gap sweater from 2006? Yeah. Gap sweaters from 2004 don't concave inward to fit the contours of the male abdomen (it wasn't the style two years ago), nor are the rounded collars en vogue amidst mainstream America.
Well dammit. No one told me. Here I've been dressing myself all this time and I've been making all these mistakes.
Even the rules I thought were steadfast have suddenly developed exceptions.

I was just informed that black and brown can be worn together under certain situations. This is to fashion rules what the letter Y is to vowels.
Dammit. Dammit. Dammit.

Have you ever been standing too close to the curb and then suddenly pulled back by a friend? If you have, you might have turned to the friend confusedly and said,
"Hey friend, why did you jerk my back so quickly?"
Your friend - slightly out of breath - might look at you for a moment and reply, "Because a bus almost plowed into you. Didn't you see it? It surely would have cracked your body into shards like an egg had I not yanked you back."
Your first reaction to hearing this news would probably be to smile and laugh. But inevitably, five minutes later, your mind might focus on exactly what just almost happened and your delayed feelings of fear and panic.
The bus is long gone, your life safe once again, but because you were unaware of your recent impending mortality, your mind and body make up for such a lag by freaking out long after status quo is restored.

This panicky freak-out is what shot through my body as my Baltimore girlfriend flipped through my photo album. It is also what zipped through my memories as I was being told that my perfectly fine wire-hanging sweater was more Cosby than J. Crew.
Why haven't I known this all along? Whose job was it to tell me these things?

When I relayed to my mother all the new information I eccrued regarding caring for my clothes, she was dissappointingly unimpressed. Apparently she already knew all these tidbits. When I asked her why she never imparted her wisdom, she smiled and shook her head.
"You never would have listened to me."

She's right. I never would have listened.

From now on, I carry a picture in my wallet of myself as a 13-year-old goober. If I should ever find myself contemplating buying pants at a Foot Locker or an Urban Outfitters, I plan to pull out my old neon XXL Nike picture and zig away from the Locker and zag toward hipstertown.

As Blink 182 once yelled, "I guess this is growing up."

The Ninja Slipper

There are topics of conversation that should never be discussed or examined or talked about amongst friends. These things are lurid and heinous and shameful. Toxic and devilish. Embarrassment would haunt us like spectors should these things ever be overheard by bosses, priests or local librarians.
Our families would turn their backs on us.

...Yet something compells us to these inglorious topics. There is something that drives us to whisper about them in our school hallways and cubicle dividers.
And at the exact moment we wish we had kept it to ourselves, it wafts out of our collective mouths, parading itself in front of everyone to hear.

Cameltoe.

As defined by Wikipedia, "Cameltoe is a slang term that refers to the outline of a woman's vulva when seen through tight, form-fitting clothes."
It is the reason Daisy Duke was an iconic heroine, why Marilyn Monroe wore two pairs of panties for the subway grate scene in 'The Seven Year Itch', and why I have decided to abandon all sense of normal decorum.
Unfortunately for my perverted constituents, this blog is not about female cameltoe, but male cameltoe, which has dared not been defined by Wikipedia or any other on-line resource. Male cameltoe - like seeing ghosts of dead relatives - is something that if happened upon, should nevertheless remain secret.
Tonight, I break the silence.

We live in a crippled world where everyone has seen this horrendous phenomenon and says nary a word about it. Men are buying pants that are too tight at the inseam and then sitting with legs splayed outward for the rest of humanity to see.
Our ramshackle society no longer believes in tailors or seamstresses and the result has long been poorly fitting knickerbockers.
Men's testicles are having a Civil War and the inseam is the Mason-Dixon.
I rarely buy my own clothing anymore. I find the task tedious and I've hired a pageboy to do the bulk of my shopping for me. He buys my powdered wigs, my feathered caps, my ruffleed shirts, but the lone item I disallow anyone to purchase for me are my pants.
The pants are my responsibility. I stand a statuesque 6'3" and 5'9" of that are my legs.
I'm leggy.
And because I am leggy, I am faced with the same pantaloon dilemma time and time again: do I allow my pants to fall rebelliously below my butt crack or do I wear ankle-flooding high pants that inevitably present my "Thunderpaw" to anyone sitting in front of me?
Because I am a man of the people, I choose to display my boxer shorts before I display my "VW Beetle Hood".
I call upon the rest of you to do the same.
I bring this up in the name of outrage. We are - none of us - innocent in this battle of the bulge.
A professor of mine insists on wearing form-fiting chinos. Originally, I thought nothing of this fashion decision until he lifted his leg and rested it upon a chair causing each of his testicles to part ways due to heavy constriction.
My professor's inseam is Moses and his package is the Red Sea.
My professor's testicles are Lucille Ball and Ricky Ricardo and his tight inseam is the episode where the two of them get into a fight and split their bedroom in half with duct tape.

I chose to sit at the front of the class on day one and I'm too stubborn to switch horses mid-race now, but my friends, I promise you, had I to do it over again, I would not choose to be eye-and-eye with his "Ninja Slipper".
His "Vertical Smile."
His "Moose Knuckle".
His "Fosolo."
His "Mandelbrot Muffin."
I write to you now because something must be done. We cannot live in a society this maddening, this unaware of itself. We must all be like Howard Beale in the 1976 film 'Network'. We must all get out of our chairs, and race to our windows. We must all clatter and shout and shatter the silence. Shout to stop professors and fat guys and Frenchmen from chaffing themselves so publicly.
It is time, my dear friends, to take a stand. It is time to say we are mad as hell and we're not gonna take it anymore.
The time to act is now.
Loosen the inseams and sit comfortably in a world of adjoined testicles. Please.

My grade depends on it.