Want to make your clothes look worse? Strap on an Apple Watch



The source of all our problems is right in front of our eyes and on far too many wrists: the Apple Watch.

The Apple Watch is bad. It’s really bad. It’s an abomination. It’s a crime against nature.

The pressing desire to know all these detailed metrics about our body throughout the day isn’t spiritually healthy.

If we wanted to pinpoint the moment everything started going down the tubes, we would find ourselves staring at the release date of the first Apple Watch. Once we crossed that threshold, everything started slipping.

OK, I might be exaggerating a little.

The Apple Watch is not a crime against humanity. It’s not the worst thing in the world. But it’s not good. I know this will anger many who have given into the Apple Watch craze, but someone must tell the truth about this pointless device.

Techno-communist

The Apple Watch is ugly. No one in his right mind would try to convince you that this nondescript, black cube that hangs off your wrist is elegant or attractive. It’s not pleasing to look at or wear. It’s not strong or powerful in any understandable way, either. It’s nothing at all. Aesthetically, it barely exists.

Who looks worse with an Apple Watch — men or women? It’s hard to tell. It looks equally ridiculous on both. It looks pointlessly geeky. The smooth black front and the tapping at the touch screen looks less retro-futurism 1986 and more senior special at Del Boca Vista. It looks less Harrison Ford in "Blade Runner" than it does Rick Moranis in "Spaceballs."

For guys, the fragile aesthetic doesn’t exude any kind of strength. It feels overly fastidious and annoyingly particular. It almost feels blandly androgynous, or techno-communist, for lack of a better word.

Traditionally, there are two kinds of men’s watches. Watches that are formal and elegant and watches that are rough and rugged. The Apple Watch is neither. It’s a secret, ugly third thing.

It’s confused, and it makes every outfit look confused. Jeans, a flannel shirt, and boots look strong. Add an Apple Watch, and it looks confused. A sport coat, poplin button-down, and khaki chinos look classic. Add an Apple Watch, and it looks bizarre.

Femininity killer

For women, the size and shape of the Apple Watch looks dreadfully clunky and unfeminine. No woman’s wrist looks delicate or beautiful with an Apple Watch. The same bland androgynous effect that we see with men is felt with the women.

A woman’s watch should be small and delicate. It should be dainty. It should suit the size of her wrist and exude a kind of feminine elegance. It should feel like jewelry.

The Apple Watch on a woman looks like a post-prison ankle monitor or some kind of experimental monitoring device they put on you in the hospital when you are knocking on death’s door.

I have seen women in dresses, heels, and Apple Watches. It’s absurd. The ensemble is one of elegance, and then out of nowhere, the Apple Watch is slapped on the wrist, and it feels like it had to have found its way there by accident. No woman would intentionally wear this thing with a dress, would they?

Slave to sleep

It’s enough to oppose the Apple Watch on aesthetics alone, but that's not the only strike against it. The very idea of the Apple Watch is offensive and neurotic. Unless you have a serious medical condition, you really don’t need to be monitoring your daily bodily functions and variations this closely.

I know that endlessly obsessing over sleep is a trendy thing today among those who have too much time on their hands, but if you are a young and healthy person, you should be able to live your life without turning every day and night into an Excel spreadsheet.

The pressing desire to know all these detailed metrics about our body throughout the day isn’t spiritually healthy. It isn’t normal. It isn’t vital. It’s pointlessly obsessive. The Apple Watch exacerbates this decadent obsession of our age more than any other device.

This obsession is driving people nuts even if they don’t know it yet. Deep down, you know you don’t really need to know all this stuff. You know it isn’t making your life better in any meaningful way. It’s all just pointless data collection.

If you really want to wear an Apple Watch when you exercise, fine. This makes sense. But this silly device really shouldn’t be on your wrist outside the gym. Ugly pieces shouldn’t be staples in a wardrobe, and the Apple Watch is an ugly piece.

Pointless overkill

Apart from the obsessive heath monitoring, the other features of the Apple Watch are completely redundant. You don’t need a watch to receive reminders from your calendar, messages, or emails. You have a phone for this, and nine times out of ten, your phone is sitting right next to you on the table. You end up with two devices within three feet of each other both sending you the same notifications. It’s pointless overkill.

As if all that weren’t enough, the price is the final kick in the shins. You are looking at spending hundreds of dollars on a redundant device that exacerbates your neuroticism while looking ugly and polluting every outfit you wear. Sounds great, huh?

Don’t take the bait. Don’t waste your money on an Apple Watch. Buy a Timex for 50 bucks and call it a day. Grab a $25 Casio for a real retro-futuristic look. Whatever you do, for God’s sake, never buy an Apple Watch.

Polo shirts should not be made of polyester



No shirt is more ubiquitous in men's closets today than the polo shirt.

And with good reason. It's the shirt you throw on when you want to wear more than a T-shirt but less than a button-up: a middle-ground that's a safe bet for most occasions in this post-business-casual world. Which is why it's a daily go-to for millions of men.

The 100% pique knit cotton polo, by contrast, only looks better with age. When the placket shows wear and tear, it feels welcoming.

But not all polo shirts are created equal. Some are hardier than others. Some wear better than others. Some last longer than others. Some look more classic than others. Simply put, some are better than others.

Tragically, the most commonly found polo shirts are some of the worst polo shirts. They are the polo shirts that should be cast into a great volcano on some distant tropical island. They are the polo shirts that don’t even deserve to be a rag in your garage. They are the polo shirts that look like the uniform for a low-level data analyst at a nuclear waste treatment facility in the distant future.

They are the sleek, shiny, polyester monstrosities known as "performance" or "Dri-FIT" polos.

Polo shirts can be unflattering. They can be unforgiving. Even the nicest ones can be tough to wear. The way they are constructed and the general thinness of the fabric tend to reveal any imperfections in one’s physique. If you are carrying any extra weight around, a polo shirt is going to throw it in your face.

If you ever wonder why you never look that good in a polo, this is the answer.

You aren’t alone. And if all this is true with the nicest polos — 100% thick pique cotton knit polos — it is all the more true with their garishly colored petroleum-based counterparts. The main way these garments "perform" is by reliably making you look much worse than you need to.

They do this by being utterly redundant. A "sporty" version of the polo shirt? The polo shirt has always been sporty — it was "athleisure" a century before the category existed.

The polo shirt was originally meant for tennis. French champion René Lacoste created it in 1926 as a more comfortable alternative to the long-sleeved white button-ups men usually wore on the court.

Short sleeves. Pique knit cotton. An unstructured, flat collar. Hard to improve on that. And for years, nobody tried. Until our scientific hubris got the best of us. What if we made these out of plastic? And in colors undreamed of in nature? We were so preoccupied with whether or not we could, we didn't stop to think if we should.

But these polos are "moisture wicking," they'll tell you. Nonsense. The claim that moisture-wicking is desperately needed for comfort during normal daily life is a delusion. If it’s so hot that a pique cotton knit polo isn’t cool enough for your daily life, then a short-sleeve linen button-up is in order. Nothing is cooler. Nothing is more classic.

The synthetic Dri-FIT polo, like all synthetic things, ages terribly. With every bit of wear, the shirt looks worse. There is no expectation that the shirt will be broken in one day. There is no repairing or mending that will ever be done. The synthetic polo is meant to be tossed the day that it starts showing any kind of wear and tear.

The 100% pique knit cotton polo, by contrast, only looks better with age. When the placket shows wear and tear, it feels welcoming. The more broken in, the more comfortable it becomes. The nick on the collar feels like a worn handrail. The fabric is subdued and quiet. The thickness of the knit is forgiving.

A synthetic polo leads you down a path of disposability. It looks best with disposable pants and disposable shoes. A 100% cotton polo looks best with 100% cotton khaki chinos and a pair of leather boat shoes. Natural begets natural. Natural complements natural.

You deserve a better polo shirt. You deserve a 100% cotton pique knit polo. Row the boat out to the island, climb the ancient steps, look down into the crevasse, and throw your moisture-wicking polo into the volcano and never look back.

You used to care about your clothes



Every August of my childhood, the same thing happened. The first two weeks were still summer: the pool and the beach, baseball and camping.

But then, sometime around August 15, my parents would start talking about school shopping.

Moms are the ones who make you put on the jeans, walk out of the dressing room, and stand there on display while they get down on their knees and yank on the waist to see how much room you have.

It was an ominous sign that summer was nearly over, a reminder that school was looming. Dreaded school. Hated school. After deliberation with each other, my mom and dad would settle on some day in the coming weeks. We would wake up and my parents would remind us to have a good breakfast because “we aren’t eating at the food court.” We would all pack in the car sometime after breakfast and make our yearly trip to the mall for school shopping.

Nice pants

Back-to-school shopping was an all-day affair. We would get there around 11a.m. We had to get jeans, a couple of boring pairs of nice pants, shirts, shoes, and winter jackets if we had grown out of them.

Sometimes my brother and I would split off and go with my dad to look for clothes — the easy stuff: socks, underwear, undershirts. My dad wasn’t a clothes hound. He never spent five minutes inspecting the rise on our jeans, checking to see if they really fit well or if they were the right length.

Moms are the ones who make you put on the jeans, walk out of the dressing room, and stand there on display while they get down on their knees and yank on the waist to see how much room you have. Tugging on the fabric and hiking up the jeans, embarrassing you in front of any random people who might walk by. You’ll never see them again, but you were always so embarrassed. “Mom!”

Mall malaise

Dads, generally, just want to get out of there. Or that’s how my dad was. He dreaded going to the mall for school shopping. I would say that walking around the mall, waiting for my mom and sister to finish whatever they were doing, was one of the things my dad detested most. But for us kids, it was a great day. School shopping at the mall was probably the only thing that made going to back to school somewhat bearable.

School stinks. Who wants to go back to sitting at a desk after running around outside all summer? No kid in their right mind wants to be cooped up in some classroom while the sun is still high. Resting your head against the smooth painted concrete wall, looking forlorn, gazing out at the bright green grass calling you through the sealed window. Let me out!

Carnival of shoes

But getting new clothes was fun. It made going back to school worth it, kind of. It felt like you had a chance to be a new person this year. I imagined how different my life would be if I had cool new skate shirts from World Industries, real JNCO jeans (I always had off-brand knock-offs — the leg opening wasn’t ever that wide), and a pair of skate shoes that were way more expensive than what I got last year.

Shoe Carnival was a highlight. Walking back and forth down the aisles, dreaming about which pair of shoes I would end up with. The really pricey ones were never an option. Eventually I learned I shouldn’t even try. I would finally select a few options. My mom would come over. I would put a pair on and she would have me walk down the aisle and then back again. She would study the way I walked like an Olympic judge.

She did this all while the Shoe Carnival employee was there watching, of course. Then she would take her thumb and press down at the tip of the toe to make sure I had enough room to grow over the course of the next year. She would press down hard three or four times, manhandling the shoe in focused judgement.

It was so embarrassing. But why, exactly? In what world does a 12-year-old get to pick out his own shoes without his parents taking a second look? No world. But when you are 12, you want that to be your world.

Natural fit

Kids are excited to get new clothes for school because they are new things and kids like to get new things. But kids also like their clothes. They might not talk openly about the clothes they like; they would rather talk about the clothes they don’t like. They don’t necessarily have the language at their disposal. Nevertheless, they have opinions about their clothes and they like when they get new clothes.

True, they don’t like them like we do. They don’t care about nice quality or anything particularly advanced. They just want a cool-looking shirt. But they do care in their own way.

It’s a natural thing to care about your clothes. Kids, for better and worse, exemplify us humans in a pure and natural state. But slowly over time we grow up, and many start to resent their clothes. Lots of guys end up viewing clothes as a burden rather than a blessing. They don’t really like thinking about them, and they don’t get too excited about them either. If they do get excited about them, they certainly won’t show it.

In short, guys have issues with their clothes. They need clothes therapy. The natural state of man is not one of resentment toward his clothing but one of enjoyment and interest. Kids show us that.

It’s funny to reminisce about those days at the mall before the first day of school, but there is a deeper lesson in these memories as well. We naturally care about how we look. We want to cultivate a personal aesthetic. Deep down, we want to enjoy our clothing.

For the guys who have built up wall after wall to protect themselves from caring about their clothing, it’s okay to let go. It’s okay to remember how you were once so excited for the jeans your mom bought you before school. Or how you looked forward to wearing those cool new shoes that first day. How you were secretly excited to show them off. It’s not embarrassing. It’s natural.

Work from home? Give yourself a dress code



I have never worked in an office. I have always worked for myself. I have always set my own schedule and determined the rhythm of my day.

Back in early 2020, when COVID hit, everyone’s work changed. All of a sudden, people were working from home. Almost everyone I knew was asking me for advice. How to adjust. How to deal with it. How not to lose your mind. How to stay productive. There was one thing I told everyone: Dress decently for work from home.

When no one is there to make you dress decently, will you still dress decently? When no one is there to stop you from being a slob, will you turn into a slob?

Working from home can be great. You don’t have to battle endless traffic every morning. You can work from the comfort of the nook in your kitchen. You don’t have to be on guard constantly, always trying to stealthily dodge cultural land mine after cultural land mine.

You are free to get your work done when you want to get it done. You are also free to look like a slob. You don’t need to wear a jacket or a tie. You don’t need to wear a shirt with a collar.

Honestly, you don’t even need to wear a shirt at all. You can, theoretically, just lie in your bed naked and get all your work done. You can skip the grocery store and start ordering all your food in. You can end up living your life in pajamas. Hour after hour, day after day. It’s all the same.

Slowly, ever so slowly, you become a shut-in. You leave your house less and less because everything is so easy at your house. Your work is there. Your food can be delivered there. Your bed is there. And life is so much more comfortable in pajamas. Oh, isn’t it so easy when you don’t have to put anything on?

“I’m just not in the mood to get dressed today.”

And while these details of this trajectory are extreme, this is generally how it happens. One thing leads to another, and then another, and then another. It can happen to anyone, but it happens most often to those who are thrown headfirst into WFH. For the person who is used to a certain life working at an office with expectations thrust upon him from the outside, the freedom of work from home can have disastrous consequences.

Dressing decently for WFH is a simple act that helps stop many potential problems dead in their tracks. A great deal of the degeneration that occurs when working from home hinges on being homebound. If you look like trash, you don’t want to leave your house, so you won’t leave your house. It’s a vicious cycle. While if you look nice, you want to leave your house, so you will leave your house. It’s a positive cycle.

Dressing decently for WFH helps tremendously with productivity. In theory, you might be able to get all your work done from your bed. Practically, it’s not going to happen. You are not going to be that productive in pajamas. You are not going to be that sharp in your bed, in a hoodie, unshowered and unkempt. It’s just not going to happen. All of that makes your mind dull — and if not your observable mind, then certainly your spirit. You might be doing fine on paper, but really you are operating, at best, at 75%. That just happens to be enough to make it.

You are simply less capable when you are working from your bed while looking like a street urchin. Your mind is sharper when you are dressed with intention. You might not be dressing up for anyone else; you are working from home, after all, but you are dressing up for work. You are also dressing up for yourself, and that’s important. It’s good for you.

When you work from home for an extended period of time, you run the risk of having your life blend together into one indistinguishable mass. Your personal life blends with your professional life. Your work day turns into your personal day. You lose all distinction and end up feeling like you are always working and never resting.

Or it could be that it feels like you are never working. Or maybe you are just perpetually stuck in this strange no-man’s-land. Whatever it is, you don’t feel right. You lose distinction and slink down into a worse version of what you want to be.

Dressing decently for WFH helps correct this problem. Since you are not able to segregate your personal life from your professional life in space, you need to segregate them aesthetically. With your clothing, you can make a distinction between work hours and personal hours. Dressing up for work, even when you don’t have to leave, makes work into something distinct that also, in turn, makes your life outside work into something distinct.

Wear loafers when you are working and camp mocs when you aren’t. Wear a sport coat when you are working and a sweater when you aren’t. Wear an OCBD when you are working and a polo shirt when you aren’t. Wear a tie when you are working and take it off when you aren’t. Make some distinction.

It doesn’t mean that you have to wear a suit or anything overboard. Just some addition of something that makes work feel like work. It doesn’t have to be grand, but it has to be something. That little something, when repeated over and over again, helps separate your day. It helps to prevent everything from blending together into an amorphous mass. It helps you stay sane and the best version of yourself.

WFH is about freedom. And freedom is a revealing thing. It’s a doubled-edged sword. When we are free, we are allowed to rise and we are allowed to fall. It’s up to us. No one is making us do anything. We are in control. No one is going to make you dress decently for WFH. No one is going to make you care. In a deeper way, WFH reveals who aspires to something higher and who sinks to something lower.

When no one is there to make you dress decently, will you still dress decently? When no one is there to stop you from being a slob, will you turn into a slob?

At first it might be uncomfortable to wrestle with these questions, but ultimately, it is emboldening and energizing. WFH gives us an opportunity to dress decently not because someone made us, but because we want to. In an era of ultimate freedom, choosing to dress intentionally is about choosing sanity, doing something better for ourselves because we care about ourselves. That is what dressing decently for WFH does. It keeps us sane and keeps us better.

J.Crew's lucrative new market: Men who want to dress like men



Where did classic clothing go? When did the standards become niche?

All J.Crew had to do was offer the standards. Just bring them back. No frills. No extra synthetic garbage added. Just give us the classics.

When did the basics become so hard to find that you could only get your hands on them if you were brave enough to venture down some dark alley on a cold rainy night? Next to the dumpster, past the broken-down truck, there’s a small window. Don’t tell anyone.

“You got OCBDs? What’s the collar roll like?”

“I’m looking for wide-wale cords. I haven’t seen them in years.”

“What do I owe you?”

This is what it was like. Well, you didn’t really lurk down a dark alley on a rainy night, but you did need to know where to look, and it wasn’t easy. It was off the beaten path. Over the years, it became a Herculean task just to get your hands on a pair of 100% cotton chinos with no stretch added. Is that so much to ask? As company after company moved toward athleisure and synthetic, stretchy slop, the standards became an endangered species.

J.Crew seizes the day

Amidst all this, there was an opportunity waiting for the right company to come along and bring back the classics. The formula would be simple. Offer them straight. Offer them standard. Offer them at some kind of reasonable price. There was a $100 bill sitting on the ground just waiting for someone to pick it up. J.Crew grabbed it.

Before J.Crew decided to seize the day, it was struggling.

Five years ago, the company had strayed far from its original mission. It was lost. Its clothing was unimpressive and uninspiring.

But over the past couple of years, J.Crew has been in the process of rehabilitating its brand and bringing back the classics slowly but surely. It is returning to its roots. It is returning to tradition.

The J.Crew golden era was the mid-'80s through the '90s. There is a fantastic Instagram account — @lostjcrew — that posts photos exclusively from the catalogs released during this glorious era. It’s a perfect aesthetic archive. Take some time and compare the photos on @lostjcrew with the photos in J.Crew’s new advertising campaigns. The connection is clear as day.

Young people running on the beach. The waves crashing on the shore. A cottage, sand, waves, style. The beautifully down-to-earth imagery that characterized the golden era of J.Crew lives again. Simple, classic, American style. The dark ages have been deleted. New J.Crew is old J.Crew.

OCBDs: Against the slim-fit menace

Peruse J.Crew, and you will be pleasantly surprised. It currently offers a giant-fit Oxford shirt. The sizing reminds you of those beautiful roomy-fit Oxford cloth button-downs that were everywhere in the '90s. An oversized yoke that falls off your shoulders. Worn untucked with jeans on a Saturday afternoon. They disappeared one day, and slim fit took over. Grim. Bringing back the full-fit Oxford OTR is a clear rejection of the totalitarian slim-fit menace.

Choice chinos

When it comes to chinos, J.Crew currently offers six different fit options. Skinny, slim, athletic tapered, straight, classic, giant. The classic fit and the giant fit are the interesting offerings. These are the options to keep your eye on. These are the return pieces. These full-cut chinos give us what we have been waiting for: classic-fit chinos with no stretch offered at a reasonable price.

Sweater swagger

The sweater selection is robust. Preppy colors. Simple, beautiful, cashmere crewnecks. Chunky cotton knits. It offers a shocking number of sport coats. It even has a 3 roll 2. Rugby jerseys. 100% cotton polo shirts. Earthy barn jackets and suede penny loafers made by Alden. This is classic. This is standard. This is great. This is the kind of clothing that should be easy to find off the rack.

Is everything perfect at J.Crew? Of course not. You can always find something wrong. It’s easy to be a critic of everything and everyone.

The collar points aren’t long enough. The pants aren’t made in the USA. The rise isn’t high enough on the chinos. Okay, fine. Whatever. Perfection isn’t the point. It’s not going to happen. Forget it. Let it go. It’s about direction. That’s what all life is about. J.Crew is making clear moves in the right direction. It is offering the old classics again. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.

It has decided to lean hard into the '90s throwback, and it is working. The styling in the ads is relaxed, nonchalant, and comfortable. The imagery is beautiful and aspirational. Joyful and nostalgic.

Permanent style

In a recent Instagram post titled “Chinos Through the Generations,” J.Crew fully embraces the intergenerational nature of classic style — handed down from father to son. The photos look like they could have been taken 30 years ago. This is all very intentional. The entire J.Crew Instagram account is becoming almost indistinguishable from the @lostjcrew account. Nature is healing.

Who knows how long this trajectory will last? Trends are fickle. Two years, five years, or 20 years. Who knows? However long it lasts, it is a welcome development and an encouraging sign. J.Crew was down for the count for a while. To see a brand come back in such a strong way should give us hope. Other makers who are currently going through their dark ages may too come back again one day. It’s not over till it’s over.

The formula was so simple. So easy. All J.Crew had to do was offer the standards. Just bring them back. No frills. No extra synthetic garbage added. Just give us the classics. The nostalgia. The '90s. That’s what it did. It picked up a $100 bill.

Iron man



Our eyes slowly creak open. We drag ourselves out of bed, pour a cup of piping hot coffee, and try to bring ourselves back to life one more time. Every morning it’s the same. We are lost in our emails before our eyes adjust to the golden morning light. We are shocked by the digital realm.

Wake up!

Ironing is certainly not some great feat of strength, but you are altering the physical world, even if only in a very small way. You are flattening the wrinkles.

Our eyes are still foggy as we scroll through notifications. From that point on, it’s a race to the end of the day, when we finally collapse exhausted into our beds. In the ancient days, we set aside time for morning prayer. We would orient ourselves spiritually before we went out into the world. Any day could be our last, after all.

But not any more. In our age we are thrust into the gears of the great machine without any pause to enter the spiritual realm. Our minds are clogged before we even start the day. No moments of reflection. No breath of peace. No chance for quiet. We are plugged in even before we realize what day it is.

There is, however, a morning ritual that allows us some respite, a few moments that draw us away from the digital realm and back into the actual. A brief experience that forces us to focus on only that which is in front of our face. It directs us toward the small and the mundane, which, in turn, frees our mind to wander aimlessly and, sometimes, even introspectively.

For modern man, ironing is a secular rite that takes place every morning.

In our day and age, many men don’t ever iron their clothes. They don’t wear clothes that need to be ironed. Many don’t even own an iron. They take their clothes from the washer to the dryer, then from the dryer to the dresser, and that’s it. The sweatshirt and jeans aren’t ever pressed. They are tumbled. And, of course, the clothing suffers aesthetically.

But it isn’t only that. Something else is lost. It’s not just the aesthetics. It’s the ritual of ironing that’s lost.

In my daily routine, ironing comes after a shower. My eyes are still wet and my hair is freshly slicked back. I am working on my second cup of coffee at this point. I have an addiction; yes, it’s true.

I stand in front of the closet and choose my pants and my shirt. I toss them onto a chair, open the ironing board, pour some water into the iron, and wait a few minutes as it heats up. The morning light breaks through the window. The trees outside are tossed by the morning breeze. The shadows flicker across the plain fabric of the ironing board. I wait in silence.

A few minutes later the iron is warm and I begin. It’s a boring task, ironing the crease in my pants. Making sure the front, back, and sides of each leg are all tended to. Taking time to iron in between every button on my OCBD. Giving the collar copious amounts of steam. Going after the sleeve plackets even when no one really sees them.

It’s tedious. It really is. But I can’t do anything else when I am doing it. I can’t text or respond to emails. I have to be fully immersed in the process. And in this strange way, it is peaceful. It is a few moments that are only mine.

The physicality of it is important. Ironing is certainly not some great feat of strength, but you are altering the physical world, even if only in a very small way. You are flattening the wrinkles. Creasing the cotton. You are making a decision to beautify your clothing. You are taking care to do something with clear intention. You are carefully crafting your aesthetic in a way that you aren’t if you simply take the sweatshirt out of the dresser and throw it on at the last minute before you race out the door.

And, in a sense, this intention leads to a feeling of ownership. When we care about something, we take time to prepare it. And when we prepare something, we start to care about it. It’s a cycle, a chicken-or-egg situation. Ironing leads to care and care leads to ironing.

Those moments of care and intention each and every morning set our minds in a different place and direct our actions down a different path. They orient us toward the world with a certain kind of certitude and direction. We start our day making a conscious effort, and that leads to more conscious effort. We have something special in these few moments of modern meditation and conscious effort.

It’s peculiar, isn’t it? It’s so small. It’s so mundane. It’s so uninspiring. And yet we are forced out of the matrix when we iron. We have a chance to be quiet and manipulate the world with our hands.

That might sound strange to a peasant from 1400 — all he did was work with his hands — but to a modern man who is perpetually engaged in the digital world, drawing back into the actual is a brief retreat into something refreshing. It’s a breath of fresh air.

That mundane routine every morning might be small, but it gives us a chance to just be quiet. It gives us a chance to just be. And that’s something we need.

Man or mannequin: Dressing to live instead of living to dress



There is man, and there is mannequin.

A mannequin is stiff and still. Motionless. Without face and without personality. Without story and without will. He stands quietly in the store window. His clothes are pressed. The tags are attached. All through the night, in the dark of the empty showroom, he remains alone.

He shouldn’t worry about wrinkles; they are natural. He should’t worry about stains; they will come out. Bumps and bruises are a sign of life lived. Rips and tears mean action.

All day, when the world comes alive again, he stands frozen. People walk by, stop and stare, and then go on their way. His clothes are perfect and without wrinkles. No stains and no blemishes. His appearance is pristine and his posture immaculate.

The people get close; they aren’t afraid. They could smack his face and he won’t retaliate. He is powerless. He’s a mannequin.

Purple noon

Man is different. He acts in the world. He exerts his will. He moves from place to place. He lives and breathes. He works and plays. He travels across the sea and writes his story for himself. He builds a world around him.

Man isn’t here just for looking. He isn’t a doll. He isn’t waiting behind the glass. He loves and fights. He creates and destroys. He is action incarnate.

Man must never become mannequin. The day he does, he becomes useless.

Avoiding the fate of the mannequin is a struggle for the man who cares about his style and personal aesthetic.

It’s easy to see how a man becomes a mannequin. One day, he decides that he wants to dress better. He starts to care about his clothes. He starts to develop his eye. He starts to stake out opinions about what he likes and what he doesn’t.

He likes jeans of a certain shade. He likes chinos with a certain rise. He likes a certain kind of balanced stripe. He doesn’t like checks. He develops his taste, and he becomes more particular. He cares more about his clothes. He spends more money on his clothes. And this all means that he takes greater care of his clothes.

La Piscine

And this is a good thing, right? Yes and no. A man should care about his clothing. He should take care to cultivate his personal aesthetic. He should appear strong in his clothes. He should dress with intention. It is good that he cares.

Yet this care can mutate into something toxic. It can turn into something unhealthy and unbecoming. Less man and more something else. He becomes like a collector. He becomes too fastidious and neurotic.

It’s possible for him to care too much about keeping his clothes perfect. He can care so much about his clothes that they become an idol that he worships. He can become so attached to his precious shirts and favorite pants that he ends up retreating from the world because he doesn’t want to put them in danger.

He can’t go lay in the grass because he is concerned about grass stains. He worships perfection. He can’t go out in the rain because he is worried about his jacket. He can’t go for a walk in the back because he doesn’t want to hurt his nice shoes. He can’t relax because he is too worried about his clothes.

He can’t. He can’t. He can’t.

He becomes less engaged with the world because he doesn’t want to damage his wonderful clothes. He no longer wears the clothes. They are now wearing him. They don’t serve him. He serves them.

He becomes stiffer in his movements. He is wearing clothes that he loves, but he doesn’t seem at home in them. He looks great, but he doesn’t look comfortable.

You know him when you see him. You can feel that something is off. He is always adjusting his sleeves, his collar, his tie, his pants. He isn’t present and living; he is always thinking about how he looks in his clothes. He secretly longs to be a mannequin. If only he could just stay still. If only he didn’t have to move about like a living and breathing man.

Le Samouraï

A man should care about his personal aesthetic. He should know what looks good and what doesn’t. He should embody an aesthetic that is natural and true. He should realize that his clothing is part of his culture and it matters a great deal.

He should put a great fit together in the morning, but then he should forget all about it. He should never forgo some activity out of fear of hurting some precious garment. His clothing should never hold him back. It should accompany him on his journey through life.

He shouldn’t worry about wrinkles; they are natural. He should’t worry about stains; they will come out. Bumps and bruises are a sign of life lived. Rips and tears mean action. He should live naturally and aesthetically.

Men must dress well, but not as mannequins. Men are not dolls. Men are meant to act in the world. A man dressed with intention exerting his will on the world is living aesthetics. It is vitalistic.

It is man, not mannequin.