Ted Medbury, the lanky, rubber-faced lead singer for my old
rockabilly band, used to say he loved to play dress-up. In show
business, you do that. We used to wear turned up 501 Levis with
white box-cut dinner jackets. I had both red and blue suede shoes.
In the clubs where we played, we’d find bands of other kinds who
changed into flowing silks and codpiece tights.
For costume parties, I used to wear one of two outfits. Khakis,
a leather bomber jacket, a vintage 1950s tie, aviator shades, and a
military cap, and presto, I was General MacArthur. An old
double-breasted pinstripe suit and a violin case, and I was a
mobster.
Dressing up like that carries forward the tastes of adolescence,
with an ironic or camp twist. I remember, as a young teenager,
being fascinated by things like eyeball cufflinks and skull and
crossbones rings. Some of my friends wore ruffled pink dress shirts
with jeans and what we called “engineer boots.”
THERE IS A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN dressing and dressing up. Normally,
it will take a while for a young man to learn that difference. In
the beginning, when he first starts to take an interest in his
appearance and his dress, his tastes will run toward the flashy and
the obvious. At that age, everything is new to him. He has not yet
learned what a cliche is, not in language, not in dress. The
obvious appears novel. Although he may well appreciate fine dress,
he cannot yet tell the difference between stunning and
staggering.
I still make that mistake sometimes. When we first moved to the
Boston area, I attended a black tie party with my wife. I rented a
tuxedo, and mistakenly rented an unusual one — not some Italian
wedding outfit, thank you, but a tux cut rather more like a suit,
in a nice gray. When we arrived, I realized that, in a tuxedo,
tradition is everything. A tuxedo should look as though it was the
best in the world in about 1955. It is a uniform, and every element
must be just so.
Some people never learn. On The Golf Channel, it has become a
running joke in our house to see what announcer and former pro
golfer Frank Nobilo will wear next. His latest outfit was a brown
suit with a pink shirt and brown tie with pink dots. He has a
garishly pin-striped suit with wide lapels. Lately, he wore it with
a black and white plaid tie. Often he wears a purple shirt with it.
He has a maroon sports jacket of a shade that screams “tourist” in
any big city in the world.
THIS TOPIC COMES UP NOW because my son Bud, 12, has been
interviewing at private schools, and has been agonizing over what
to wear. He has gone on several shopping trips on his own hook,
with his Christmas money, and he has bought a suit (double-breasted
pinstripe), several shirts, trousers, and ties. Yes, ties.
I have of course told him to be careful at this stage, that his
tastes are likely to run toward the flashy, and that he should
automatically tone down every urge. Nonetheless, he is a boy. At
his latest interview, he wore (after considering and rejecting many
outfits) his new pinstripe suit, a dark shirt, and a white tie.
As my wife got his suit ready, she noticed a couple of tiny
spots on the lapels. She tried to scrub them off with a damp paper
towel, and then approached me in dismay. In her efforts, she had
actually begun to erase a couple of the pinstripes. That’s right.
Instead of being woven into the fabric, it appears, the pinstripes
are somehow printed on.
Oh, well. He’ll learn, slowly, as we all do. He’s a trim, fit
young man, and he looked like an absolute doll.
