[23] in Humor
HUMOR: Fashionable Man (Dave, 1990)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (abennett@MIT.EDU)
Tue Jan 25 15:30:05 1994
From: abennett@MIT.EDU
To: humor@MIT.EDU
Date: Tue, 25 Jan 94 15:24:59 EST
Date: Fri, 21 Jan 94 13:35:32 PST
From: ckleinja@Novell.COM (Connie Kleinjans)
THE FASHIONABLE MAN
by Dave Barry
As a fashion-conscious guy, I recently became concerned about what I'm
supposed to be wearing this fall, now that it's half over. So I got hold
of GQ magazine ("For the Modern Man"), which featured an article
entitled "Fall Flair." The first sentence is:
"This fall, we celebrate a clever conflation of luxe and loose moods."
Ha ha! You can always count on professional fashion writers to make
things clear. I bet they had quite a brainstorming session at GQ, trying
to come up with the fall concept:
"OK, how about: `This fall we celebrate a clever concoction of duck and
moose foods."'
"Nah. How about: `...a clever convention of schmucks in puce shoes."'
"Nah. How about..."
And so on, until finally they hit upon it, "a clever conflation of luxe
and loose moods," which is EXACTLY what you men out there are
celebrating this fall, right? Liars! You don't even know what
"conflation" means. I know I don't. It sounds like a medical condition
("I'm sorry, Mr. Johnson, but you have a conflation of the spleen").
But after carefully analyzing the photographs in GQ, I have concluded
that what they mean by "a clever conflation of luxe and loose moods" is:
Brown suits.
This makes me very nervous. I have always dressed according to certain
Basic Guy Fashion Rules, including:
-- Both of your socks should always be the same color.
-- Or they should at least both be fairly dark.
-- If, when you appear at the breakfast table, your wife laughs so hard
that she spits out her toast, you should consider wearing a different
tie.
-- When dressing for a formal event, always check the armpits of your
rental tuxedo for vermin.
-- Always wear BLACK shoes after 6 p.m. EXCEPT during months ending with
"R" UNLESS you are a joint taxpayer filing singly with two or more men
on base.
-- When you wear shorts, your underwear should not stick out the bottom
more than two inches.
But the most important Fashion Rule that has been drummed into guys is:
NEVER WEAR A BROWN SUIT. Only two kinds of guys wear brown suits:
1. Your Uncle Wally, the retired accordion broker who attends all family
functions -- weddings, funerals, picnics -- wearing a brown suit that he
purchased during the Truman administration and that he has never had
cleaned or repaired, despite the fact that the pants have a large
devastated region resulting from the time in 1974 when he fell asleep
with his cigar burning and set fire to his crotch, and Aunt Louise had
to extinguish it with egg nog.
2. Ronald Reagan.
All other guys have been trained to wear only dark blue suits and dark
gray suits, taking care to never wear the pants from a BLUE suit with
the jacket from a GRAY suit, or vice versa, except in low-light
situations.
It has taken some of us guys YEARS to absorb these guidelines. And now
here comes GQ, introducing a completely new fashion concept, brown,
which raises a whole raft of troubling questions, such as: Does this
mean we also have to wear brown shoes? What about ties? What about GREEN
suits? How many questions make a "raft"? And what will the fashion
directors tell us to wear next?
The alarming answer is: PERFUME. Yes. Oh, they don't CALL it perfume.
They call it "fragrance for men," and they give it guy-type names like
"El Hombre De Male Man For Him," but it's definitely perfume. This is
even more alarming to me than brown suits because I grew up in an
environment where, if you had shown up at school wearing a fragrance,
the other males would have stuffed you into a gym locker and left you
there for the better part of the academic year.
The scariest part is that you can be exposed to male fragrances AGAINST
YOUR WILL merely by exercising your constitutional right to leaf through
magazines. For example, while leafing through GQ I was attacked by an
aggressive Calvin Klein male-fragrance advertisement that deliberately
spewed fragrance molecules onto my body, and for several hours I was
terrified that I might have to make a trip to a masculine environment
such as the hardware store for an emergency toilet part or something,
and the clerks would pick up my scent:
CLERK (sniffing): Smells like a moose conflated in here! Is that YOU?
ME: Yes, but...
CLERK: Hey, wait a minute, isn't that Calvin Klein's Obsession, the
fragrance that used to be advertised with pictures of a bed with enough
depressed-looking naked people lying on it to start a Co-Ed Naked
Depressed Person's Softball League?
ME: Yes, but...
CLERK: You got any more?
My current Fall Fashion Plan, as a Modern Man, is to squat around in my
boxer shorts until spring.
(C) 1990 THE MIAMI HERALD
DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
