I’m wearing a navy suit coat today with a light grey pinstripe. It’s off the rack from a discount store, size Medium. Buying a tailored jacket from a men’s store, well, that’s more complicated.
Clothes make the man, they say. Actually, they don’t say it. Mark Twain did. And Shakespeare. Only when Shakespeare said it, in the voice of Polonius, it was more like “the apparel proclaims the man.” And of course it doesn’t matter who said it, or didn’t: clothes really don’t make the man. The man is either made or he’s not.
I’m wearing a silvery neck tie with narrow navy strips that run at an angle to the pinstripes in my jacket. Little lobsters the color of wine are climbing up and over the diagonal lines on their way to my chin. The Windsor knot exudes self-confidence, the tie-tieing websites claim, apparently believing what they say about what clothes make. I’ve tied it in a half-Windsor.
Shakespeare might have been right about apparel’s aptitude for proclaiming, if not creating things. Clothes can lead us to believe certain things about the bodies underneath them, whether or not those things are true.
I’m wearing Jockey brand shorts. Black, with a grey elastic waist and black JKY lettering. I keep a week’s supply of boxers neatly folded in the dresser drawer where I hide my neck ties, rolled up in the back.
In a little while I’ll hang up the jacket and unbutton the Oxford collar so I can slip the tie off and put it away, finish up another day as a working man in my private home office and appear to be the person I am wanted to be in a household that isn’t ready to believe what the clothing might say about a man. But my Jockey shorts, buttoned snuggly into a softened pair of 501 jeans, will still have something, albeit quietly, to say.