How Your Father Dressed | JT | HowTo: Fashion

My father dressed to get the job done. Not in a careless way. He was neat. His clothes were clean and pressed and appropriate for the occasion. But the frame he operated in was entirely different from the one most men my age grew up inside. For him, clothes were functional. They covered you, they fit the situation, they didn't cause problems. That was success. He had a work wardrobe, a church wardrobe, and everything else. The categories were clear and the clothes didn't cross between them. His work shoes were for work. You didn't wear work shoes on a Saturday. This was not a formal rule. It was just obvious. He did not think about clothes the way I think about clothes. Not because he lacked taste — he had taste, you could see it in how he put things together, a kind of quiet coherence that came from knowing who he was and dressing accordingly. But he was not interested in clothes as self-expression. He was interested in clothes as presentation. There is a difference and it is a generational one. The generation I came up in was sold something different. We were told that what you wear is who you are. That style is identity. We spent a lot of money and a lot of attention on things that probably didn't need either. My father spent almost none of his mental energy on clothes and was correctly dressed for every situation he walked into. I'm not sure he had the worse approach. Here is what I think he understood that took me too long to figure out: the goal is not to be noticed for what you're wearing. The goal is to be appropriate, clean, and coherent, and then to be noticed for everything else. He wore a white dress shirt to church for forty years. It was the same category of shirt — well-fitted, pressed, collar right. He never looked wrong. He never looked like he was trying. He looked like himself, which is the hardest thing to look like and the most valuable. What my father had that I'm still working toward is the confidence to dress simply and correctly without second-guessing it. That is a form of mastery that doesn't look like mastery. It looks effortless because the effort happened once, decades ago, when he figured out who he was and what that looked like, and then he just kept being that. The men I admire most dress this way. They are wearing things that fit, that are appropriate, that cohere with each other and with who the person is. They look like themselves. That is what your father was doing when you thought he was just not paying attention. He had already figured it out.