FIONA McCANNOn men and the clothes they wear
SO, MY EDITOR asked me to write this week about men dressing, it being the theme of the magazine and all. Of course, if you ask me, there’s more to be said about men undressing – badoom tish! (er, only messing Ma) – but the brief did get me thinking about men’s clothing and how I could muster an opinion on something I thought meant nothing to me.
Men’s clothing? What care I, who have enough on my plate trying to fit into skin-clinging ladywear and six-inch heels in order to pass the pretty muster, what do I possibly have to say about men’s clothes? After all, while the choices for women seem myriad and varied, doesn’t men’s apparel mainly amount to a limited spectrum of dun suits, or bog-standard blue jeans with some manner of shirt appended? What’s to opinionate about?
Plenty, as it turns out. The cut of the jeans, the width of the lapel, the size of the pocket, the neck of the shirt, the cuffs, the buttons, the hems, the linings, the vents for crying out loud: all details that can make or mar a man and do enough damage to his first impression to even deny him a second.
The tie alone can be the making of the suit, or its swift undoing, and is as essential to dressing the man as olive oil is to dressing the salad. A slash of colour against the dull suit palette of navys and greys, it comes in patterns and fabrics as varied as an evening dress, and even the shape of its loops and knots – Windsor, half-Windsor double-simple, cross – can convey more information about the man than his curriculum vitae.
And don’t get me started on the shoes. The point is, when it comes to men’s fashion, the delight is in the detail, and the detail – whether it’s a cartoon tie, a white pocket square, an open button or a peaked lapel – can define the man, devil and all.
Although we claim to judge books by their content, the covers are where the encounter begins, and while women might decry the opposite sex for defining them on their appearance, there are few among them who don’t themselves draw swift conclusions about the character of a man based on his sartorial decisions. And they might not be wrong to do so. After all, chances are you are right to deduce that the man in the rugby shirt you’ve spotted by the bar is not a ballet dancer, and that the guy with the Iron Maiden T-shirt and cowboy boots is not a member of Westlife. On the positive side, the one with the Armani suit probably really is minted (unless he’s Gerry Adams, in which case all bets are off).
And if I thought I never made such surface assumptions, it turns out I was wrong. Because a quick flick through my memory files throws up enough male apparel to fill a suitcase, revealing far more clobber in the contents of my fond reminiscences than I ever expected: the pair of brown trousers my Da used to wear that so defined him for four-year-old me that I followed them blindly through a supermarket once without noticing they had someone else’s legs in them; the grey school-uniform pants that flapped around the white-stockinged ankles of my painfully unrequited 13-year-old crush; the olive-green suit on the disappearing figure of a dark-haired man in the back of a taxi on its way to the airport, the same man who strode back into my life three years later wearing that exact same olive-green suit he’d left in, thus fulfilling every romantic fantasy and sealing the deal before he’d even opened his mouth (reader, I married him, suit and all).
So it turns out I have been paying more attention to men’s clothing than I ever would have suspected. And why wouldn’t I? The clothes, Mark Twain assures us, make the man, and he has a point. Where would Leonard Cohen be without his suit? Michael Jackson without his white glove? Or, for that matter, Enrique Iglesias without his tight leather pants?
Yet often, it’s not just what he’s wearing but how he’s wearing it that can be the biggest tell: the gestures around clothing that reveal more about the wearer’s state of mind than anything he actually vocalises. I’m talking about the way a tie is loosened at the end of the night, neck craning with the action; or the trousers nipped swiftly at the thigh before a man takes his seat; or the slip of his hands into jacket pockets, patched elbows akimbo; or the jacket removed, folded, slung over a shoulder, dumped in a corner, draped on a chair back; every gesture is as individual as the clothes can seem generic.
Perhaps, after all, it’s the man who makes the clothes, who gives them their appeal, fills their folds and creates the creases that make them memorable, and gives them meaning. Although having said that, there’s a reason why the most memorably dressed man in literary history is Hans Christian Andersen’s ill-advised emperor: it’s still the undressing that steals the show.