Offensively Bold Tailored Clothing - Page 5

You are a clown. Pay attention to which thread you're posting in. I've said from the beginning that the collar in THIS THREAD is too spread to be CBD. It was the collar in the OTHER THREAD that I denied was too spread to be CBD.

This is what our friends in the military calll a target rich enviornment.

I think, in all honesty, that it requires a new acronym. Remember that line in Schindler's List when Schindler and Stern are talking, and Schindler says that the Germans have promised some of his people "special treatment," and Stern says, "Given the memos coming out of Berlin, I hope you got that wrong" or something like that (because "special treatment" was a Nazi euphemism for the gas chamber), and Schindler gets angry and says "Preferential treatment. Do we have to invent a whole new language?" And Stern says "I think so."

Well, to compare light things to grave, sometimes it is necessary to invent a whole new language. Neither OBTC nor BBTC fits this ... this ... See? Words fail me. We have to invent a whole new language.

Let's call this style, "Plant Bomb in Closet, Scatter Clothes Throughout Room, Collect What is Intact Enough to Be Worn, Get Dressed in Bomb-Shattered Pitch Dark Adjacent Bathroom." Or, PBCSCTRCWIEBWGDBSPBAB for short.

There is no point in discussing the deviations from CBD here; those should be obvious enough even to the K-man. However, it might be useful to distinguish PBCSCTRCWIEBWGDBSPBAB from OBTC. The ignorant and the stupid will no doubt tend to mix them up.

First and foremost, I have to trot out that old sawhorse, "The Rules." OBTC is not about outrageously flouting the major rules. The OBTC dresser piles up misdemeanor violations, to be sure, and perhaps throws in one or two low grade felonies. But here we see several first degree felonies, I would even say up to and including first degree murder, except it seems impossible to believe that this outfit could have been premedidated.

So we have 1) Suit trousers worn with jacket of indeterminate provenance (could be from a suit, but could be odd); 2) Striped trousers worn with non-formal day wear; 3) Ground of trouses is black; 4) Spacing of stripes too wide for scale of the wearer; 5) Color of jacket fine for summer in Capri, maybe, but March in Manhattan? 6) Showing an offensive amount of pocket square.

But the real crime here is the shirt and tie combination. The shirt is offensive in and of itself; the shirt and tie are ill chosen together; and the combination riots against the jacket and trousers. You'd think a trained shirtmaker would have better instincts for this sort of thing.

Shirt: black ground with white dots. NOT a dress fabric; not CBD, not OBTC, not to be worn with a tie, ever. Perhaps it is an old shirt from the wearer's days as the newsletter editor for Studio 54. If so, he should be commended for keeping his shape so consistent since the disco era.

Tie: a fine silver and black Charvet. Wearing that in a business or informal social context would be OBTC. Wearing it with that shirt is just a crime.

Together: Worse than a disorienting optical illusion. Positively blinding.

The combination with that jacket: a great example of the difficulty of pairing black anything with color, and why black has generally been reserved for black and white formal wear. The black just dials up the intensity of the color of the jacket. There is nothing inherently wrong with that color (though, as noted, its appropriatness in the context of the event is questionable). But such a vivid color needs muted accessories: a pale pink, blue, or cream shirt and a CBD tie.

Finally, I congratulate the wearer on being the first known person to disprove the maxim that brown suede shoes go with everything.

It's not that light; more of a postman's blue. Lighter than navy to be sure, but darker and more muted than avion blue. The stripes are bold, but they're still stripes. A double windowpane is inherently bolder than any stripe.

Too warm to wear. The weather has turned. It's hibernating until fall.