Fake it till you make it?

[dougc33]

Zoolander? Spiky hair...eugoogily?

 

[R.O. Thornhill]

This from someone who has been here for all of four months.

Did DWW leave? Oh crap, another experienced and thoughtful voice gone

 

[Andy57]

Did DWW leave? Oh crap, another experienced and thoughtful voice gone

That was my thought, exactly.

 

[LA Guy]

@dieworkwear can't ban anyone. He is not an administrator or moderator. But I am, and I spy with my little eye someone who might get banned, purely for being an asshat for no good reason.

Here's the thing, not everyone is going to get along. Block and move on. Or just ignore. But if you decide to just get into it with the same person over and over again, then you become the issue.

The forum has grown far larger than my co-founder and I could have imagined. So maybe the neighbourhood bar analogy is not so apt. But maybe this is a large social club. In this space, there are many congregations. If you don't like someone's circle, walk around, have a drink, talk to others. Don't insist on telling the persons at the one group that one of the group leaders sucks.

Okay, so, I hope that we are all clear now.

Thanks,

Fok.

 

[LA Guy]

I should also say that certain persons are banned not for getting into it with a specific member, but for mocking the mods (moderators are untouchable here. Unless there is a clear violation of their authority, which has basically never happened because we are pretty hands off. their judgement will prevail), getting timed out and told to not make a sock and making one regardless. That will not stand.

Cheers,

Fok.

 

[DB2000]

How would someone who has been here for four months possibly know all the contributions that Derek has made over the years? Hardly an ad hominem attack.

Please.

 

[DB2000]

@dieworkwear can't ban anyone. He is not an administrator or moderator. But I am, and I spy with my little eye someone who might get banned, purely for being an asshat for no good reason.

Here's the thing, not everyone is going to get along. Block and move on. Or just ignore. But if you decide to just get into it with the same person over and over again, then you become the issue.

The forum has grown far larger than my co-founder and I could have imagined. So maybe the neighbourhood bar analogy is not so apt. But maybe this is a large social club. In this space, there are many congregations. If you don't like someone's circle, walk around, have a drink, talk to others. Don't insist on telling the persons at the one group that one of the group leaders sucks.

Okay, so, I hope that we are all clear now.

Thanks,

Fok.

Plenty of people could post his threatening (and cringe) PM's when he got called out and made to look stupid. There is nothing wrong with calling out the truth of what he did.

 

[stuffedsuperdud]

The smartest kid in the class typically gets bullied and mocked. It's nothing new. Some people just can't help it.

I am going to cordially disagree with this, speaking as someone who was the smart kid and was indeed badly bullied, but with hindsight's perfect acuity, almost certainly for reasons more complex than "lol nerd!"

The smartest kid who gets bullied doesn't get bullied because he's smart, and if he does, I think that is at most an auxiliary reason. In fact, I think we as a culture these days tend to like and appreciate smart people, but only if they are also charming and socially adept and, unfortunately, to some extent, good looking. This likable smart kid makes math club cool, gets his MS/MBA in EECS from MIT, and becomes some sort of SVP of product at a big tech company or something like that. I'd propose that the smart kid who gets bullied suffers that fate not because of some sort of resentment towards his intelligence but primarily because he can't read a room. He can't understand that not everyone is as interested in his passion topic as he is, at least not all the time, and he makes at most a poor attempt at meeting them halfway. He worries about looking smart according to contrived benchmarks, and misunderstands other people's disdain as some sort of jealousy or inferiority. In other words, this is the kid that, if he doesn't grow out of it, turns into a goddamn academic, a self-centered dork who engages in bitter low-stakes slugfests with other socially inept nerds.

The PhD part of me absolutely appreciates all of Derek's writings, including (or especially) the stuff only tangentially related to clothes, e.g. descriptions of some obscure attire and its role in a particularly interesting slice of some bit of recent human history. The part of me who quit academia in favor of a real job though finds it really tedious when that's all he wants to talk about, when he whines about how this site isn't where it was in 2010 when a bunch of other pseudo-intellectuals were around, and when he resorts to completely unwarranted condescension towards anyone who didn't want to make clothing a high-brow intellectual pursuit and instead treat it as, you know, clothes, those 3D thing drape-y things made out of 2D sheets woven out of 1D fibers that we scraped off a smelly sheep and use to cover our bodies because we ate from the tree of knowledge and now don't like it when other people look at our dongs.

I also appreciate all the work he has done in popularizing classical menswear and introducing us to new craftspeople without making it all about him, something the influencers (bunch of prissy twats) never seem to get right. However, while that kind of humility is wonderful in this very narcissistic hobby of ours, I also find his clumsy attempts at pretending to be just like the plebes here kind of distasteful. He seems to have infinite funds and his guys all hold royal warrants while I'm going around whoring my referral codes to save $25 the next time I buy an OTR sportcoat made in China out of VBC's remnant fabrics. He wears his stuff to sit at home putting out articles under a pseudonym for what I can only assume is a massive retainer, while I'm wearing my Brooks Bros blazer, Charles Tyrwhitt shirt, Banana Republic pants, AE longwings, and off-brand man-thong to go wine and dine some asshole so that my company's shareholders make more money they don't need.

It's okay that we're not the same, but it's kind of gross to hamfistedly pretend that we are. His recent foray into comedy reads like just another version of this but kinda creepier. Like watching someone fail a Voight-Kampff test. Finding this offputting has nothing to do with him being probably one of the smarter people in the room.

TLDR I personally like reading's Derek's more academic-inclined stuff but he seems unable to process that not everything has to be an endless masturbatory academic stalemate. Sometimes folks don't care about appreciating and recreating the social and economical milieu that gave rise to 1950s NYC jazz club attire. Sometimes folks don't want to spend an hour in the morning looking at a Fellowes drawing and then recreating a 2022-approrpiate version of it, but only after completing a master's thesis on the role of the lounge suit in preparing the Weimar Republic for a second European war. Sometimes people just want some clues on how to pair their green Lands' End chinos with walnut Strands and move on with their lives, and not be talked down to for baring such a provinicial mentality.

Some of you guys seem to have some personal beef and that's...you gotta let that go because there's no sense in poisoning your own soul over some rando from the internet whose real name you don't even know.

 

[gdl203]

That's a totally unfair and incomplete portrait of Derek's contribution to the topic of menswear and to this forum. He can go deep when the discussion warrants it and he can have fun with it when the discussion is light. He has a great understanding (better than most) of various levels of formality in fashion, and various style tribes too. Not because he is superhuman, but because he takes the time and effort to observe, read and understand.

I'm sorry you were also bullied as a kid (I really am, I think school dynamics can create profound wounds in people and I constantly worry for my kids) and maybe this whole rationalization you just wrote helps you process it. If so, please hang on to it. But I find it offensive, as I read it as blaming victims and justifying abuse.

But maybe it's just me and I can't read your room, or something.

And I know, those is the internet, where grown up men hide behind anonymity to be cruel, mean or just do whatever they can to deal with they're insecurities. So I should just deal with it.

 

[stuffedsuperdud]

That's a totally unfair and incomplete portrait of Derek's contribution to the topic of menswear and to this forum. He can go deep when the discussion warrants it and he can have fun with it when the discussion is light. He has a great understanding (better than most) of various levels of formality in fashion, and various style tribes too. Not because he is superhuman, but because he takes the time and effort to observe, read and understand.

I'm sorry you were also bullied as a kid, and maybe this whole rationalization you just wrote helps you process it. If so, please hang on to it. But I find it offensive, as I read it as blaming victims and justifying abuse.

But maybe it's just me and I can't read your room, or something.

To be clear, I don't mean this to be any sort of attack, and would like to emphasize that I enjoy reading almost everything Derek writes. And lest it seems like I am speaking ill of the dead, I also hope that he's actually reading all of this because again, I want him to keep posting content and know that his stuff is appreciated. I'd go out on a limb and even suggest that of all the characters that spawned from the ~2010 #menswear craze, he's the only writer who has only kept on getting better, while the rest quickly faded away or became shills. I also find myself going back to older articles because they were thoughtful and thus have aged well through what can be a fickle environment.

In the past few months though he seemed to have lost sense of perspective and became preoccupied with picking fights, dying on hills that were not worth the effort, and complaining that this community has devolved from serious intellectuals into just a bunch of guys shopping online. This punctuated with awkward unhelpful attempts at humor. I don't think that pointing out that these actions, typical of the smart but unlikable types, are not a path to success is "victim blaming," because from what I read, I don't think there are victims or perpetrators here, and we shouldn't cheapen those words, which should be saved for more serious situations than internet kerfluffles. Of course you are free to disagree and to be fair my skin can be a bit too thick sometimes for me to register bad behavior as truly bad, but from here, this seemed like simply an uncomfortable Internet development where a fraction of an audience became frustrated and exasperated with a public figure, and expressed their frustration with harsh words. Hopefully it's not overly antagonistic to offer a suggestion as to why this happened, and a roadmap for how this can be rectified?

I don't know Derek personally the way you do; to me he's a prolific public figure with endless social capital and a huge following even outside the menswear space, and I assumed he was not personally bothered by the antics of anonymous critics and would be interested simply in correcting course and revising his presentation. This was an embarrassing mistake on my part in forgetting that behind the powerful internet persona is a person, and I apologize to you Greg and to Derek if that was hurtful of me. I've been told before that my advice was unwarranted so if I am overstepping my bounds here, my fault, but I am honestly not trying to pile on, or to be mean or cruel or to launch any personal attacks. I'd mostly just prefer if we could have a simple solution to go back to the way things were, but if I am misjudging how bad the situation had gotten and if my suggestions for how to tighten up the parts that didn't go over well are too unfeeling or simply inappropriate, then I guess I'll respectfully back up to the door and **** right off.

ADD: I do realize that I made the mistake of injecting my negative youth experience into my last post, which was meant to provide context on how I slowly solved a social problem I had, but probably just cast everything in an overly gloomy light. It was a growing experience for me and I am more resilient for it today. No need to misunderstand me as some sort of victim lashing out. If my perspective on all this were to be informed by a personal experience, it's probably more my grown-up activities in learning to avoid pointless fights (my academic career was not time well spent) and to tell clients things they might not want to hear while maintaining their trust and having our relationship come out stronger in the end. Which I guess I am failing at here...so that's...not ideal...and again, if this fell flat, my fault.

 

[hoodog]

Whoa that's a lot of words 🤯

 

[SpooPoker]

I'll just leave this here.

The Official Dieworkwear Appreciation Thread

its high time we gave @dieworkwear his own appreciation thread. There are so many times I read these articles (and twitter) and say that these things should be memorialized. Its going to take some time to go back in the archives and catalog other gems, but Ill start with yesterdays Ralph Lauren...

www.styleforum.net

 

[LA Guy]

I can’t remember a single time when his attempts at humour have worked for me. In particular I remember a post about wearing a white fleece and looking like a sexy cauliflower that was absolutely tragic in the attempt / desperation to be funny. I’m sure some people find him hilarious. I feel sad for them!

I mean, I don’t find all of Derek’s stuff funny, but that is a pretty strong opinion about an innocuous cartoon.