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wellwornwornwell · 3 years

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Quite a while since you updated us on wardrobe pickups. Fall ‘21- anything new?

I have like fourteen versions of this question in my inbox, so I figure this is as good an opening as any to return to the written word. Hope my inaction hasn’t jaded too many of you. A friendly reminder that if the withdrawals are severe, you can find me on twitter @wwornwwell. Let’s make your questions on wedding attire and first dates public!

So, first thing is first: I’m totally gutting and renovating a house my wife and I bought last summer. In short, I am poor. But even more impactfully, I have a wife with a renewed zeal for scrutinizing my credit card practices. This is great news for the viability of a 9-foot floating marble vanity in our master bedroom. Not such great news for my contrived self-importance in the Wide World of Jawnz.

Of course, I am still a dreamer. Still unwilling to seek therapy. And so my mind naturally drifts to what would look nice hanging next to the 1,000 other garments I wear once a year. Which piece of the puzzle I can unconvincingly cram into a void of a vaguely similar shape. A man has his needs, after all.

So, let’s swing for the fences and discuss the stuff that I have been thinking a lot about over the past year and, though I will absolutely not buy any of it, makes for great #content in the try-hard world of the iGentry:

When I was a senior in high school I went on a “graduation cruise” (suburban much?!) with some of my friends and their parents. The trip was littered with congratulations and drunken hand jobs received in dark corners of the Teen Club. In all the excitement someone’s father decided he was going to buy a watch for his son as a graduation gift (gotta love those Caribbean tax havens). This triggered an immediate competition amongst dads, leading to some ill-advised spending. In the fog of compensating for missed baseball games, a buddy of mine came away with a Rolex Explorer II 16750 “Polar.”

It was an absolutely beautiful watch. A watch that I obsessed over and envied immediately. Unfortunately, my more well-adjusted, “loving” father wasn’t interested in buying my affection, and so I left the trip with a measly Baume & Mercier. You can’t imagine my struggles.

Flash forward to present day and I still think about and lust after this watch. While the IWC Mark XVI will always be my true love in the watch game, I’d quietly planned for the 16750 Polar to one day be my ruggedly beautiful mistress. And that’s exactly as gay as it sounds. Unfortunately, some guy named WM Brown or Matt or something decided he too has impeccable taste and now what was once a borderline affordable daily wearer has jumped in price to the point that it would cost me the equivalence of a real mistress. I’ll have her one day, but not any day soon.

Segueing out of homoerotic undertones with aplomb, over the summer I caught myself admiring a middle-aged rich guy at a poolside cocktail party. It was a beautiful sunny day, meaning that he paired his navy fleece Polistas vest with Nantucket red shorts and a white Lacoste polo. While we need to definitely talk about bringing Polistas back one day, what really caught my attention was his footwear – low-vamp, full-strap penny loafers in an espresso crocodile. They were beaten up exquisitely, with frothy frayed edges and delicately separating tiles. You could tell they wore like butter.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a good lead on where to even find these shoes. They had that blobby last that looks charmingly stodgy on the right guy and stolen from dad’s closet on the wrong guy. I presume they’d need to be bought secondhand on eBay (yikes) or commissioned (double yikes). Regardless, this is the peak old rich guy stuff of dreams.

And speaking of dreams, I had a fleeting moment over the summer where I was going to send all my custom shirts out to me hand monogrammed. My sister recently created a kick-ass monogram for me, and it immediately sent me into a vortex of creative expression. After my wife assured me it would look somewhat askew as a face tattoo (my bone structure is suboptimal), I begrudgingly began my research on where to send things for hand monograms. Spoiler alert: There’s one place in the United States that will do it and the juice likely ain’t worth the squeeze.

I’ll probably give the treatment to a few of my favorite shirts, so consider this at the top of my “Fall shopping list.” But it’s gonna be a hot minute before I go full-on Gatsby and repeatedly assault Daisy with my initials.

Alright, last one here: An overcoat. I live in Atlanta, a place that does not require much in the way of formal outerwear. But I am a recovering iGent with continued (if supervised) access to the internet and so I must justify owning something expensive that I will literally wear twice a year.

My initial instinct was to go Ralph Lauren Polo Coat (if you know you’re never wearing it you might was well lean all the way in), but I think I’d be better served with a lighter weight, darker, and more utilitarian option. The only thing I know is that I want sharp peak lapels and a cloth with some visual interest (large scale herringbone, boucle, Donegal, etc.) While I know I said the monograms were most likely, it’s all but certain I buy some version of this off a dead guy in the next few months. eBay has my number.

So there you have it: What I’m thinking about this fall. If you outbid me on eBay, I will find you.

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