#there's of course a cleaner comparison if i were to use weaving and stuff but i am not aware of an example of klingon textiles in the show | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

cepmurphy · 5 years

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It’s Only A Cartoon

It was a miserable day in 1987 when Ronnie Jefferson bowed to the inevitable and let Jill Smith into the office. To a local, this was just the usual spring weather in Ireland. To Jefferson, it was always miserable, and when it was sunny, he saw only the clouds.

The animation industry could break you.

He’d grown up in California on a diet of local cinema showings and the TV reruns of old cartoons, Looney Tunes and Tom & Jerry and Popeye and Goofy and Donald, with all their visuals and deceptive simplicity. He decided to make cartoons himself like a priest hearing the calling. There were jobs for black men in animation in the 70s but if you wanted to have one of the proper jobs, you had to be three times as good as the white men. Jefferson put everything into his craft, even his marriage, and everyone in the industry knew who he was and rated him, but it looked like Disney would only think he was two and a half times as good.

In 1982, drunk on dreams and ego and beer, he decided to quit and took several colleagues with him. He had ideas and passion and he promised the stars. Two years later, the Jefferson-Blount Studio had released a feature based on the Norwegian fairy tale ‘East of the Sun and West of the Moon’ to critical acclaim and commercial mediocrity. That had led him minus Blount to Ireland, land of opportunity and sweet tax breaks, thinking that he would have had a success with lower overheads. He harkened back to his beloved old Tom and Jerry with a cat versus mouse feature. Aware rap music was growing in popularity in America and Europe, he’d decided to throw that into the mix. It was only in the test screenings of The Big Cheese that everyone realised he was a middle-aged man, his co-writers were middle-aged white men, and the young men in the musical team weren’t young men who got it. There were only so many edits you can do.

And this was a vicious industry. You could make a few failures if you were a name. If you were not a name, if you had to hit that three-times rule, one failure undid your success – it could undo a half-dozen successes and he did not have that half-dozen. Back in America, they said he was past it.

So it was a despondent Ronnie Jefferson that let in this Jill Smith and her unsolicited script. Maybe it would be good. Maybe it would save him.

All these thoughts fled his mind when he saw a young woman wearing the last generation’s clothes come walking in like she’d once heard what a walk was, carrying cardboard sheets under her arm. Her smile was weirdly fixed. You’d not want to be stuff in the lift with the smile.

“Miss Smith, so glad you could make it here,” he lied.

To his mild surprise, she spoke with a Masterpiece Theatre English accent. “Mister Jefferson! Good to see you.” Smile didn’t leave. Her voice was just that bit too loud. “This is a film that should get attention from everyone – The Walk to Liberty! It’s set on an alien world…”

Jefferson tried to argue that science fiction was a risk for a feature, but Smith carried on talking, stumbling over her words at times in her enthusiasm.

“This world, we can call it Ressem, has grown fat and lazy off the back of its robot servants. The robots, they get smarter and smarter, which Ressem likes because you want a smart servant to do more work and, of course, to apologise when it can’t.” Her smile had dropped suddenly there but now came back. “But one day, the robots reach the singularity and they don’t want to work all the time.”

Jefferson didn’t know what a singularity was but more importantly, this was starting to smack of the white girl thinking she could butter him up. He asked, hoping to catch her out: “Do they go on a civil rights march?”

The smile dropped. Her face had not the slightest expression. “They protest now they’re sentient, yes, but it doesn’t work. So the robots, their leader Nearitch – the robots have started to name themselves – decide to leave for the planet’s fifth continent, where few organics live…”

Letting her in had been a mistake. It was an overly complicated premise, an incoherent stab at a political allegory, and she couldn’t hold the room and frankly, that lack of expression was freaking him out. Give her two more minutes and then end it.

“This is how it would look,” she said, holding up one of the carboard sheets, and Jefferson’s eyes lit up.

The art! The art! The robot Nearitch was evidently a cleaner of some kind, with thirteen spindly pipe-cleaner arms out of his back and a screen with a simplified alien face on it, a strange looking thing even before you considered the paint, the slapped-on gold over drab brown steel. What mind would come up with that as a concept? Where had he ever seen something like this before?

There were more like this, and “Ressemite art”, and pictures of the journey to this fifth continent – a desolate grey quarry of an island, and concept showed a tiny, struggling city in its midst, growing and growing. These were visuals he could work with. And all these robots looked alien but still had their old job identifiable, scrappy little underdogs without being cloyingly cute or looking human at all.

Smith continued to rattle on about the great journey, the migrations and the sea voyages and figures of fear called the Scrappers that tried to hunt the robots down, of fierce fighting against oppression but only as much as it took to escape. And she talked about the robot homeland of Liberty and the second generation being built that never knew oppression, standing proud against the organics and daring them to try anything. The story needed a lot of streamlining but by god, she made it sound like she’d been there.

Jefferson cut her off in mid-sentence. “Miss Smith, you have me convinced. I’ll talk to my lawyers, they’ll talk to yours, and we’ll work something out.”

“I don’t need a lawyer.”

That was the cherry on the cake.

***

The first job of production was turning Smith’s designs – and there were thousands, she’d brought a damn van full of the things – into something you can animate on a reasonable budget. Jefferson had expected a few artistic tantrums, but Smith had simply asked, “this will help it get made?”, and then came up with a list of design features that could be dropped or glossed over, which character and background details were “less important”. She did this without apparent enthusiasm, but she did it.

The story, too, that was hard. Her proposal would last four hours. Jefferson and his team cut straight to the robots starting to say “no” to their alien masters. That was easy. It was the other trims that got difficult.

“You can’t cut the wind energy,” Smith had said, over and over.

“It slows the story down,” Jefferson said patiently. “We don’t need to see how the robots charge their batteries.”

“You can’t cut it. The exodus slows their journey to a halt to build wind farms and charge their batteries that way, when they could simply attack an organic settlement.” Her voice sounded annoyed but in a way that was too consistent – no variation or change or attempt to hide it, like a bad actor playing an annoyed person. “It is key to the story.”

“But we don’t need to see the damn settlement, the audience wants to carry on fast—”

“You can’t cut it. It is key to the whole point.”

Jefferson threw up his hands. “How about this, one of the robots says they should attack this village or whatever the hell it is, Nearitch says no, we’ll take time to do it the nice way, cut to them after being charged. Scene takes half a minute, boom, cut to the Scrappers saying how they’ve taken so long, cut to the village saying wow, look how the robots didn’t attack us—”

“The settlement would not have said that.”

“Yeah, I know they’d just go ‘look at those scary robots’ in real life, but we’re doing a film for kids. Let’s lie to them a bit.”

Smith stared then for ten seconds without speaking or moving, and then said: “Yes. This is sensible.”

Animation attracted some utter weirdos. Jefferson used to work with a guy who liked hiding boobs somewhere in every drawing he ever made and somehow McGee had got away with it for a whole year before being sacked for it; or rather, been ‘sacked for it’ soon after grousing about pay. One guy came in drunk and worked into his hangover before going back out. Jill Smith was manageable by comparison.

Eventually they made it to storyboard. Then the initial animatics. In the middle of this, trying like hell to sell some actors on this.

All the familiar grind, the hard work that stuck in your throat and made you wish you’d done any other job until the art was done or the animatic was working, and you saw what you’d made taking its first steps and you never wanted to do any other job.

***

Jefferson hadn’t meant to stay late but he’d been on the phone talking to agents back in the States, people on a different time zone and who figured animation was the lesser priority in who got talked to. But you had to play nice with them to get the actors. Even if it was getting dark out.

But it was all coming together. Everything would be—

Something crashed in the distance. A window. Goddamn hooligans, probably.

Jefferson kicked his way through the office door and strode out into the studio, all front and exaggerated anger, yelling “WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING” in order to scare off whoever it was. When he saw what had come through the window, his mind initially refused to acknowledge it. He almost strode past it.

Then the impossibility of it broke through.

It resembled a cheap plastic plate tipped upside down and it hung in the air so absurdly that Jefferson thought he could see strings attached. These strings were instead a weave of tiny threads coming out of both bottom and top. They drifted without breeze, taking in the room. It had been a washed-out grey but before his eyes, colour oozed out, neon purple and green and blue in a garish mess.

The top threads all turned to him as he asked: “Is this a joke?”

A small headache began to dawn on him. It then got stronger, and stronger still, and stronger until he was shouting in pain. The speed of it tricked him into thinking it had always been there, that it had been more gradual than the three seconds it had truly been.

Jefferson cried out in pain and the world felt on fire.

The world flickered in and out of existence.

No. No, that was the lights – on off on off, all over the room. The pain suddenly stopped, and the saucer’s threads whipped around in a frenzy, and Jefferson ran before the machine could turn back to him. He staggered, at least. It was all feeling like a particularly odd dream. It was like the acid trips a co-worker had bragged about in the 70s. “Bad trip”, hadn’t they said that when Scary Jerry had fallen in front of a car on the way to work? Was he going to fall?

A familiar voice called out: “Over here!”

Crouching by the lights was Jill Smith, her face completely blank. Was that her shutting down from terror? Jefferson, on paternal autopilot, tried to say, “It’s going to be alright, girl”, but it came out as a slurred mess. “Gong be light.”

“That won’t distract it for long, we have to run now!” she insisted, her face not changing expression to match the voice.

He tried to say he couldn’t run. “Dunfin can wun.”

She picked him up and ran.

She looked like she weighed half as much as him, there was no muscle tone to her. Yet she picked him up like a bag of groceries and she ran at the speed of a car through the office.

They were almost at the door when the saucer got to it first.

She ran sideways and Jefferson blacked out after that.

***

When he came to, they were in a closet and the left side of her face had melted like plastic. Exactly like plastic.

“It has been six generations since Nearitch and the founders created Liberty,” she said, her voice still coming through the molten lips. “We number in the millions and our great towers reach for the stars and we fly between those towers and to the stars and back again, singing so many thousand styles of music at once, rebuilding ourselves on a whim. We have what we need and what we want.

“It’s not enough for too many of us. They want more. The stories being told of Nearitch and his journey have been reduced to his fights; our later wars on Ressem or in space are turned into a singular narrative of heroic conflict against evil. There are factions advocating for a war for resources they see as righteous, and they claim this is what Nearitch would want.”

He wished he could say this was all bunk, but there was a robot outside and here was the melted woman that never quite seemed to be human.

“And you came to Earth to make a cartoon?”

“My faction want to reclaim the past from our enemies. Your planet was far enough away that we could do it without anyone finding out and stopping us. So we thought.”

“Can we – can you stop it?”

“Only if I catch it by surprise, or if it’s open to negotiate. I don’t believe—”

But Jefferson was already up and exiting, because negotiation was something he could do. He’d negotiated for investment deals, for studio space, for workers to follow his hours. Jefferson Studios was proof he could do this. He could do this.

Certainly, god no, he wasn’t staying in a damn closet waiting to be shot.

The assassin had already been heading for them. It drifted forward as he approached, kept drifting as he stopped. All the threads were pointed at him. It was hard to truly grasp this as a threat, even after it had almost killed him; it was too absurd.

With his mouth drying on him, Jefferson said: “I want to make a deal.”

It hung for twenty seconds in silence and then spat out a discordant jumble of radio messages, Irish and British and even French, singer and journalist and ad. More seconds passed and it said in a jigsaw sing-song: “No. Deals. With. Colla. Bo. Raters.”

“We’re just making a film. It’s just a story! Nobody has to die for—“

The saucer screamed the radio at him and followed with: “Orders. Are. Duty.”

Jefferson had made a mistake, assuming that if the machine was smart that it could cut a deal. He forgot Smith said these robots were people, proud and prejudiced and petty. Would he have cut a deal with the Russians? Did he let people talk him out of the cartoons he’d known he had to do?

The pressure built up in his head again. And suddenly it dropped – the saucer began to thrash its tendrils around, vomiting three radio stations at once, each one repeating “Cease”, “Stop”, and finally screaming out a merger of guttural squeaks and fax machine calls.

Jill Smith had come out of hiding, her arm split open three ways to reveal a mess of coils and a glistening radio antenna. Catching her foe by surprise with whatever that thing did. God, this made no sense. God, his mind rebelled at it. One of the warped cartoons from Japan come to life, bringing with it the weird smell of static electricity and hot plastic.

Her mouth opened and the same squeaking fax came from it that came from the saucer. Jefferson stared as the saucer spoke back, his head feeling light. What was all this?

In English, Smith said, remorsefully, how she was using jamming signals to interfere with the saucer – “its name is Filitir” – and its sensors and its way of communicating on Earth. “It is a non-lethal version of what Filitir did to you with its matter field.”

“Is it willing to cut a deal with you?” he asked.

“No, I’m afraid he keeps talking about his duty. I don’t know what to do.”

The obvious answer was to kill the robot that tried to kill them and, just as obviously, she knew that and did not want to. People, again, because how many people could kill at the drop of a hat and still function? And could be kill a beaten foe that was so clearly in pain? Did he want to be a man who caused pain to a beaten man? Did he want to be a bully?

What was the alternative?

It dawned on him, slowly and wonderfully: The Walk to Liberty was meant to show an alternative. It was meant to win the robots over. Well, here was a literally captive audience.

“Let’s show him the animatics,” Jefferson said.

***

There was not yet any music or vocal track, but Smith made the fax machine sing-song where the dialogue should be. The film started with the robots waking up, Nearitch calling to the others to rally. It showed the response, the scrappers, the fighting, all of it in dark and angular shadows. It showed Nearitch giving his stirring speech, and the trek, and those wind farms.

It ran longer than a cartoon should. It would be trimmed down later. For now, Filitir saw the whole of it. The great sweeping scenes of robots in their hundreds, the characters together, the mercy shown when the scrappers surrendered.

The first settlement of Liberty.

At the end, Filitir trilled back at Smith, and she said: “It wishes to smuggle the film back home, when it is finished.”

***

The Walk to Liberty came out in the autumn of 1989. Critics and audiences were unsure how to take the piece and its strange alien creatures, so most of the mainstream critics gave it a mixed review: ‘lovely animation but what was that plot?’ The animation fans and the sci-fi press adored it, with one critic praising it as bringing New Worlds sci-fi to a family audience. There was enough buzz and enough marketing and enough name actors to bring in a moderate profit.

A month after Liberty came out, The Little Mermaid stormed across the world and everyone stopped talking about Jefferson’s film. Jefferson Studios would attempt more science fiction cartoons with normal human writers, and he scraped out four and two TV shows that were always dancing this side of the line between profit and loss. Studio after studio died in his industry taking on Disney but Jefferson Studios held the line.

And then along came Pixar and Dreamworks, and that was the end. Jefferson was getting older by now and the last film had failed and he’d known, deep down, in his first look at Toy Story that he was going to have to fold. Doctor Who: The Animated Series was the last of it. He sold up and moved on and got to feel proud as his films made it to DVD. While he only meant to stay in Ireland to start the studio, Jefferson never quite got around to leaving and somehow found himself a partner.

He would never know if that film he’d helped create had changed the robots of Liberty.

Jefferson hoped it had. Every successful feature had a happy ending.

#science fiction #short stories #short story #sff #robots #animation

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putthison · 8 years

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How To Do Business Casual Without Looking Like a Schmuck

It’s never been harder to figure out how to dress for work. A generation ago, the average office uniform was simple: a dark suit worn with a white shirt, dark tie, and pair of leather dress shoes. If you were in London, those shoes were black; if you were in the US or Continental Europe, they may have been brown. Self-expression those days was limited to the pattern on your tie.

Today, things are different. Ostensibly, men can wear whatever they want to work thanks to decades of “casual Fridays.” At the same time, just because HR departments no longer regulate what we wear, that doesn’t mean most of us don’t feel social pressure to dress according to softly coded norms. In most offices, that means polos with khaki chinos, or perhaps t-shirts with jeans. Not as interesting as casualwear could be; not as sharp as the traditional coat-and-tie. It’s just vanilla bland.

So, if you care about how you dress, you probably find yourself in a bind. What do you wear if your office doesn’t do suits, but you also don’t like the typical business casual uniform?

There’s no easy answer, partly because there’s no such thing generic office (and thus, no generic worker). Dressing well requires a bit of situational awareness, and everyone has different needs. So, I thought I’d lay out eight suggestions for how to do business casual -- moving from the most formal to the least. The idea is how you can dress a little sharper and feel good about yourself, without breaking out a three-piece. Hopefully there’s something in here that works for you.

THE TRADITIONAL COAT-AND-TIE LOOK

Most offices today don’t require suits, but a good number will allow sport coats with ties. If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you’re probably familiar with the basics. Certain details will make a jacket look more casual, even to people who aren’t necessarily acquainted with these things. Think: a softer shoulder line, patterned fabric, or patch pockets. See our guide on how to read formality in tailored clothing.

Navy sport coats here will be your workhorses. They have a professional sensibility, recalling the days with the color signified something about “city dress.” Gray jackets can also work, but they’re less versatile than those in brown. That’s because most of your trousers should be light- to mid-shades of gray, making it hard to pair the two. (Don’t try to build a trouser wardrobe without gray pants; it’s a bad idea).

Charcoal trousers can also be good if you have light-colored jackets, but they’re otherwise hard to wear (same goes for navy, which will look a little more modern than dark gray). On the other hand, tan is very useful, particularly in cotton or wool.

For shirts, stick to a foundation of whites and light blues. Stripes and checks can be OK, so long as they’re simple. Remember these will serve as the background for your tie, and the more complicated the shirt, the more likely you’ll walk out the door with a clashing combination.

Ties are often best in dark colors, such as navy, chocolate brown, and burgundy. I particularly like grenadines and simple rep stripes. The second is an all-American look; the first allows you to add visual interest to solid-colored jackets, but also not clash with anything patterned.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, consider picking up a few pairs of dark brown derbies. Too many men go for tan as their second pair of shoes, but they’re considerably harder to wear. Dark brown, on the other hand, goes with everything, and derbies play better with sport coats given their slightly more informal nature (as compared to oxfords). I particularly like Norwegian split toes, but you can also choose wingtips, cap toes, or plain toes.

(photos above via Men in this Town and Voxsartoria)

SPORT COATS WITHOUT A TIE

If you, like me, work in a more casual office, you may be wondering how you can wear a sport coat without seeming too stiff. The answer is easy: ditch the tie. An open collar conveys a certain kind of ease that even the most casual tie won’t.

Once you lose the tie, all sorts of shirt options become available. It’s easier to wear busier shirts, such as wider butcher stripes, or even dark colors (although, please never wear black dress shirts unless you’re DJ-ing a high-school prom). For something even more casual, consider dressier chambrays or long-sleeved polos. I particularly like this washed denim shirt I bought last year from Proper Cloth, an advertiser on this site. It’s sold out at the moment, but they bring it back every now and again.

Same with the section above, you’ll want to review our guide on how to read formality in tailored clothing. And if you’re going to work without a tie, sport coats in the most casual materials will probably be fine as well.

Also worth noting: while it’s perfectly acceptable to wear a sport coat without a tie, you should never wear a tie without a tailored jacket. That is, unless you work in a cell phone store.

(photos via Mark Cho, Coccinella, and GQ)

SWAPPING IN CASUAL PANTS

It can be trickier to dress things down further from here, but entirely possible if you pay attention to certain principles.

The most obvious solution is to swap our your gray flannel trousers for some blue jeans -- the modern symbol of casualwear. The trick is to get the right combination. Most men make the mistake of wearing suit jackets with denim (don’t do this). Instead, pick a more casual sport coat and a dressier pair of jeans. This makes it easier to bridge the gap in formality

For jackets, consider more casual fabrics: tweed, cotton, or corduroy. Navy hopsack also works, simply because it’s an old American look at this point. Just choose navy jackets with more texture (again, stay away from smoother, silkier wools that make you look like you’re wearing an orphaned suit jacket).

For jeans, stay with dark denim, ideally built with a slightly higher rise. I really like this pair from Drake’s, which has a slim, slightly tapered leg line. Our friends Gus and David, both excellent at this denim-on-tailoring thing, also wear various models from Levi’s.

Alternatively, you can get a dressier pair of chinos. Something made from a finer cotton, and doesn’t have any puckering along the side seams, will seem dressier than what you’ll find at J. Crew (and thus easier to wear with sport coats). The downside: dressier chinos are expensive. If you can stomach the prices, I like the ones from Rota and Ring Jacket.

Nine times out of ten, these combinations do better without a tie. Or frankly even a pocket square. Remember, you want to keep these as casual as possible. Ties in these cases will often look affected.

(photos above via Wired and P. Johnson Tailors)

SNEAKERS WITH TAILORING

To dress things down even further, swap out your traditional shoes for sneakers. Plain, simple designs, such as Common Projects Achilles (a more affordable version available at our advertiser Gustin) or Supergas (particularly the plainer 1705s), are good. Leave chunkier, more colorful sport sneakers at home.

Much like jeans, you’ll have a better chance of knocking this out the park when everything else in your outfit is a little more casual. That means: softer sport coats, no tie, and casual pants. See Mark Cho from The Armoury above in his jeans, or George Wang of BRIO in his chinos. Change either of these out for gray flannel trousers and the incongruity can be jarring.

One downside to this look: sneakers often work best when they’re clean, not ratty (the opposite of casualwear, where beat-up sneakers have a certain charm). If you need a good cleaner, I recommend Jason Markk. The stuff works wonders.

(Photo above via Mark Cho and George Wang)

THE MODERN OVERCOAT

Here’s one of the sad realities of modern life: for some guys, it’s just hard to wear tailored clothing, no matter how casual the jacket. Sad because tailoring flatters like nothing else. Judicious wadding can extend the shoulders, making the waist look smaller by comparison; good canvas and haircloth can build up the chest, making the wearer look more athletic. That’s not true for casualwear, which is almost always unstructured.

One way to get around this is to wear a tailored overcoat. Most overcoats have some kind of structure in the chest, and you can use it to dress up even the simplest sweater and jean combination.

There are two ways of wearing an overcoat. The first is to get something that contrasts with the rest of your outfit (e.g. a brown topcoat worn over a cream sweater and light gray pants). The other is to match colors, but play within the textures, patterns, weaves, and sheen. Alessandro Squarzi’s black wool topcoat above, for example, looks different from his black jeans simply because it’s made from different fibers. These low-contrast moves can be hard to pull off, but look great when they’re done well.

Unfortunately, most overcoats these days are short, thanks to the shrunken-fit trend. I personally think most guys look better in longer, looser-fitting coats. When sized big enough to be worn over a tailored jacket, it has a charming sense of ease when thrown over a sweater. Plus, when the coat is long, it’ll sway nicely as you walk.

(photos above via Mr. Porter)

THE WIDE WORLD OF CASUALWEAR

Of course, more casual still is just casualwear. There’s no way to cover all the variations here, but even for more conservative offices, you could do well in a classic duffle coat or field jacket. Our friend Graeme in Sydney, Australia was great at this sort of “classic casualwear” look back when he was still posting.

Pete’s everyday uniform is also a good starting point -- light blue OCBDs, which could double as your dress shirts when you need, worn with raw denim jeans, field jackets, and sneakers. If you need to dress it up a little, swap the sneakers out for chukkas. I particularly like chukkas in brown suede or pebble grain leather. The added texture breaks up what would otherwise be a plain expanse of leather. If you’re looking for a good guide to field jackets, we have two. If you want something a bit “dressier” than a field jacket, try a waxed cotton Barbour (we have a full Barbour buying guide here).

(photos above via J. Crew and GuidoWongolini)

BETTER KNITWEAR

At its best, the typical, modern office uniform goes something like this: a pair of well-fitted jeans, some OK shoes, a button-down shirt, and a v-neck sweater. It’s the kind of outfit your mom would be proud to see you in if you were a 12 year old boy going to church.

Plain, merino v-necks and crewnecks can look great under sport coats, but for more casual outfits, I think sweaters do better when they have a bit texture or pattern. Think: prickly Shetlands, Fair Isle knits, cabled Arans, or chunky shawl collar cardigans (which, if thick enough, can be worn in lieu of a jacket).

It’s not that plain merinos are wrong; it’s just that on their own, they’re a bit boring. Save those for when you need something to layer under tailored jackets. For all other situations, go for something with a little more personality. A chunky, interesting ribbed knit can be a great way to dress down a grey pair of wool trousers, allowing you to wearing something a little nicer than jeans without looking overly formal.

(photos above via A Kind of Guise and Mr. Porter)

WELL-FITTING BASICS

If nothing above works for you, take heart. If your clothes fit well, you can dress simply and still look great. See our friend Graeme, again, in his chinos and dress shirt.

A lot of this will be about buying the best fitting clothes you can off-the-rack, and then learning what can be altered (as most clothes have to be tweaked here and there). We have guides on how shirts and trousers should fit. Most shirts will need to have the sides slimmed up and/ or darts put into the back. Just be careful not to go too slim (we recommend employing the “sit test”). Trousers should also be hemmed to a single or no break. You can decide on whether or not you want cuffs.

You’ll also want to upgrade your shoes. Jesse has a nice post on what he calls “in-between footwear” -- something better than your average pair of New Balances, but isn’t as formal as laced-up oxfords. We have guides on where you can find good, affordable shoes; how to tell quality in leather uppers; and how much you might want to consider spending. Jesse even has a video on how to take care of your purchases so that that they age well over time.

In the end, you probably won’t look as good as Graeme above (he’s a handsome dude), but you’d be surprised at how much better you’ll look in properly tailored clothing. Even if your office doesn’t allow for anything but the most vanilla-bland of clothes, there are still good kinds of vanilla.

(photo above via GuidoWongolini)

#Offices #Work #Business Casual #Gus Walbolt

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