Minimum Viable Wardrobe

2012-03-25

girouxmcisaak asked: Truthfully, if you're already wearing a coat, it would be super simple to put a moleskin or little notebook in the inside pocket.

Yeah I should have made it clearer that I don’t really advocate replacing a pocket square with this and I’m certainly not lacking for pockets. I just wish one of these “updating menswear for the 21st century tech-savvy man” projects actually understood menswear.

It’s like the part of my brain that loves multi-function objects is short circuiting the part that knows this is another pointless replacement for a part of fashion that works perfectly fine the way it is.

In my non-tumblr life I work as a tech journalist which means I have an interest in trying to figure out what the future looks like and I keep wondering if there’s a form of menswear that marries the highly-functional utli-wear stuff I see around the tech scene without just throwing fashion out the window. Basically, I want the suit a William Gibson character would wear.

I’ve got to think it’s POSSIBLE, but instead people send me stuff like this. I’ll keep searching for a project that puts a new functional/futuristic spin on menswear but I’ll be the first to admit I haven’t found anything worth somebody’s money.

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Hankie Pocket Notebook

On the one hand I know I should support a traditional pocket square and I do in fact hate the name. (I know the Pocket Square Pocketbook would have been slightly more inaccessible but I’d have loved it.) On the other hand though I want one of these functional futuristic fashion item schemes to work as more than just a funny gimmick one of these days. I’d kinda love to try this one out to see if it’s workable or just the adult equivalent of those self-tying shoelaces from when I was a kid.

2012-03-07

What Next?

So I have a few possible directions I could take the blog in and since I actually have a readership I thought I’d ask to see which one you guys prefer. I’ll probably be doing a little bit of each of these for the foreseeable future but what would you most like to see?

Replacing Items in my MVW List: I’ve got quite a few items as I mentioned that I’ll need to be replacing and improving. This brings up a lot of questions about how to identify high quality construction in your clothes as well as getting it tailored and getting my shoes resoled that I don’t see a lot of people discussing in detail. I know I should do these things but I don’t have much experience in them so I’ll probably discuss it from the point of view of “my first time getting a suit tailored” and “what it’s like getting your boots resoled.”

Getting rid of my old clothes: I’ve been wearing only my MVW items but my old clothes have still be hanging around (in some cases literally) and I should do something about that. This would probably be an account of how to catalog and sell your clothes which I see a lot of menswear blogs doing but relatively few discussing. I’ve got no clue how to do it since I’ve mostly just bagged up my old clothes in the past and sent it to Goodwill.

More Data Driven Posts: I didn’t exactly set the world on fire with my listing of wardrobe variations but the math there was also relatively simple and the useful takeaway for others (you probably don’t need as many pieces as you think in your wardrobe) was relatively minor. I’d love to survey major cities to find good tailors using the Put This On method or really try to dig down into the data from eBay to get some good insights on good times to buy x or y item. These projects would probably be relatively few and far between since my statistical analysis skills aren’t exactly top notch and they’d take quite a bit of work but I feel like there’s some real value to using hard data to talk about menswear.

Wearing New Things Every Day: I want to let my MVW list stabilize a little more before I really try it but the more I think about my self imposed challenge to try and go as long as possible without repeating my outfit using my MVW the more it appeals to me. The other advantage of this is that it would see me actually posting some photos of my outfits and frankly photos have been pretty sparse on the blog lately.

Of course if you have any other suggestions for something you’d like to see me talk about in MVW I’d love to hear about that as well.

2012-03-05

Anonymous asked: In the spirit of Two Things where no one really agrees what the two critical things are, I would propose that you are right with #1 being fit, but that #2 should be "once you put on your clothes and get them the way you want them you should forget about them all day until you take them off again. I suggest this because you can't look stylish if you are constantly adjust your pocket square etc.

I think that’s more of a goal that should naturally follow than a rule. If your clothing fits and it all works together then you should be comfortable enough in your own wardrobe to not spend all day fiddling with it. Trying to “force” that kind of calm collectedness by declaring it a rule is going to be way less effective than just ignoring it, concentrating on building up a wardrobe you can feel that comfortable with, and trusting that some day you’ll look as chill as the random dudes from street photos coming out of Fashion Week. This is just the opinion of a dude who NEVER looks as chill as anybody on photoblogger sites though so I may be way off.

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Anonymous asked: With a set number of articles in your wardrobe, how often are you "allowed" to swap them out for new ones? Is it only when they get worn out, or can you change them whenever you want?

The answer to this is “technically whenever I want.” I thought about putting an artificial “recharge time” of 3 or 6 months before I was allowed to switch out an item in my wardrobe again but I decided against this for two reasons.

1) in the early going I want to be able to experiment a little bit and kick out clothes that aren’t working in the rotation for another item that works better. I want to be able to get a blue trenchcoat and a pair of wool pants (which I think are going to be stables in my rotation) before like…september.

2. More practically I can’t really afford to buy clothing at a rate fast enough to screw up the experiment. 4 items a year is probably about the max I could manage considering the time commitment for finding a very specific item cheap in a thrift store or on eBay and the financial commitment to get high quality clothing the traditional way.

For now I’m going to try and get by with just the rule that once I’ve thrown an item out of my MVW list it can never return but let me know if you think I’m swapping out items too often and it’s killing the spirit of the experiment.

2012-03-04

Wardrobe Variations

I’ve had a few people off the blog ask if I was concerned about not having enough different outfits to wear with MVW, because they know I’m sort of a clothes horse. I suspected it wouldn’t be much of a problem for a few reasons. 1) I already tended to stick to a relatively small number of pieces 90% of the time 2) nobody seemed to notice this AT ALL.

I did wonder just how many different variations I could manage before it became really obvious that I was just wearing the same outfits over and over however. So I’ve decided to do the only thing more interesting that talking endlessly about my clothes: talk about math about my clothes.

So here’s a quick calculation on variations in my wardrobe. I’m not including every little variation I can think of however. My two pairs of shoes are not going to double the total number, nor are my tie or raincoat though they technically could. Instead I’m going to stick to the big items that I’ll be wearing on a daily basis and that people would probably notice.

In my current MVW list I’ve got 3 pairs of pants, 7 shirts, 6 sweaters and 6 coats. 2 of those shirts however are basically identical to another 2 (well one of my white shirts is a button down and one is not but I’m too lazy to calculate which wardrobe combinations work better with which so I’m just combining them into one wardrobe option) and that means I’ve got 5 shirts.

So with 3 pairs of pants, 5 shirts, 6 sweaters and 6 coats that comes to 3*5*6*6 = 540 different outfits. However that number assumes I’m wearing a sweater AND a coat every day. If I add in outfit combinations that include a coat but no sweater (3 pants * 5 shirts * 6 coats = 90) my total jumps up to 630 outfits. Which means that even without including my tie or shoes I’ve got easily a year and a half’s worth of unique outfit combinations.

Even I was kinda surprised by this number and assumed I was miscalculating something. Certainly a few of those 630 outfits won’t work (jeans + blue OCBD + blue cardigan + either of my blue coats springs to mind) but even assuming there are 100 of those untenable combinations, which seems like a WILD over-estimation, then I’ve easily got enough variations to never repeat my outfit until I turn 28 and buy a 28th piece for the MVW. Assuming I pick a pair of pants for that extra wardrobe slot then I get another 180 outfits and make it to 29 without ever wearing the same outfit.

I’m almost tempted to try this just to see how long I can possibly go but then I remember that I have a few outfits I really like and, as I noted in the first paragraph, nobody really notices.

2012-03-03

putthison:

Steven Hitchcock shows off one of his high armholes. Such armholes will allow you to lift up your arms without moving the rest of your coat. As Steven writes, “You will be in control of the coat not the other way around.”

Of course, there are other things that facilitate a comfort and movement, and it’s best not to get too fixated on armholes alone. However, whether you’re buying off-the-rack or getting something custom-made, it’s important to lift your arms a bit to see if you have a good fitting jacket. You don’t just stand in front of mirrors all day, after all, you move.

For a very interesting read about Fred Astaire’s armholes, which are kind of legendary among bespoke enthusiasts, check out this interesting article by Kerry Goodrich. Sometimes photos like this are posted when the topic of movement comes up, but as Goodrich explains, there are important trade-offs.

I can always count on Put This On to make sure that I understand why my clothes work instead of just if they do or not.

Source: putthison

2012-03-02

The Two Things

“For every subject, there are really only two things you really need to know. Everything else is the application of those two things, or just not important.”

-Glenn Whitmann

So I saw a post over on design blog Swissmiss last week discussing this idea of two things along with a long list of the two things for various professions. It got me thinking about this post I made back in January where I kind of cut a corner in order to make a point I declared that there was really only one fundamental principle in menswear-

1. Make sure your clothes fit.

I stand by that rule being pretty fundamental and my claim that it’d be pretty hard to look too bad as long as you adhered to it. But, that was sort of a lie, and I kinda knew it was a lie at the time. I still went with it. The truth is that a two things models probably fits men’s fashion better than a single golden rule, I just let it slide because I think the second thing is the one most guys are already familiar with.

2. Make sure it matches.

This is a skill most guys already possess to some degree. Even in the jeans and t-shirt world of the average dude some sort of aesthetic judgement about a jacket/shirt/jeans combination has to happen each morning.

Still I feel like it was a huge mistake to skip over this basic principle at the start of the blog because it’s honestly where I can communicate how I’m doing it in ways that should work for almost everyone. (Yes there’s color matching stuff that’s unique to each person but that probably won’t come up all that much with my wardrobe selection.)

I can’t make your clothes fit. Even if I knew as much about tailoring and fit as some of the menswear blogs out there fit tends to be a sort of tricky thing to master that requires a lot of trial and error even when you’re following instructions well. Matching colors and patterns however is a far less complicated process.

Of course the main way I’m doing that is by keeping it absurdly simple. If you look back at the MVW Mark I list I’m leaning REALLY heavily on blues and grays with a brown belt and shoes. That’s because that’s probably the simplest pallet that I literally could not fuck up. With the exception of the black trenchcoat I kind of think it’s impossible to fuck up my wardrobe so long as I’m actually wearing pants and a shirt when I leave the house. The main danger is leaning TOO MUCH on a single color and ending up looking like I forgot anything but blue existed.

Still, the danger of that is actually amazingly low for reasons that’ll become clearer in my next post where I deal with the main assumption about MVW: That I won’t have enough things to wear.

2012-03-01

Trading Up in Menswear

So I’m kind of torn about how exactly I should make sure I’ve got content up here every day while still remaining true to the project. I want to start doing some WIWT stuff but that isn’t going to be enough content to carry the blog and pounding out a 1000 word treatise every day doesn’t seem viable (or particularly interesting to my readership). I’m resistant to reblogging not because I don’t think it’s valuable but because so much of it seems centered about aspects of menswear I sort of can’t get into on this blog. (I need to worry about giving credit to the great blogs I read every day though, especially since I’ve already benefitted from their kind reblogs.)

I’m kicking around the idea of trying to bring in some non menswear stuff and talking about how it’s actually related to the menswearosphere.

I first really started thinking about this after reading this essay called Acting Dead, Trading Up and Leaving the Middle Class by Venkatesh Rao. In the essay Rao argues that the middle class is effectively dead or dying and the only option really available is to escape one way or another. You can either slide down into effective poverty by “acting dead” and continuing to make financial decisions based on what you think you’re supposed to buy or you can “trade up” and strategically buy items of quality to improve your life.

I’m not sure I’m ready to declare the entire middle class dead but I was struck by this graphic that Rao uses about halfway into the essay.

When I saw that I was immediately struck by how similar it was to the common menswear call to save for quality. In many ways the choice Rao outlines is a totally valid description of the menswear market. “Standard quality” clothing is increasingly scarce. The choice between “acting dead” and “trading up” may not be a dire financial and class necessity but it certainly does seem to be the choice at the heart of men’s fashion right now.

There’s an argument to be made here that by buying a traditional mens wardrobe you’re performing your class and acting dead by attempting to. Certainly I think that’s the argument being made by people who don’t buy suits or wear ties or care about Double Monks.

On the other hand however I think there’s a real argument to be made about the frugality of quality clothing. Sure an $8,000 bespoke suit is probably not the most fiscally responsible decision you could ever make but a high quality $600 suit is likely to see more use and last longer than a $200 one.

The thing that makes fashion become a performance of class and a waste of money is when what we wear becomes another ephemeral item in our lives. Even though I’ve parred down to 27 items I still don’t feel like I’ve hit MVW because some of these items are still ephemeral. They’re a coat I wear when I have to or a sweater I keep around just to have a grey sweater. My goal for the next month is to get rid of the items I don’t want to become an item I actually pay attention to.

2012-02-29

Replacing the Minimum Viable Wardrobe

So, obviously the list I unveiled yesterday is just a Mark I of the process of getting to MVW and that means there’s going to need to be rules about how to replace items. I want to make the rules pretty strict to encourage me to really think about changes to the list so I don’t end up just switching things out constantly when I get bored with them. Here’s what I’ve come up with-

When I replace an item on the MVW list it’s gone forever.

So if I replace one of my white shirts with grey slacks I can’t change my mind. I can replace those slacks with something but if I get rid of an item I’d better be damn sure I don’t want to wear it anymore.

Of course I could get around this issue by simply continuing to buy new clothes and throwing out something each time to have an effectively infinite wardrobe but in practice there are two things that would stop that. The first is that you, my intelligent and wise readership, would notice and tell me to knock it off. The second is that I don’t have the money to go out

In point of fact I don’t have the money to buy very much new clothing at all. For the time being at least I probably won’t be able to upgrade more than 2 items a year to a higher-quality equivalent. I may try the eBay/thrifting route to up that number a little but I really want to avoid turning this blog into a diary of me buying a bunch of clothes. Ideally MVW will evolve into more of a WIWT project where I really dig deep into varying my wardrobe despite the limitations.

That being said I do have quite a few planned improvements that probably won’t break the bank before I start trying to replace each item with a really high-quality piece.

I need some grey slacks. It’s kind of absurd how long I’ve gone with just jeans and khakis (going on six months without anybody saying word one about it) but it’s silly of me not to get a third option ready.
My 1000 mile boots need to be resoled.
I need to take my suit to a tailor.
I need to replace my black raincoat with a navy one.
I need to get a brown tweed coat off of eBay or something to replace the one from the gap that is already falling apart.
I need a pair of reinforced khakis or something I can go biking in regularly without them getting destroyed.

That’s all I’ve got for now though I’m sure I’ll get plenty of insightful comments about other items I should swap out.