A Confluence of Styles

I tend to get heaped in with the "trad" or "ivy" bloggers. There's nothing particularly wrong with that, I guess. But it is a situation that I refuse to feed and have tried to avoid. Notice, I avoid such terminology like the plague, It's not that I see anything wrong with "trad" or "ivy"...its not that I don't fully understand how I came to be categorized as such...it's just that I've always felt that pigeon-holing ran anathema to true style. I also believe that style is an ever evolving thing, a constantly changing confluence of all the good things one has seen and experienced in life. Get ready, and take your grain of salt now, I'm about to pontificate. Today's get-up provides me with a good spring-board for my arguments:
I usually like to keep it fairly classic, but hell, I'm still young, so out come the jeans. Besides, there's been a lot of dusty, dirty work on the job lately...so I wear work pants.

Not to be a sloppy chump, I pair said work pants with an oxford and bow tie. Bow ties are great when there's dirty work to be done, they stay out of your way.

And since I was on my feet for an excessive amount of time today, rubber soled shoes were definitely in order...like these three toned saddle shoes, a gift from Toad (where the hell are you, Toad?)

I tend to go through phases. I bet the head-shrinks have a drug fro that now. Let me give you a brief rundown of my sartorial phases:

- At age 7, I asked for a sport jacket for my birthday. Mom and Dad obliged with a navy blazer.

-I went to a Jesuit, all boys high school. Considering that, our dress code was amazingly lax: no blue jeans, and a collar on your shirt. Even sneakers were permitted. I wore a suit and tie everyday.

-I worked in a Boston men's haberdashery, ages 16-19.

-In my twenties, I discovered punk rock, a look more fraught with rules and specifics that any kind of "trad". Tight jeans, studded belts, big boots, leather jackets, funny dyed hair...you name it, I did it.

-Then came rock-a-billy, which is kind of like "trad" punk. Crisp jeans, shiny shoes, rigidly combed hair, and so on...

-and now this.

My point is not to "blow my own horn" as it were, but to admit that my current sense of things is the result of all these other things, and will continue to change in the future as I find and become obsessed with still more things, but (hopefully) will always be an expression of myself.

-Jesuit high school taught me comportment.

-Haberdashery taught me...well, just read the damn blog.

-Punk taught me the importance of the right jeans, and the beauty of something that is perfectly worn out and tattered. (Funny, WASP's and punks have their love of the old and worn in common)

-Rock-a-billy taught me to work with the natural wave in my hair, rather than fight it.

-Blogging taught me that there are no end of cool takes by cool folks on the kind of things I like.

-Who knows what the next thing is?

I try to avoid terms like "trad", "ivy", or "punk" because they are way too restrictive, and to me, style is not about restriction. Quite the opposite, it should be about freedom. Look around you, and absorb that which is "cool". Use this knowledge to your advantage. The minute you decide not to wear something, or do something, because it doesn't meet the rules of whatever "thing" you're into this year, it's time to step back and take a breath. Think of the bad-ass people you've known. It's always been about a combination of an eye for quality and the confidence to be a little weird.

Hasn't it?