Washing: Less Is More

Dry-cleaning, laundering, hot water, hot air, hot industrial-size pressers--these things all degrade your clothes. T-shirts develop pills.  Buttons crack.  Denim wears thin.  Your cleaners will never accurately press your necktie's edges.  They will flatten your collar.  The tips of your shirt collars will discolor.  Facings will shrink.  Behold the litany of woes.  It's not the wearing that decays your clothes; it's the washing.

I am a dedicated value-maximizer when it comes to dress clothing.  (Consider, for example, these damnable pleats on my profusion of Jos. A. Bank suits.  I am a young style blogger, yet I have all these pleats!)  Every shirt that shrinks, every suit that wears, drives home the inevitable conclusion:

Do not wash/handwash/dry-clean anything until it takes on an odor or a stain.

I'm experimenting with wearing my dress shirts several times before washing them.  I've found that as long as I hang them up after removal and spot-iron them as necessary, I can wear them two or three times before they need washing them.

The Essence Of eBay: Caveat Emptor

No bones about it: eBay can be a great place to find nice clothing for cut rates.  Suits from brands like Hickey Freeman, Brooks Brothers, and J. Press filter through there regularly.  I like the "Saved Searches" notification feature.  Set up a category you want to monitor, and eBay emails you when something new appears in the category.

However, you have to be savvy.  You have to know exactly what you're looking for.  You also need to be smarter than the sellers.  A lot of these people are not clothing experts.  I recently bid on a "suit" only to realize when it arrived that the seller thought that "suit" meant "matching jacket and vest."  Sellers routinely abuse "vintange", "mod", "indie", and the sizing parameters, so while you can narrow your search to, say, 40Rx34, there will almost certainly be at least one 40L in your search results.

The flip side is that volume sellers rely on 100% positive feedback, so they have a strong incentive to keep their customers satisfied.

Letting Go

A favorite shirt is hard to let go, especially when you paid $20 for it at Paul Fredrick on wild clearance, and you have such good memories together.  But when, as here, the cuff's edges start to show minor signs of wear, it's best to rip the bandage off and donate the shirt.  Otherwise, you risk holding on for too long and showing up shabby.  The line between thrifty and threadbare can sneak up on you if you're not careful.

Tools Of The Trade: Suede Eraser

When you are like me, and you own a pair of white suede shoes, and at least one person at your office has taken to calling you "White-Shoes Johnson" as a result, and you decide to incorporate them into your casual wardrobe all the more fully and often, they get funny discolorations instead of scuffs.  They also get indigo dye on them from your APC New Standards.  This is unseemly.

Enter this unassuming rectangular prism: a suede eraser.  I don't know what it's made out of, but its texture is very...eraseresque.  You basically gently erase the scuffs and stains.  Maybe it abrades the suede slightly; maybe it has some white powder built into it.  At any rate, the stains go away, and there is a fine white dust on the surface where you were working--a net gain, as the dust can be swept away.

I got mine over at the A Suitable Wardrobe shop.  Will's blog is definitely worth a read as well.

Lessons Learned: Wardrobe Malfunction

Let this be two lessons to you: 1) buy quality belts, 2) don't wear them too tight and then sit down in your APC New Standards.

Bonus lesson from the image's background: The Lincoln Tunnel costs $8, and they don't accept a giant handful of quarters which you had been saving for the laundromat.  And when the toll booth guy waves you through without taking your money, they take a picture of your license plate and send you a bill.  If you pay the bill promptly, it's only $8.

Clothing Hacks: Nametags

Much credit to Zach Kitts of my office for this tip.

Conferences and meetings often issue nametags with alligator clips to attach to your clothes.  But if you leave those on a suit jacket, shirt, or anything else for more than 10 minutes, they leave an indentation that takes a long time to come out.

Instead, attach the alligator clip to your hotel room key or a credit card and stick the key/card in the breast pocket of your shirt or suit jacket.  The nametag will hang over the lip but spread its weight across the entire width of the pocket, preventing premature clothing destruction.

Problem solved via low-tech, unobtrusive, no-marginal-cost technique.

Of Acorns And Trees

Pater recently created this outfit, which receives the Dapper District stamp of approval.  Note:

1. Tiny brown squares in the jacket coordinate with the large brown squares in the shirt.

2. Deep, solid blue tie picks up a blue in the jacket that you don't see at first and also coordinates with the brown to make the mood less somberly autumnal.

3. Necktie dimple helps the knot assemblage reach the bottom edge of the collar points so the collar points don't sort of hang down unaccompanied.

It runs in the family, I guess.