What Got You Into Dressing Well?
Or, a Short Retrospective On My Fashion Journey
What’s up fellas,
It’s almost Spring, which means it’s time to change over the closet to the ol’ Summer wardrobe.
It’s currently 40°F with a windchill of 16°, so spring is a relative term when it comes to New England weather, but it’s still an opportunity to prune down your wardrobe and get rid of things you only wore a couple of times.
It’s also a great time to reflect on how your personal style has changed.
this year, as I’m starting to put the flannels and sweaters into storage, I thought way back to when I first started to really attend to the idea of how I looked.
[Love Sosa by Chief Keef plays softly in the background]
In 2012, the CIA introduced the Sperry and Nike midcalf combo to UMC white boys in suburbs across America, causing widespread and devastating addiction. The damage to these communities is still being assessed over a decade later.
As a 13-year-old who had just discovered reddit while searching for rage comics, I made the mistake of taking solace on r/malefashionadvice. Instead of using my free time for anything productive, I instead learned that I could spend all my extra money on stupid shit that I didn’t need, thus launching a tumultuous relationship with #menswear.
If you’re a fellow oldhead, you might recall the outsized grip that the fishtail parka had on that subreddit at the beginning of the 2010s:
That was the uniform in my eye — a sick jacket, raw denim, and boots, right in-line with the end of the hipster era. Thankfully, I knew better than to actually buy that stuff at the time (would’ve gotten (deservedly) torn apart by my friends), but the idea of “having that shit on“ still sat in the back of my mind until I started making money from my college internships.
In the interim between my “getting into” clothing and actually having money in my pocket, a few things shaped my worldview (and by extension my personal style) which made me drift away from that idea, but the fishtail parka was the beginning of the butterfly effect that has thus far culminated in the Frayed Collar newsletter.
I see spring as a season when nostalgia is free to wander — a time when the new year unfurls before our eyes in full bloom. It feels both natural and fitting to revisit the past and how one’s personal style has evolved, as we move to embrace the beauty that the upcoming year has in store.
So I’ll leave this letter with a question for you: What got you into caring about your personal style?