Praise be unto Allah the Just and the Merciful, for I have gotten some new pants—trousers, that is, for transatlantic readers. All my chinos save one pair had blown-out knees, and the one was beginning to get suspiciously soft at the joint. The other intact leg-covering to my name, excepting suiting, was a dingy but ever-reliable pair of white painter’s pants, a survival of my brief, inglorious adventure as an archaeologist. Not exactly office wear.
The four new arrivals were greeted with a wifely sigh of relief and approval, which means the management’s eye will soon turn to my bad and worsening shirt situation: uniformly frayed collars, loosening buttons, separating plackets and cuffs, ignominious grime inside at the neck and wrists. Doubtless, by time this is addressed, the chinos will again be in tenuous condition. So the cycle will go, I fear, until the end of my working life.
Shabbiness isn’t exactly a choice so much as a comfortable and habitual way of life. Four years of Catholic school uniform left me unprepared for dressing like an adult when I got to college. My freshman year, of which blessedly few photographs survive, was an unhappy farrago of t-shirts, sweaters, and cargo shorts. I looked bad. During one of the few frank moments of self-evaluation in those years, I decided that this was no way to live, and reverted more or less to Catholic school uniform: slacks or chinos, button-down oxford shirts, and a blazer. This also happened to be the unofficial uniform of my department’s faculty, which I took as approbation. It was not until some years after I left that I realized that this in fact probably seemed (and, at least a little, was) pretentious.
Unfortunately, my aspirations to prep surpassed my undergraduate budget. When I say “a blazer,” I mean the singular literally: a boxy twill number the welcoming tan of a Werther’s Original. (I learned during an unsuccessful club punch season that, if you have a single jacket, this is not the correct color.) Three years of heavy use left its cuffs heavily frayed; further, wearing the same top number daily I suspect did little to dispel the goofy impression left by the annus horribilis of casual dressing. On cold or rainy days, which are frequent in that part of the country, I wore a woolen overcoat inherited from an upperclassman, the same dubious benefactor who introduced me to scotches I could not afford. This was once a classy item, navy with wing lapels. At time of acquisition, it was missing one button of six and had a small tear developing at one pocket—nothing catastrophic. By the end, it was missing three buttons, the pocket tear had grown to nearly the size of the pocket itself, and holes had developed in other and sometimes surprising places. It also permanently smelled of damp and tobacco smoke. Because of the buttons problem, I could not close it, and I’d stomp through the elements flapping like a very low-rent Heathcliff. My mother hated this garment passionately, and would be appalled to know that, smiling, I have placed it on the desk before me as I’m writing.
Briefly, shabbiness established itself in my life early. It has not departed. At no point since has it seemed sensible to spend on all but the necessary clothes—I leapt unblinking from the poverty of graduate school into the poverty of family life—so things tend to stick around until they are rags, and then a little longer. I could pretend that there’s something genteel about this, citing the old practice of letting your Nantucket reds mellow into the salmon imitated by the consciously preppy mass-market brands; I could argue about comfort, since there is nothing softer than a pair of chinos that is about to disintegrate. But there’s no reason to it. It’s just shabbiness.
I am lucky to work in one of the last remaining industries that presumes business dress—the press of the American right, such as it is. One of the first things that impressed me when I entered the fourth estate, lo! these many years ago, was that reporters wore t-shirts or polos, but editors wore suiting. A jacket and tie elevates, or at least distracts from, the down-at-the-heels habitus. Yet, if you look, you can still see the tell-tale fringes of worn-through collar folds, or the elaborate staining of cuffs that have seen heavy action. But—and here is the real luck—nobody expects respectability from a journalist anyway.
