Why do this? Look, sometimes when you sign up for a job, you follow it through, no matter where it goes. As Slim Charles says, you fight on the lie.
In pursuit of all things Dentonian, it’s starting to get a little ugly, and desperate here. We can’t even count on sac to comment anymore, so a boot has been put in my ass to generate some ‘new’ content. And by new, we mean, lazy retreads of Gawker material.
Why do I do this, as opposed to the royal we? Well, you do all you can to help a guy close the deal, and Krucoff has yet to achieve blogger hook up Nirvana (really, I’m not sure he’s achieved blogger hook up Piscataway) -- one Mr. Lockhart Steele. Porn name aside, I like to think of their relationship like that of Lara Flynn Boyle and Philip Seymour Hoffman in Happiness. Lock, all nervous energy, overachieving shell of coke-fueled sexual frustration, and Kruc, maybe a well intentioned schlub, maybe sexual predator. There they are, just feet from each other, crank dodgeball calls, narratively hopeless, even though we all root for them to reach out to each other to satisfy long frustrated passion. That, or to at least spoog on the wall like Dash Snow.
Why else? Well, that should be obvious. Because every time someone in this town recommends something to you, a restaurant, a book, a film, the first thing you do is not thank them for making a considered effort to share something they value, but instead making a counter recommendation that shows that you instantly dissected the reasons they clearly prefer the inferior and provide a corrected path that not only illuminates for them a higher level of discrimination, but reminds that you are cooler, better and more successful than they. Eventually, we all go to that Devendra Banhart concert in a dumpster.
So, here, provided by a service of the surly, perpetual also rans is ToDone, one thing occasionally recommended for you, by us, better than anything those middlebrow sucks over at Gawker can come up with.Look, we aren’t going to quibble with the fact that when you put on a shirt, a well made shirt, a really fucking great shirt, you not only feel like well more than the absurd amount of hard earned scratch you just surrendered, but you start to believe all seeming lies the tawdry aspiration brand consumption rags like GQ try to sell you every issue:
Did I suddenly get taller? Have I always had those shoulders? Can a shirt improve my posture? Will young children aspire to be me?
Will this shirt get me laid?Then perhaps you get philosophical: should I really buy a shirt for an amount that could feed an African village for a month? Then, defensive: well, that same amount could buy me barely enough real estate in TriBeCa to cover a playing card, and that doesn’t even include common charges. Hey, dude, look back in the mirror. Look at that fucking shirt!
It wipes your mind of almost any other consideration. Look, I was every stripe of counterculture asshole that didn’t require getting a tattoo over the past fifteen years. I’ve heard and expanded upon every reason to sneer at a poofter/yuppie/establishment asshole wearing a suit. But like the strange cool calm you get from an IV, the though that flooded my mind when I tried on my first Varvatos shirt was
I am never buying a shirt anywhere else.
Gone were the days of wondering what I was supposed to do with the extra acre of fabric that billowed from my waist. Should I leave it loose, to catch a stray nor’easter? And why did the seam that looked like it should rest on my shoulder drape somewhere around my elbow? And why did there always seem to be a button resting uncomfortably in my belly button?
That’s because all of those shirts were designed for Chris Farley, and none were from John Varvatos. There are three basic cuts: a traditional formal shirt, an intermediary that works for causal suit and non suit, and straight casual. It probably gets more subtle than that, but after a couple visits, you can eyeball which design does what and can basically assume how it will finish, and when you can wear them.
Forget fabrics or patterns. They’re great, but they will come and go season to season. It is the way they taper and finish that makes them so amazing. My survey of the high-end off-the-rack shirt market isn’t broad, but it’s enough to note that general trends and perhaps even admit that yes, there may be no one shirt for everyone, so take with proverbial grains, etc.*
Aside from “anyone who thinks a $275 shirt is a reasonable investment” what makes this your shirt of choice? I would hazard the ideal matrix would be slightly above average height, solid but not bulky build, and a sense of design that coalesces the idea that modernism, wrought well, is tied to traditional precedents that have continued value. That’s pretty high minded for a shirt, or even more, but much of what you see won’t strike you as outré or groundbreaking. Nor will it be staid Brooks Brothers or Pink (and there are really good reasons to go there). What you
will see are very careful, incremental decisions that take an idea (the shirt) that has been understood for generations and makes it right for today. And when you put it on, even the most basic French blue, you will think, with small surprise and satisfaction, that yes, there are things that approach perfection.
Then you have to figure out how to finance a whole closet of them. That part is a bitch.
*My favorite part of this post? That someone, somewhere out there read this and went, sneeringly, "Oh he wears Varvatos? Of course."
Of all the movies made about or highly associated with New York, what role would you have liked to be cast in?
