The clothes make the man, right? The phrase “clothes make the man” has roots going back to ancient Rome, but it took a winding path to become the expression we know today. It’s ancient origins come from the Latin saying “vestis virum facit” (literally “clothes make the man”), which was already a proverb in classical times. The idea was that your clothing revealed your social status and character. The Dutch scholar Erasmus included this saying in his famous collection “Adagia” (1508), a compilation of Greek and Latin proverbs. He helped transmit it from classical culture into Renaissance Europe. Then the concept appears throughout Elizabethan literature. In “Hamlet,” Polonius gives his famous advice: “costly thy habit as thy purse can buy… For the apparel oft proclaims the man.” Shakespeare and his contemporaries understood that clothing was a serious marker of identity and rank. Mark Twain popularized the English version of the phrase in America. In his story “The Czar’s Soliloquy,” he wrote: “Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.” He used it somewhat satirically, pointing out the superficiality of judging people by appearance. The expression endures because it captures a truth we’re still grappling with: whether we like it or not, appearance influences perception. First impressions matter, and clothing is often the first thing people notice about you.
I’ve seen pictures of myself when I was spending my first four years living in Venezuela with my parents and my sisters. I think that despite…and perhaps because…we lived in a less developed country, we children were often dressed up and looking very presentable and even photogenic. I even had something called a liqui-liqui suit (also spelled liki-liki), which is a traditional Venezuelan suit for boys and men. It consists of a long-sleeved jacket with a standing collar (similar to a Nehru or mandarin collar) with matching trousers and typically made from lightweight white or cream-colored linen or cotton. The jacket buttons up the front and has a clean, tailored appearance. While the outfit is designed for comfort in Venezuela’s tropical climate, it creates a very formal look and style that implies that the kid is from a successful family. The liqui-liqui is considered Venezuela’s national dress and is an important symbol of Venezuelan cultural identity. It originated during the colonial period and has remained popular as formal traditional attire. The picture in my family archives with me wearing my liqui-liqui reminds me that I was raised in my earliest years to appreciate using clothes to create a more elite impression.
By the time I was in grade school in Madison, Wisconsin, living the early 1960s suburban American lifestyle, my attire had changed to accommodate the environment and I was all about scruffy chinos and white t-shirts. In fact, my grade school clothing memories were all about sewing up split pants seams on my sister’s singer sewing machine and putting on canvas iron-on patches where I ripped my knees out running around doing something boy-like. Like most young boys, I gave almost no thought to either what I wore or anything resembling personal hygiene. It was not until high school that I can even recall one article of clothing. Because I went to prep schools where coat and tie was a requirement, I do remember my corduroy jackets, khaki pants and oxford button-down shirts. It was my uniform for four years, the years, just when I started paying more attention to how presentable and hygienic I was at any moment. Clothes were still a mindless distraction to me with one exception. I remember that since I started my lifelong passion for motorcycling when I was 14, and my heroes were the Steve McQueen sorts (think Great Escape), I had to have blue jeans on the bottom and a black leather jacket on top. That was pretty much all I wore in high school when I was not at school.
College is where I started to feel the need to conform and it was a challenging sartorial moment for me. I was 6’5” and weighed about 320. The only place I could buy clothes was from a Massachusetts company called King Size. It was very cheap stuff that never fit very well, but the Big & Tall selections were pretty limited. My moment of success came that one summer when I was 20 and working 12-hour shifts doing landscaping work. I got down to 270 and could wear off the wrack XL clothes for the first time. But by the time I was getting ready to leave graduate school and go to work, I was back in the business of finding the outer limits of men’s clothing sizes in suits and dress shirts from Brooks Brothers (who tended towards cutting their shirts big in the body). Once I discovered the Hong Kong tailoring option, literally ALL of my clothes were made for me in Hong Kong. They were relatively cost-effective, but mostly they fit. My wardrobe was 90% work clothes and I was back in an adult version of my high school prep school uniform. While during all those working years, the Big & Tall industry expanded vastly (along with America’s waistlines), and I did expand my off-the-rack purchase selections, my wardrobe was probably still 85% work duds made in Hong Kong.
And then I retired…first from Wall Street…then from New York City…and eventually from regular work. That’s when my selections of clothing started to take on a more personal choice dimension. Just like I didn’t have to spend my time doing what I didn’t want to do, I no longer had to wear what I didn’t want to. I could suddenly dress however I damn well pleased. There was no one to impress and no cultural norms to be met. COVID may have actually accentuated that whole process since for a year or more we all just hung out by ourselves. Obviously, there has been some need to keep clothing for dress-up occasions where societal norms need to be met, but I think it fair to say that my wardrobe is now 10% dedicated to that normative stuff (even less if you take % of time spent in the clothes) with 90% about what I want to wear. My dress is a function of what I like to do, which is garden and ride my motorcycle. My brands are Duluth Trading and Carhartt. Carhartt is a 135-year old company dedicated to making rugged clothes for railroad workers, farmers and tradespeople. What Levi Strauss was to gold miners in California, Carhartt was for midwestern laborers and regular folk. Duluth is only 35 years old, but it too focused on tradespeople, particularly plumbers and electricians. It famously solved problems like “plumber’s crack” by making clothes that worked better for beefier working guys. Duluth is a more modern and more marketing oriented brand that is all about the modern big guy who wants to get his hands dirty. Those are the companies that now clothe me on a day-to-day basis. The clothes are unsentimental and simple with their style coming from their functionality and a small bit of color optionality. I like everything about these clothes.
What I like most is how they make me feel. I mean they actually feel good to put on and wear (everything is comfort blended to be comfortable and moveable). But they also make me feel good about myself wearing them…not because of how they look to others (though I do think they are attractive), but because how they make me feel about myself. I like being a working guy without pretensions. I much prefer being that guy than the guy who has to dress up to play golf or tennis and certainly more than that guy who has to suit up to take money out of someone else’s pocket to put into my own. I guess what it boils down to is that I am a down and dirty guy who only wants to put on a liqui-liqui when I really have to.