Today I took two sports jackets into my local tailor to have them significantly cut down to size. On Sunday, I went to put on one to wear to my sister’s 75th surprise birthday party and I felt like I was putting on a moo-moo. I was swimming in the jacket. That caused me to take that and another jacket in for the resizing. I have found a decent local tailor that is very reasonable in doing these sort of alterations and felt it was time. I have previously had him cut down several suits since those have all become outsized for me. Over the past six months I have regularly been replacing my everyday wear items gradually. All of my everyday pants have been replaced several times over and my longsleeve and shortsleeve tops have equally been updated. As I have mentioned, I am solidly now in 2X territory, so much so that I can buy an off-the-rack 2x sweatshirt, as I did in Catalina last week, and, lo and behold, it fits just fine. All those medicine ball twists seem to have done a decent job of getting rid of enough of my love handles to make my upper torso much more compact than ever before. I still have a bit of a spare tire around my middle, but its more like a bicycle tire than the truck tire it used to be.
I addressed my outerwear reduction needs back in November and did so with enough foresight that I am fine in that category for the foreseeable future. The last area that needs addressing in my closet are the two most difficult to address, the items that were specifically tailored for me at great expense over the years, the suits and jackets and the tailored shirts. As a reminder, based on a lifetime of purchases and some degree of excess I exhibited in my dress, I had several dozen suits and half a dozen jackets as well as 175 tailored shirts. I have donated all but six suits and five jackets at this point. Four of those suits got cut down in the fall and now four of my jackets will have been cut down this month. I suspect that the jackets, which are mostly worn to business casual events, will be adequate to see me through and that I will be unlikely to need to actually replace them. What I have come to realize is that my frame will always be rather large no matter how far this weight loss journey takes me, and I will always need slightly outsized clothes by most any standard. While I may get a few sizes smaller in pants sizing, it will be a while for me to get down to a normal XL top and I suspect it will never get any smaller than that.
What that translates to is that suits are more problematic for me than jackets alone. I anticipate that at some point in the early summer, I may have to take a trip over to someplace like Men’s Wearhouse and try on an off-the-rack suit. I will deal with that later since my recently cut down suits should suffice for the time being, given how infrequently they get called into service these days.
The bigger question for me will be that vast array of tailored shirts. Tailored shirts sold off-the-rack have traditionally been sized based on collar and sleeve length only…which has always struck me as very inefficient. Most commercial operations are efficient enough to capture the majority of their market’s needs, so maybe I just didn’t fit the majority mold. I do notice that most sizing these days has added three body sizes of slim-fit, regular and relaxed. I like that nomenclature…rather than calling me fat, clothing purveyors call me relaxed. Truth be told, the casual trends combined with the slouchy preferences of particularly younger people has made the relaxed designation quite appropriate. I have started to experiment with ordering standard versus relaxed sizing and am finding that a 2X standard fits me just fine in long and short sleeves t-shirts. I’ve ordered a few off-the-rack tailored shirts and there is a lot more variability in that sizing. I’m leary of ordering standard cuts in those shirts, even though the materials used these days tend to be quite flexible and stretchy. There is still something about sitting down and having your shirt strain and pull apart at the buttons that makes that look less than attractive. But at least half of the tailored shirts I have now bought off-the-rack seem to fit well and I find them more attractive than the old tailored shirts in my historic collection. That is probably because I am wearing them without a jacket over them. When they go under a suit or jacket, the old collection works just fine.
Brooks Brothers used to always cut their shirts more fully than other clothiers because I think they knew that their clients would almost always be wearing their shirts under suit coats and would prefer them to be full and relaxed. Unlike my old suits or my old causal clothes, I doubt I will be very motivated to throw out many of my 175 tailored shirts, since it always seems they can be kept folded and packaged or simply hanging on the cleaner’s hangers indefinitely until there is some use for them. I would perhaps be more motivated to throw some of them away if I suddenly found myself with less closet space, which is unlikely to happen until we truly downsize our living arrangement. Until then, those 175 shirts will sit there stacked and hanging (I am running 50/50 on those two configurations), organized by color (white, blue, grey and other) and pattern (solids, stripes and checks) and get occasional use. I am always surprised to find a packaged shirt from our old Cameo Cleaners (by far the best I found in NYC) who we stopped using in 2018. That means I haven’t worn that shirt for eight years now. The only thing more surprising is when I find one that has NEVER been worn and then I am compelled to look at the shirttail to determine when I had it made for me. I have shirts that are thirty years and older in that collection and the good news is that they neither go bad nor go out of style (at least by my buttoned-down standards).
My closet is now like my menu. I completely ignored it for years because I just wanted things to fit and not be reminded of my bulk. I ate the foods I liked mindlessly and wore the clothes I had had made without much regard. Now I find myself thinking more about what I eat and enjoying it more and what I wear and enjoying the selection and look more. That kind of mindfulness is a good thing and keeps me focused on my downward progression.