257 | Derek Guy on the Theory and Practice of Dressing Well

0:00:00.8 Sean Carroll: Hello everyone. Welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. A little while back, I was at a cosmology conference and there was a talk being given by Jim Peebles. Jim Peebles will be very well known to anyone who knows about cosmology. He's a professor at Princeton, one of the grand old men of cosmology. He was a young physicist working with Robert Dickey in the 1960s when they predicted and tried to observe the cosmic microwave background before being scooped by Penzias and Wilson. So he's been around, he's seen everything, and he's a super nice guy. So everyone wants to hear what Jim Peebles has to say. So he was talking to this group about the acceleration of the universe, and he showed a picture of the people who discovered the acceleration of the universe. That's Saul Perlmutter, Adam Riess, former Mindscape guest and current colleague of mine at Johns Hopkins and Brian Schmidt. Their teams of course also had a lot to do with it. I wanna give them all the credit but these are the folks who were on stage at a ceremony in Japan with some officials from the Japanese government. Why am I telling you this? Because Jim Peebles said this very amusing thing.

0:01:12.1 SC: He sort of looked at the picture and paused and he said, you notice how the scientists, the astronomers are very well dressed. It was an official event, everyone dressed their best and he says they're in their suits but the suits are kind of clearly off the rack. They fit okay but they're not perfect whereas the politicians, he said, the Japanese politicians have these perfectly tailored bespoke suits and you can actually just tell that they're made to fit these people specifically. And the audience loved this. It was hilarious. It was all done in very good spirits. He wasn't insulting anyone or anything like that and he was just making a wry observation and it was funny because it was different. It was not what you expect. We don't usually talk about the fashion choices of scientists. Thank goodness. There's literally a website, really there used to be anyway, called Prof or Hobo where you're supposed to guess whether the picture is of a professor, often a scientist, or just a person, a hobo, right? In other words, scientists don't put a lot of effort into dressing well but I think that there's something to be said for dressing well or at least dressing intentionally and thoughtfully. When it comes to science and philosophy, I often say that scientists can't choose to not do philosophy but they can do it badly if they don't want to pay attention to it.

0:02:36.6 SC: Scientists are always talking about the nature of science and stuff like that which is really just kind of cheap, not thoughtful philosophy. And I think the same thing goes true for wearing clothes. If you wear clothes, you can do it thoughtfully or not thoughtfully. And you know what? It's completely fine in the case of wearing clothes to do it not very thoughtfully. Just wear whatever you want, that's fine. But you are making a choice about what to wear. Even if your choice is whatever is in front of me, I'm gonna wear that. So there is a question, a set of questions to be asked about what are we conveying? What are the choices that we're making? What are the statements we're giving to the world by how we dress? And how can we do it well? How can we make the kind of statement that we want to make? I cannot think of any better person to talk to about these issues than today's guest, Derek Guy. Many of you who go on Twitter these days will know that Derek has become a mini celebrity on Twitter over the past year. He is one of the people whose Twitter accounts were inexplicably sent, algorithmically boosted to a whole bunch of people. The good news is his Twitter account is great, so no one really complains unless they just want to complain about it because Derek not only knows a great deal about clothes and how to wear them, but also thinks about it.

0:03:58.2 SC: That's why he's a good Mindscape guest. This episode is not going to be mostly fashion tips, okay? There might be a fashion tip that sneaks in here or there, but it's mostly going to be thinking about what it means to wear clothes, what you are saying, like we said. What is the cultural situation into which your choices of what to wear fall? And he's very, very good at that. It's clear from the Twitter thread that he is being prescriptive in that he says, I think this works, this doesn't, but at the end of the day, you gotta wear what you gotta wear. You should just understand what it means to be wearing those things. So to me, that is a very Mindscapey attitude and a little bit of a departure for us, but that's okay. Departures are what we're all about. So let's go.

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0:05:03.2 SC: Derek Guy, welcome to Mindscape Podcast.

0:05:04.2 Derek Guy: Thank you for having me.

0:05:06.5 SC: I think that it seems as if we're in a somewhat weird cultural moment as it refers to clothing and fashion. I mean, on the one hand, we have the media, we have social media, as well as mainstream media flooding us with image of celebrities dressing in different ways. I can't watch an NBA game without seeing pictures of the players arriving in their fits and being judged on them. But at the same time, we're dressing very casually or even thoughtlessly ourselves when we go into work these days. How do you feel about what it means to be someone thinking about fashion and clothing in this particular moment?

0:05:47.4 DG: Well, I think the reason why, I mean, to be sure, I mean, just to put it out there, I only really think about men's clothing and I write about men's clothing. I don't, my niche is not in women's clothing. But certainly women have been thinking about clothing for a lot longer than men. And I think it's just two things have happened in the last 20-25 years that has increased male interest in clothing. One is that there's just, although I think it's still there, fashion has always been coded as, for a long time, fashion has been coded as a feminine, frivolous interest. So men, when you go back into, go back in history, you see the King of France wearing all these like [laughter] crazy gowns and, and men used to wear red heels and all of these kind of like resplendent like textures and, and materials.

0:06:45.5 DG: And then there was something called the great renunciation where men gave up those things and went for much more austere clothing and left fashion to women. And that, was reinforced during the Oscar Wilde trials, where many of our stereotypes of gay men came from that trial. The kind of effect, interest in art and clothes and witty kind of stereotype of a gay man. And then for much of the 20th century, because of the combination of the great male renunciation of men leaving clothes to women, and also the stereotypes that if you were interested in clothing, people would suspect that you may be a gay man. And for much of that period, that also meant that you were considered less masculine. That made up the bulk of the 20th century, even though there were many, parts of the 20th century where men expressed great interest in clothes, for example, in London during the '60s, there was like this peacock revolution where, men would wear these really dandy outfits, but for the most part, that characterizes much of 20th century dress in western society.

0:07:48.9 DG: And I think that started to break down, at the turn of the 21st century when those gender norms start breaking down a little bit more. And they've kind of gone almost into hyperdrive now, even though I still think there is a lot of taboo for men to be interested in clothes. The taboo is less strong now than it was, let's say in the 1950s. So that has allowed men to feel more comfortable being interested in this subject. Whereas 75 years ago, they might not wanna signal too strong of an interest in clothes 'cause they thought it might signal something about them that they didn't wanna signal. So that's one part, just generational changes in how we think of, "proper gender behavior." And the other part is, I think we live, we are seeing more nowadays, the internet has put many people in front of a wider audience, even if you have like an Instagram account.

0:08:53.8 DG: Whereas before, if you wore, you know, I mean, you could go through much of life not thinking about clothes because you were seen by a smaller number of people. And if you wore something silly, like most people would forget it about it after a while. Whereas now there's like a record of how you look over the course of many years because many people are documenting themselves online. And it's seen even if your Instagram account may not actually get that much traffic, the potential of these photos circulating puts a greater incentive to pay a little bit more attention to your address than you may have in the '90s for example. So I think the internet and the breakdown of gender norms or normative gender behavior has contributed to this kind of boost in male interest in clothing.

0:09:52.2 DG: There was also a period in the early 2000s where in the '90s, if you were interested in, I should preface this, I think many people in the '90s and before were interested in clothing, but they didn't think of their interest as an interest in clothing. So the way I often frame it is, to give an example, if you grew up in the '80s or '90s, you may have been involved in like a youth subculture movement. You may have been into, punk music or skateboarding or hip hop or whatever it is. And many people in these communities have a keen sense of how they're supposed to dress. They know what is like the right jacket, the right shoes, but they don't think of that interest as an interest in clothing. That interest is primarily linked to some other activity like skateboarding, surfing, dancing, whatever it may be.

0:10:42.8 DG: And that also expresses itself in the workplace. People are still keenly aware that there are certain ways that they should present themselves, but they do not think of that as an interest in clothing. So the people in the '90s that had an explicit interest in clothing were like fashion guys. They were interested in Helmut Lang and Marella and all of these name brands. Again, breaking against that taboo, but starting in the early 2000s, there was a narrative kind of fomenting that an interest in clothes could be, it could be recoded in these kind of masculine terms. So to give an example, like you're, in the early 2000s, there was this idea of like dressing like a grownup or dressing like your grandfather, or investing in classics. Getting back to heritage clothing, buying quality clothing, all of these things allowed men to develop an interest in clothing without crossing that gender Kind of like taboo of like, oh, you're a man interested in clothing.

0:11:51.7 DG: It was like, no, I'm just dressing for respect, or I'm dressing, you know, like my grandfather, whatever they said, there was this narrative that allowed people to more easily get in. I think that narrative has been dead for like about 10 years. I mean, nobody really cares about that narrative anymore, [laughter] but that allowed a huge wave of guys 20 years ago to get into clothing while still feeling, heterosexual, masculine, all these things essentially without feeling threatened. And then that group, you know, made it a little bit more, okay for other guys to also develop an interest in clothing. All of these kind of like cultural moments, I think have led us to this point where you have more men interest in clothing. Although I still think, there is this like, many people think that they are smarter, like, better than other people because they are so explicitly, they care so little about clothing that they're so much more intellectual than other people, so yeah, I think that's still the dominant narrative, but it is less so now than it was in previous decades.

0:13:07.4 SC: Well, this is a great segue into the whole connection between clothing and the wider culture, right? I mean, you mentioned on your Twitter feed pretty often the idea of clothing as cultural language. When you're wearing something, no matter how generic or not very fashionable it is, you are fitting in to a wider cultural context. That's not something you can help but do. So I guess the argument could be made, correct me if this is not an argument you wanna make, but an argument could be made that you should at least put some thought into what are the signals that you're sending?

0:13:45.7 DG: Yeah, I mean, one, even if you put no thought into it, your clothes send a message anyway. So, I've always strongly believed that you should never judge a person's inner qualities based on their dress, but it is an undeniable fact that other people will judge you based on your dress.

[laughter]

0:14:09.7 DG: And, that is at least one reason to put a little bit more thought into your clothing. And then I would say that even people who claim to not put thought into their clothing put at least some thought into their clothing. Sometimes guys tell me, well, I only dress for comfort. Well, it's not purely true because a skirt may be very comfortable on a hot day, but many men don't wear skirts. So they still put some thought into what is, how they want to dress to project certain ideas about themselves, whether that's gender, class, cultural identity. You may dress to say, I'm an academic, or you may dress to say, I'm a smart person or you may dress to say, I'm a respectable person. You may dress to say, I am whatever, you could dress to say, I identify as a man, whatever it may be. These like messages are very, the way we choose clothes to broadcast those things, even for people who claim to not think about clothing are so second nature that they don't even think about how they may be choosing certain things over other things. A skirt to me is more obviously comfortable than jeans, but most guys are gonna wear jeans, just because that's like, what guys do.

0:15:35.3 SC: How objective do you think the standards are? I mean, do you think that they're, at the end of the day, are good and bad ways to dress, or is it relative to something else?

0:15:47.8 DG: I always liken dress to language, and I really like using Noam Chomsky's as I'm sure your listeners know, you know, Noam Chomsky, the linguist, and also political commentator, but in his linguistic work, he's famous for the phrase, colorless green ideas sleep fiercely as an example of a sentence that makes grammatical sense, but is semantically nonsensical. Has no meaning. And I think that's true also for clothing. To think of this in terms of like, when I see people discussing clothes online, often they'll take these things as like, scientific principles. Like, does black go with blue, or is this objectively good or bad? And to me that doesn't, that's like asking if a sentence is objectively good or bad. Sometimes a sentence is bad because you're not communicating anything. The sentence doesn't make any sense.

0:16:47.4 DG: Sometimes a sentence can be good just because it communicates what it's supposed to communicate. Sometimes a sentence can be beautiful, and that can be in the eyes of the beholder, but thinking of clothes in terms of cultural language gets you out of the paradigm of believing that clothes are either purely a subjective expression or some kind of objective, there's some objective measure to beauty. Fashion is different than other forms of visual communication in that it's the way that we broadcast our identity and our aspirations and our even our mood for the day. So I think when you think of it in terms of sociological language, it makes a lot more sense. There was, I was thinking of this the other day. There was, I don't know if you're, this might strike, I don't know if the audience listens to rap music, but for example, in 2020, the year 2020, there was a rapper named CJ who came up with a song called Whoopty, and it was a huge summer hit.

0:17:48.8 DG: And the term Whoopty came from the leader of a blood gang in New York. And it was originally a gang call for, for that group. The group on the street would say, Whoopty on the street to identify with each other. This rapper who happens to not be from this gang, took that street slang, turned it into a really catchy song, and then all of a sudden, a bunch of other people were saying Whoopty unaware of its origins. And I think when you look at the kind of genetic traces of language and how language evolves and how slang, gets popularized and who can create slang and who's not allowed to create slang, it's very easy then to like, think of clothing in that sense. Somebody who may hold a lot of cultural capital can wear something and make it cool, like within a small community.

0:18:45.2 DG: Some other person may take that and then popularize it to another group, and then that group takes it and they use it in a whole different way. And then all of a sudden, the meaning of that, that either that slang or that garment changes. And I think that's, it's much easier to think of clothing in terms of language when you see the evolution of how clothes are used and how they're worn and how certain styles go from being in or out. Just in the same way that, like many of us don't use slang like tubular anymore so it's kind of like that.

0:19:24.8 SC: Well, and this comes up against another issue. I mean, maybe we should be very basic for... We've already started the conversation, but just to get some things on the table here, dressing well in this, if I'm following what you're saying, doesn't mean just wearing a suit or wearing a nice dress if you're a woman. There's all sorts of ways that you can dress nicely without dressing expensively or formally.

0:19:53.0 DG: Yeah, I think, I'm sure your listeners are familiar with Bordeaux and the ideas of cultural taste and hegemonic taste. So there are notions of good taste with a capital G, capital T. And in my view, these are basically the practices of the elite class. So good taste is often... I used to be on a menswear forum and Michael Anton, who went on to be an advisor for Trump, he started a thread on this forum actually. And Michael happens to have a lot of clout in this kind of like small menswear community. But Michael started this thread where he would give feedback to people and tell them whether they were dressing in good taste or bad taste. And people would go into this thread eager to get Mike's opinion of like, is this good taste? Is this... Did I do it right? And if you went into the thread and if you're new to tailored clothing, a lot of it could seem random. Like why is this shirt in good taste and why is that shirt in bad taste? Why is this shoe in good taste and why is that shoe in bad taste?

0:21:12.9 DG: And it's much easier to understand if you understand the notion of good taste, again, with capital G, capital T, in terms of the social practices of Western elites prior to like the 1980s. So we're talking of like British aristocrats, Italian industrialists, the Kennedy family, like these types of people. And when you understand that their practices, every single group has practices, like bikers and Harley Davidson clubs have practices. It just so happens that the position of this group of essentially old money is coded as good taste because of their social status.

0:21:57.8 DG: And many kind of Marxist cultural commentators have noted that this is essentially a way for elite classes to impose their cultural power even deeper into the bodies of the people that they subjugate. But this notion that their taste is good and everyone else's taste is bad is how we wind up with, again, capital G, capital T, good taste. So yes, I think there is such a thing as, like when you see something and it conforms to that specific taste, that taste is so hegemonic, that culture, that status is so well understood that many people will recognize it as "good taste".

0:22:44.1 DG: However, every single group has their notion of taste. If you go to... If you went to an underground punk club, they have their notions of what is a good style. And that is according to their social group. If you go to a biker event, if you go to a low riders club, if you go anywhere, all of these groups have ways to regulate group behavior. And people will then dress in ways to both identify themselves as part of the group, but also to identify themselves as unique individuals within that group. So they will conform to the notion of taste, but then often try to do something different to either impress their peers or to express themselves as individuals.

0:23:42.8 DG: So to go back to your question, yes, I think there is a notion of good taste. It's sociological, it comes from hegemonic culture and elite practices, but there's also a lowercase g, lowercase t, good taste, which is contextual to the social practices of any group. And that's where I think clothing becomes much more interesting, where you recognize these as sociological practices, and you can go to, like near me, there are biker clubs, and it becomes fascinating. Like, why do you think this specific jean jacket is good and that other jean jacket is bad? Seeing how these groups express themselves in terms of clothing, I think, is a much more interesting way to look at clothing than just to think of... I don't know, how to dress according to some objective measure.

0:24:40.4 SC: Well, the thing that you just said that I thought was really interesting was the need for people in a group to kind of fit in, but also maybe they want to be a little quirky and individualistic, right? But the next line of that is, but it has to make sense in some way. I mean, you have a lot of fun on the Twitter feed with celebrities and political figures, and you've poked gentle fun at Jordan Peterson, for example, for apparently wearing suits and so forth, but with just weird things that make really no sense. And maybe the message that comes through is it's okay to be weird, but be weird for some purpose, at least.

0:25:23.3 DG: Yeah, again, to me, it's the same as writing. I mean, there are poets and writers who use language in unconventional ways to express their own style, but that doesn't mean that me randomly stringing, not even random words, but random letters together, like someone can just look at that. That's not the same as like reading, I don't know, E. E. Cummings or something. You have to form a sentence to communicate something, and you can be creative with the way that you compose that sentence, but it still has to be somewhat culturally legible.

0:26:00.6 DG: I wanna say also, I've always strongly... You don't have to have any interest in clothes. You can go through life and not pay attention to clothes at all, and we thankfully live in a time where there is less consequence to that now than there was in previous generations. In previous generations, people would gossip about you, you could be sent home from work for wearing the wrong shirt, and all of these crazy material repercussions. There are... Especially for women, again, I primarily focus on men's clothing, but for men's clothing, there's reasonably less repercussions now than there were in the past, and I think that's a good thing. You can go through life and not happen to have this as a hobby, but if you are interested in dressing well, I think you'll have more success if you think of it in terms of cultural language, versus, can I use a necktie as a belt?

0:26:56.3 SC: [laughter] Can you?

0:27:01.3 DG: Yeah, you technically can, but it will be weird, so sure.

0:27:04.0 SC: The one other current news example I wanted to get on the record was John Fetterman, but we're gonna have some listeners who are not in the United States, so they probably, for better or for worse, have no idea who we're talking about. Do you wanna explain who John Fetterman is and why he's in fashion arguments right now?

0:27:25.6 DG: Sure, so John Fetterman is a senator from Pennsylvania, and he has caused a lot of controversy because he rarely conforms to political dress codes, and so he often walks the halls of Congress in basketball shorts and oversized hooded sweatshirts and sneakers, which, that's just very casual attire. And when he first got elected, I wrote a thread saying that this man should get custom suits, even though custom suits are thousands of dollars, very expensive, but his suits fit him so poorly because he's a very large, he's very tall, he's very broad, he has a very broad-shouldered kind of build he's not gonna fit into an off-the-rack suit. He's not even gonna fit into a made-to-measure suit. He needs a bespoke suit, and that will literally cost him $4000 at minimum, and I said, but he should invest in that because what ends up happening is that when he wears these awkward suits that are so short they show the lower half of his shin and the jacket lifts off of his neck, and they're like a mess, is that he ends up causing a lot of discourse around his clothes, and so that was... He's gotten a lot of heat in the US because conservatives hate him because they feel that he unjustly won his election, and he's also been very outspoken against Donald Trump, who has many fervent supporters, so on and so forth.

0:29:04.6 DG: So conservatives have never liked him for political reasons, but they've often picked on his dress because he doesn't conform to the notions of kind of like respectable attire. But this really came to a head when Chuck Schumer changed the Senate rules to allow Fetterman into the Senate chamber without a suit, whereas before, any male entering the Senate chamber would have to wear a suit, so many people felt this was such an affront to the Senate and like this horrible thing, and I happened to catch a lot of flack on Twitter because I often remark on the attire of politicians, and not even just politicians, but also like wealthy business people, and so on and so forth. I've refrained from talking about Fetterman originally because he was hospitalized for depression in the same way that I don't talk about, like Mitch McConnell walks the halls in dress sneakers, and I never comment on it because he's suffered multiple falls, and it's just like kind of I think a reasonable level of not being a jerk, that you just shouldn't do certain things.

0:30:18.4 DG: So I've refrained from commenting on Fetterman because he was hospitalized for depression, but when the rule change happened, it became such a controversy of how can we allow a man into the chamber wearing shorts and hoodies, why are we changing the rules for this one person, he's disrespecting the Senate, he's unfit for office, so on and so forth. And I wrote an op-ed saying that I think Fetterman should wear a suit simply because clothing is not important, and he should conform to these simply so that we talk about more important things, which is policies. However, again, it's such a important point for me that I strongly believe that you should never judge a person's inner qualities or the quality of the work based on their attire, and I am shocked at the number of people who don't see that as like a obvious truth because surely they must have poorly dressed friends, people in their family, if you spend any time in academia, you know many smart people don't dress well, and that is like...

0:31:33.0 SC: I do know that.

0:31:35.3 DG: There's no correlation between their dress and the quality of the work, if you wanna understand the quality of someone's work, read their paper, listen to what they have to say, look at their student reviews, whatever it may be that you wanna understand the quality of the work, but their dress is completely unrelated, I don't think you should show up in a chicken suit, just because then you generate needless conversation about your chicken suit, but if you were to look at someone's attire, it should not be... You should not use that as a proxy for more important inner qualities. So I said that in a POLITICO article and it got so much backlash because many people felt that I was being partisan, but also I think many people do think that it's an affront to the Senate, and I just think that this is like pointless, kind of like Victorian pearl clutching.

0:32:33.1 DG: Respect for the Senate is whether or not you treat your job seriously, and you can judge that directly by what bills they sponsor, what bills they pass, what deals they make, so on and so forth, and you should just look at that. If every single... I wrote on Twitter, if every single politician went to Savile Row and bought a bespoke suit and looked beautiful, no American's life would be improved. It'd be like a meaningless gesture. So that's my... I have this view that clothing is more important than what many people think, but it's definitely pretty trivial in the grand scheme of things.

0:33:14.0 SC: Do you know if Fetterman has actually come out with a positive defense of his short and hoodie wearing?

0:33:26.6 DG: No, I have never seen him. I reached out to the campaign when I was writing that POLITICO article, and I said, I'm writing something about Fetterman's dress, and I'd like you to answer some of these questions. One of the questions was, why does he choose to not wear a suit? Didn't hear back. I don't have any views. I think that's like his own... The only person that knows the answer to that is him and the people closest to him. I do think that many people claim that he's doing it to signal his allegiance to kind of like blue collar workers and I don't... I have a hard time thinking it's that kind of like high-minded, because if it was, I think he'd be more vocal about it. He may just... The other thing is that I don't actually know his reasons for not wearing a suit, but I will say, I encounter men who resent wearing suits all the time. [laughter]

0:34:21.9 DG: So it's not weird to me to find another person who resents wearing a suit, because especially someone of his build, because they know they look bad in a suit. I mean, you don't have to be a suit expert to look in the mirror and say, this doesn't fit me. And he probably doesn't wanna spend, I mean, a bespoke suit, again, is $4000. He would need at least five of them to get through at least the week. And, it's reasonable, most guys are not gonna wanna spend $20,000. And that's just for the suit. We're not talking about dress shirt, tie, shoes. So just for the suits, you're spending $20,000 and most guys don't wanna do that, so.

0:35:08.3 SC: Good, yeah, I think that, yeah, it makes perfect sense, but it's just... It's also amusing how much we try to proclaim that what you wear doesn't matter that much. And then when it bugs us, especially if you're on the opposite side of some controversy, suddenly it matters a lot to people. I think it's very telling, right? Okay, that was great. Thank you so much. But I wanna switch maybe to a little more practical vein here because you're very good at giving out advice and judgments because not only do you say, this is thumbs up, thumbs down, but you give reasons why. So I thought that maybe we could help the listeners, there's both men and women out there listening. So we'll try to be as general as possible, but let's imagine the median Mindscape listener is like a graduate student in physics [laughter] or something like that, or the equivalent kind of middle of the road in terms of income and social station.

0:36:06.8 SC: Do you think that... How important is it for someone like that to have a personal style, to kind of be coherent in how you dress no matter how, what that style might be?

0:36:13.7 DG: Which I'm on personally for in the classroom for academic purposes, or?

0:36:14.9 SC: I guess not even in the classroom, but just... There's I guess, a professional wardrobe, but also a casual everyday wardrobe. I guess what I'm asking is, would you try to persuade people that they should be thoughtful about what they wear and try to have some version of a style?

0:36:45.9 DG: I think of it, it's just whether you take joy in it. I think it's fine if you don't... If you don't have any interest in clothes, I think that's totally fine. If you don't particularly like... If you don't enjoy dressing well, I think that's fine. It's just, to me, it's just a hobby. It's like, should somebody drive, I don't know, a nicer car or eat nicer food or whatever it is, do you enjoy it? A friend of mine just had dinner over at him and his wife's house the other day. He's an academic. He graduated with a PhD in biophysics. He has no interest in clothes. It's like, he complained to me because I recommended him a custom dress shirt that cost him $200, and it wore out after five years, and he complained that it wore out after five years. And I was like, that's five years.

0:37:35.7 SC: Five years.

0:37:38.3 DG: Meanwhile, he loves food, so he'll spend $150 on a dinner, and to him, that's where his enjoyment lies. I will say that for professional purposes, there is sometimes for certain people an advantage to dressing in a way to distinguish yourself from students. That may be if you're a younger professor, maybe if you're a graduate student, you wanna dress differently than your undergrads. It may be that you're a woman or a person of color and you want to establish yourself as an authority in your field.

0:38:19.0 DG: But these things sometimes vary by field as well. In the hard sciences, it may be very normal for a guy to show up in, like cargo shorts and a polo shirt or something. He may even look more intelligent because he conforms to this notion of what a absent-minded scientist may wear something. Whereas someone in let's say, ethnic studies or something or English has to dress in, maybe a tailored jacket because they want people to take their field "more seriously." So it varies by field. I think it varies who you are and what challenges you want to overcome, but I do think that there may be advantages to paying at least some attention to your dress when you go into a classroom, because it can help, in some ways establish your bonafides even if it shouldn't, right.

0:39:13.8 DG: People should be paying attention to quality of your work. But the reality is that when you get in front of a classroom, sometimes people don't take you as seriously if you dress a certain way. But that's gonna be very contextual in the school, the location of the school, the city, your field, you as a person. I would say, when you're talking about like a very general person, it would, even though I often criticize it on Twitter, I think it's kind of a boring aesthetic, but it'd be hard to go wrong with like a pair of like flat French chinos, like a college shirt of some sorts and a sweater when it's cold. Just like the bare basics of like, I mean, not that I believe in, like respect respectability of dress, but there's a language out there for the respectability of dress and sometimes you can use that language to your advantage.

0:40:09.0 SC: You know, I do tell, sometimes tell my students, graduate students, when they seem reluctant to speak up in, conferences or talks or whatever, and I say like, you know, it's good for you, it's good for you, you're trying to become a scientist or whatever, and you have to participate in the discourse. And of course their answer is, but I don't want to be judged. I don't want people to judge me harshly and I would like to say, oh, don't worry, you're not being judged. But the only thing I can honestly say is, well, yes, you are being judged all the time whether you like it or not.

0:40:47.6 DG: Exactly.

0:40:48.6 SC: And that's I don't even think about it exactly. But it's probably true for the clothing too, right?

0:40:54.0 DG: Yeah, I agree. Yeah. Even if you opt out, you're still being judged. That's just the reality. Again, I don't think that we as individuals should judge others, but it's undeniable that other people will judge us. So you should, I think, move through life. You can choose not to, but even if you choose not to, people will still look at you and they'll make an impression. They'll, if you wear certain things, they'll form a certain idea about you. Again it is just very difficult to go wrong with, just like chinos, if you can afford them. I think if you're a graduate student, it might be tough because wool trousers can be kind of expensive and they'll wear down a little bit faster than chinos. But if you can forward them, you know, wool trousers can be very nice. Yeah, these are, there's not like a secret to it, right? [laughter], it's, that aesthetic is like J.Crew.

0:41:50.2 SC: Yeah.

0:41:51.7 DG: Kind of like, you know, like everyone knows what it is. [laughter] So it's not, I do think that it's not off, it's not always the most like stylish. It's, you know, like there are more interesting and like fulfilling ways to dress, but if you just wanna look respectable in the classroom, like, yeah, just go to J.Crew and buy some things.

0:42:11.5 SC: Well, you touched on an issue, which I'm sure is in the back of some people's minds, which is that sometimes this costs money, and we have to take that into consideration. What do you tell people who say to you, this whole clothes as a hobby thing sounds great, but isn't it an awfully pricey hobby to dress really well?

0:42:31.1 DG: Yes, that's true. [laughter]

0:42:33.9 SC: Good.

0:42:34.6 DG: If you take it as a hobby, it's going to be expensive. However, if your goal is to just dress well, then no, you can do it very inexpensively. If you make it your hobby, and if you're just like, really interested in clothes, yeah, it's gonna be expensive. But if you're just trying to dress, well, you can get, you can get chinos. There's a company online called SPIER & MACKAY. It's called, it's spelled S-P-I-E-R, and then the word and then M-A-C-K-A-Y.

0:43:06.1 SC: Okay.

0:43:06.1 DG: The downside to them is that you are shopping online, which means that you are gonna know, want to do three things. One is you're gonna wanna check the return policy, and for them, they give you free returns on their first order. So, you know, like keep that in mind. Two, you probably gonna wanna buy two sizes if you're interested in something. If you're starting out, you know, sometimes having two sizes gives you some options at home to figure out what fits you best.

0:43:35.7 DG: And three, the most important thing is you wanna start measuring clothes at home that fit you well. So if you have a sweater that fits you really well, you lay it flat on a table or your bed, and you measure it from armpit to armpit on the front, turn the garment over, then you measure from shoulder seam to shoulder seam on at the back. And then again on the back you measure from the bottom of the collar down to the hem down the center back. This gives you chest, shoulder and length measurements. Use those three. If you often have problems with sleeves, then you'll want to measure, the center of the back collar seam down to the sleeve cuff. But with certain things like sweaters, you can always fold the cuff back with dress shirts you can take it to the tailor, but the first three are very important because chest, shoulders, and length are much harder to alter at the alterations tailor.

0:44:30.9 SC: Okay.

0:44:31.0 DG: So you wanna know those measurements. And then you can buy things at places like SPIER & MACKAY, and they're really affordable. You get like a pair of pants for $60, you buy like three of them, right? They'll cover you for at least a week you can rotate.

0:44:50.3 SC: Yeah.

0:44:52.3 DG: And buy a few dress shirts for when you need to do a presentation. And if you can afford to, you can buy a tailored jacket. Usually a sport coat that the one that is fail safe is a Navy sport coat in a textured fabric like hop sack or surge. And if you're going to an academic conference you put on a sport coat, it just makes you look a lot better.

0:45:15.5 SC: Yeah.

0:45:19.7 DG: You don't have to go the full suit, you don't have to go full tie. But having chinos, a dress shirt and a sport coat allows you to break up those things to look, "nice" at different formality levels. So you don't always have to wear a sport coat, but if you buy a suit, for example, that suit's gonna be a suit. Some suits can be broken at separates, and there's like a whole language to that of like, which can and which can't. But when you're just starting out, you're probably not gonna need a suit. You can probably just get away with a sport coat. And then at that point, by breaking up those pieces, you can dress appropriately for different situations. And yeah, Spier & Mackay sport coats, I think are like $300, that's not cheap, but you're not looking at thousands of dollars. And these are things that you can wear if you like unless your body changes dramatic shape, these are things you can wear for like 10, 15, sometimes 20 years. Well, the sport coat anyway, the pants will not last that long, but the pants should last you, like a good five, seven years.

0:46:33.5 SC: Yeah. So we're, I always like to think of these things as rates, right? Like, how much are you wearing? How much are you spending not to buy the thing, but per time you will use it. So we're talking, a few bucks for a sport coat like that.

0:46:48.6 DG: Yeah, I agree. If you're, cost per wear goes down when you think of it over the time period that you're wearing them. And I think there is, I would just caution there are ways to get clothes for cheaper. For example, like shopping on eBay, I would just be careful with things like tailored jackets, because tailoring is so particular in terms of fit that unless you've tried that model on before, you're often taking a gamble. But if you have tried on a model and you know it works for you, then you can look up that model on eBay and find it for less. If you wanna dress down the Chinos, you can always get like a dark pair of jeans. There's a company called Gustin, G-U-S-T-I-N. They sell, dark kind of raw denim jeans for I wanna say like maybe $60 or $70. And those will last you, I mean, even with regular wear, they should last you like 5, 6 years. So, and those will be jeans that depending on the model, you don't wanna wear like overly skinny, low-rise jeans with a sport coat. So depending on the model, that's something that you may be able to wear with a sport coat, and then obviously you can wear casually.

0:48:04.8 SC: And this brings us to another thing that is very important that you've mentioned a couple times the idea of the tailoring. I've noticed that for people who don't think about clothes very much, when they do, they think about the color, the fabric, the design. But people who think about clothes a lot are thinking about the fit all the time. Like, does this thing actually fit you or not? So that's a way to level up the clothes you wear, is to really make sure that they fit you correctly, whatever that might take.

0:48:34.6 DG: Yeah, I agree. I mean, you can have, 10 navy sport coats, and they can look totally different depending on the cut in the construction, you know, without, since we're speaking over a podcast, it's hard to give visuals. But the easy way to, I think the three easiest ways, if you're talking about sport coats and suit jackets, the three things to look for is when you're putting on the jacket, see if the collar, which is the part of the jacket that touches your neck, make sure that collar stays on your neck even when you're moving around again, within reason. Like, if you're swimming, if you're moving your arms like you're swimming through a swimming pool, it's not gonna stay on your neck [laughter], unless you're going bespoke. But you know, like if you're kind of like reaching forward for things and stuff, the collar should stay on your neck. The other thing to look for is a jacket that's long enough to at least cover your bum.

0:49:28.8 DG: And that is a big problem with a lot of ready to wear because trends have just pushed the jacket shorter and shorter. Make sure that the jacket at least covers your rear. And even better measures that when you're looking at yourself in the mirror while you're wearing the jacket. The jacket should end about halfway from the jacket collar to the floor when you're wearing heeled shoes. But at the very least, it should cover your bum. The third thing, this is the easiest thing, is when you fasten the jacket, when you button the jacket, look to see if the lapels are buckling away from your chest, look to see if the sleeve head has a divot look to see if there's pulling across the waist. All of these are indications that the jacket doesn't fit you. If the shoulders have a divot, if the sleeve head has a divot, if the chest... The lapels are buckling from your chest, that means likely that the chest is too small for you. If the, when you fasten it across the waist, if the waist is pulling, that means the waist is too small for you, the jacket should fit cleanly, but still have a nice silhouette.

0:50:42.3 DG: But what has happened over the years that many, many guys, particularly by these really small jackets, and one [laughter], it doesn't give them, like, you're gonna gain weight over the course of 10 years. And if you buy a jacket that doesn't even allow you to eat a bowl of spaghetti, it's not gonna, it's not even gonna last a year, let alone 10 years. But, many guys buy these really small jackets and it just, it's constricting and it doesn't flatter them very well. So when you put it on, just see to make sure it lays cleanly, has a nice silhouette, it's not puckering or pulling anywhere, and those puckering those pulls, those are the indications that something doesn't fit on you.

0:51:17.5 DG: You may, in those cases, either wanna size up or when you size up and it doesn't just still doesn't look good on you. You just move on to a different model. At some point, you have to like, try on many different models to figure out your own fit challenges. And everybody has their own particular set of fit challenges, and they end up having to figure out ways to overcome that, either through ready to wear or custom tailoring or ready to wear that's been altered through, an alterations together so and so forth.

0:51:44.9 SC: Well, you mentioned just now ready to wear custom tailoring. We've mentioned bespoke. Let's lay out what all these terms mean for the person out there. Like what are the levels of category that we can get into if we're gonna buy a suit for ourselves?

0:52:01.8 DG: So bespoke, I mean, to go through the very corny kind of [laughter], categorization of it, bespoke comes from when you used to go to a tailor and a piece of cloth was spoken for. Somebody had already spoken for that cloth and they're gonna make it into a garment.

0:52:20.3 SC: Wow.

0:52:21.1 DG: Bespoke is really just how clothes were made before the advent of ready to wear. So, before the middle of the 19th century or so, everyone, with the exception of slaves and laborers wore custom clothes. If you wanted to get clothes, you'd go to the tailor, you'd have them made or someone would make it for you in the home. So the practices of bespoke vary to some degree because it's just how clothes were made before the invention of ready to wear. Ready to wear is very obvious. It's just stuff that you go to the store, it's already made. A designer came up with the idea, a pattern maker figured out what are the proportions of their target demographic, and then they made this item. And then you go on and you try it on and see if it works on you. Ready made is like very standard and very obvious. Made to measure is somewhere between these two worlds.

0:53:15.1 SC: Okay.

0:53:15.2 DG: Where made to measure is means that somebody came up with a block pattern, which is like a architectural draft of how a garment should fit. They came up with this block pattern and you go to a store, you get measured, and then they end up adjusting the block pattern to fit you. And then after they've adjusted the block pattern, they'll make the garment straight to finish, they'll deliver to the store. You try it on. And any adjustments from there are basically what would happen, if you just brought a ready to wear garment to the store and had it altered. The problem with made to measure is that its success depends on how far you are from the block. So to give an example, if the block is made for a very slim person and you have a bit of a belly, they can extend what they tailors called the front balance a little bit to cover your gut.

0:54:14.5 DG: But they can only extend it so much before other proportions get thrown off and they have to draft a new pattern. In an ideal world, you go to a made to measure shop and they will tell you, this is not gonna work for you. [laughter] But we don't live in an ideal world. People are just... Often just trying to make money. Salespeople may not be experienced, so you may go in and they just measure you, they adjust the block, and even through that adjustment, it doesn't fit you. All of a sudden now you have a garment that is not salvageable even through alterations. That's the danger of a lot of made to measure, is that the block was not thoughtfully constructed. It's often an amalgamation of trends or that you're too far off from the block. Bespoke sometimes uses a block pattern, even on Savile Row many tailors now are using block patterns to streamline the process, but theoretically they should draft a completely new pattern to ensure the best fit.

0:55:12.8 DG: And not only is the pattern made for you, but the garment is made through an iterative stages of two to three, sometimes even four fittings. So the garment, they'll draft the pattern, they'll base some, the pieces together. You come in, they fit it on you, and they figure out, does it look right? How do you feel? And then they'll adjust it. They'll bring it back to the workroom, fiddle with it. You come back for another fitting. So and so far the til the garment is correct. The problem with the custom tailoring processes is that just because it's custom doesn't mean it's good. [laughter] You could have a bad tailor.

0:55:51.8 DG: You could have chosen an ugly fabric, you could have chosen bad details. There are all sorts of ways a custom garment can be bad, which is why I always tell people, start with ready to wear first. Figure out what are your own fit challenges. Figure out what you like, what kind of silhouette you like, whether things work for you off the rack. Because if things don't work for you off the rack, you can always just put it back on the rack. There's no cost. Whereas if you go to a custom tailor doesn't work out, you've just lost $1000 to $4,000, sometimes even $10,000 depending on where you go. So, start with ready to wear, figure out your own fit challenges. And then, if you know you're a certain size, if you're John Fetterman, you need to go bespoke [laughter], but most people are not that size. So just figure out what's level is right for you.

0:56:43.4 SC: Do you personally have favorite kinds of suits in turn? I mean, there's like very conservative IBM executive blue and black suits, but then you can get pretty wild out there, right? There's the double breasted and the three piece, and there seems to be a lot of variety, even a, in a relatively restrictive fashion category.

0:57:03.7 DG: Yeah, I, you know, suits used to be the uniform of business dress, and that is no longer true for most industries except for, sometimes law, finance and newscasters and suit salesmen. So I think everyone should have at least one, what I call a serious suit, which is a conservative suit, single breasted, notch lapel, made from a dark worsted cloth and a sober color like gray or navy. And you need to have this suit because this is the thing that you're gonna wear to weddings, funerals, court appearances, christenings, all of the stuff that calls for a suit. And sometimes these events come up unexpectedly, you don't plan for to attend someone's funeral, right? Like it happens. And then you need a suit. And often I'll get emails from people saying, I need to get a suit next week. Where do I go?

0:58:00.2 DG: And the answer is, you're screwed, because you should have been doing that way in advance. Now you are gonna spend $500, $600, $700 on something that quite honestly is not gonna look very good. And then hopefully you'll find something that looks good later. So find one serious suit for when you need it. 'Cause those times are gonna come. After that most people do not need another serious suit because most people don't wear suits to work. So, for the academic that wants to go to conferences and might want something for certain kind of professional settings, I think it'd be good to get a sport coat. But if you are interested in suits and you want to wear suits, then yeah, I, this is a difficult thing because suits are expensive, but I really do think that the second, third suit should be a fun garment that you enjoy wearing.

0:58:56.2 DG: In the springtime, it could be cotton or linen in the summer months, it can be Seersucker. If the kind of like, if Seersucker sounds too, like southern, mint-julep-swilling-cigar-chomping-trad, then you can go for tonal navy Seersucker. So like, Seersucker is traditionally blue stripes on a white cloth, whereas a tonal navy Seersucker is basically all blue and you just get the texture. That can be very nice in the summertime. In the wintertime it can be corduroy. Certain types of tweeds, it can be calvary twill. I really like mohair wool blends for evening. Because mohair wool blend has a certain sheen that I think looks really nice under artificial light. And I think we live in a time where, again, as I was saying, there are very few consequences to dress at this point.

0:59:49.8 DG: So I think you can just wear a suit because you enjoy wearing a suit like. Yeah. Some people are gonna ask like, why are you so dressed up? But like, nothing's gonna happen to you. Right? Like, they're not gonna put you in jail. So, if that brings you joy, if you enjoy doing that, then I think that's something that you can, if you want, you can wear that, you can wear a kind of semi-casual suit to, you know, professional settings, but many people will find it much easier to wear that, for example, to a nice restaurant or to the theater. Even if no one else at the restaurant is wearing tailored clothing. Especially if a friend of mine dresses up for, to go out, with his wife every Friday. And his rule is that if there's white tablecloth at the restaurant, he feels it's appropriate for tailored clothing.

1:00:40.4 DG: And I think that's a pretty good rule. But even if there's not white tablecloth for me, I live in the Bay Area, so I just think like, if the place is serving like $25 plates of spaghetti, I'm gonna wear tailored clothing. Because for me that's like, you know, that's like a nice night out, once you factor in drinks and all that's like $50. So I think you can do that and it can just be an enjoyable night out. It is a little bit easier if you can find friends who also like dressing up. So not that you should only invite women, but I found that women are happy to take the opportunity for a night to just dress up to have fun, to go out to eat. But they're also men that also enjoy these things.

1:01:28.0 DG: So you find a group, you say, maybe we do it once a week, or we do it once a month, we go out to a nice restaurant. It's just, to some degree, for me anyway, $50 for a meal, a meal and two drinks to me, that's expensive. I don't know other people's budgets, but, it's, for me, it's an expensive meal, but it's a cheap way to have a nice night and to unwind, compared to the other ways that one can spend money. And yeah, it just becomes a fun thing to dress up, go out, relax, and have a nice night. But again, if someone's just building a new wardrobe, I would say you need that one serious suit for those weddings, funerals, those kind of occasions. And then you should probably get for academic listeners, you should probably get a sport coat, maybe even two sport coats, for when you need them.

1:02:19.1 DG: And those, those I think flatter your frame more than casual wear, and will still look appropriate in a classroom. But if you're the kind of person that really enjoys wearing tailored clothing, then and make that second suit like, a mohair wool blend or a linen or something that you can wear out for social occasions, and it will just be a fun thing. And nowadays, Spier & MacKay suits, for example are, I wanna say like $400. So not inexpensive, but you know, it's probably not gonna make a huge difference in your tax bracket. It's something that you can buy and wear for many years, and especially now we're looking at the holidays. It's something you wear for holiday parties, and it's just something to kind of spruce up life.

1:03:13.4 SC: Well, I actually really appreciate that little digression because, I do think that there's a whole bunch of people who probably think of dressing up as a duty or a chore. And you're saying that implicitly you should take joy in it, which is almost always good advice. I actually was at an event just last week when I had to fly somewhere and I had to dress nicely in a suit in fact. And I didn't have time to change before coming back on the airplane. And I gotta say that, I kind of felt like I was looking good for traveling on an airplane where usually I dress like a slob, but you can actually, no matter what your everyday wardrobe is, get some pleasure out of that if you take the right attitude toward it.

1:03:57.4 DG: Yeah, I think of it just as a private pleasure. It's just really nice. It feels good to wear something that makes you feel cool and great, you know what I mean? Just, it's a very basic thing, and that's how I feel. Again, no one has to take interest in it, but if you do, it's really enjoyable. If tailored clothing feels too formal for your lifestyle, you can do that in other ways. You can do that depending on your vocation, depending on your environment, your age. You can do that with field jackets, trucker jackets, if you're an academic, you might be able to do the, like the barber jacket kind of thing. I think that still looks fairly at home on many campuses. Whatever that garment is for you, you can find it and it will feel good. It can just be a way to have some, a routine that you enjoy in the morning and you'll walk around. And I mean, not to sound vain, but you'll like how you look in the reflection when you pass by store windows, that's all. Yeah. There are worse things to be into. So.

1:05:05.9 SC: Did You ever see a TV show called Instinct, starring Alan Cumming?

1:05:10.2 DG: No.

1:05:11.7 SC: This Is from just a few years ago. But Alan Cumming plays a university professor actually, who, it's a police procedural, so he's consulting for the police, but his character on that show was, in my opinion, the best dressed person I've ever seen on TV. And what, really struck me was not only did he wear nice suits, but he would have these exquisite color and pattern combinations. And I have no idea how it was done. Obviously it was not Alan Cumming's choice. There's people who are dressing him, but am I wrong to think that that's probably another level of intimidation that people go through if they're not used to doing this? A fear of either being too matchy and just wearing the same color and looking like you're at the senior prom or having clashing colors or something like that. Is this something that can be learned or you just have the instinct or you don't.

1:06:04.0 DG: No, you, absolutely, it's a skill like anything else that you learn it. And it's absolutely true that in the beginning, you'll probably do some things wrong, but you end up learning and it's enjoyable along the way. I mean, as you knowed with students, you encourage them to speak up and, and engage in discourse. It's with any skill, you just, you practice and you get better at it. The only thing I would say is that there's, I've, have you heard of the Spotlight Effect? I've mentioned this a few times on Twitter.

1:06:36.1 SC: Yeah, I have, go ahead. But explain it to people.

1:06:41.0 DG: So the Spotlight Effect was a famous psychology study where they told a group of undergrads to, undergrads would get paid, or I think they got, they were supposed to get paid to arrive at some classroom for some study. And they told everybody to arrive at a certain classroom except for one person who they gave the wrong location. And when this person arrived at the wrong location, they said, oh, the location was changed at the last minute. You have to rush over to this new location, but before you go, you have to put on this t-shirt. And the t-shirt had a big print of Barry Manilow's face. And in the academic paper, the authors made a big point to say that Barry Manilow was considered very uncool at the time, which I thought is a hilarious insult to Barry Manilow.

[laughter]

1:07:31.3 DG: So the student puts on this Barry Manilow t-shirt runs across the hall or down, different buildings gets to the classroom and opens the door and the classroom has been arranged so that all the other students who had already arrived are facing this person who has just opened the door. And so imagine being the student, you open the door, you see all these students looking at you, you go try to find a seat, you're shuffling around, then you've already embarrassed, you're making this noise, you sit down, you unzip your backpack. And then soon after, the person in the class that's leading the study says, oh, I think you've arrived too late. Unfortunately you're gonna have to leave. And, we'll try to compensate you in some other way.

1:08:18.6 DG: So then you gotta like, pick up your stuff, leave, it's like a horrifying experience. Finally get it out of the classroom you probably feel like crap. And then all of a sudden there's another, investigator outside the classroom who says, I'd like to ask you some questions. And they ask you how you're feeling at the time, so and so forth. And one of the questions was, how many people in there do you think noticed your Barry Manilow t-shirt? And they would also ask the students in the classroom, how many of you can say what that person was wearing? And by a huge margin, the person outside overestimated the number of people inside the classroom that noticed what they're wearing. And so the term spotlight effect was our tendency to think essentially kind of like the main character effect.

1:09:09.3 DG: We think we are the main characters of our world and our emotional state. When we are feeling flustered, anxious, we're feeling nervous. We use these feelings as anchors to interpret other people's readings of us. And I think this happens often when you are wearing something new, especially if you're new to dressing, you may be used to wearing whatever it is, shorts or jeans or whatever, and t-shirts, and then all of a sudden you're wearing something nicer and, you might feel a little self-conscious about it. And you go to work and you're already feeling self-conscious and someone says, oh, you look very dressed up today. And your feeling of being, feeling self-conscious is then as an, serves an anchor, where you think, oh, people think I look stupid, or they think I'm trying too hard, or they're noticing me and all these things.

1:10:05.2 DG: I had dinner with, a fashion designer a couple of months ago, who's a woman and who grew up in the South. And I was surprised that this is also true for women. Dressing up in this like casual town. She had noticed, noted that her mom had felt this at certain social situations, when you are dressed more formally or fancier or whatever it is, or even differently from others, you may feel self-conscious. So then when someone comments on your tie, even if they're complimenting you, they're saying something nice about how you look, you feel uncomfortable. And I think that just takes some practice. It's about you, it's about your own self-consciousness. So after a while, you're so used to wearing these clothes, they're just your clothes, you're not self-conscious. And when someone compliments you, it may make your day, you may feel good.

1:11:05.4 DG: Or it just may, even if, you know, it just may not bother you. I think when clothing becomes just like a part of your daily routine and it's private pleasure, that's when I think it's the most fulfilling. And again, yes, everyone stumbles along the way with any skill that they pick up, not just dressing, but it's just kind of rolling with it and enjoying it. Like with any hobby, if you were, I don't know, building trains, you're probably gonna build an ugly train, the first train that you build, but eventually you're gonna build some beautiful trains, and it's just an enjoyable thing to do over the course of your life. And it will always be that at the end. Like, people are gonna look at you and think, oh, that person just wear clothes well, and I can never dress like that. That's where it always ends up.

1:11:56.0 SC: [laughter] Well, I did wanna give you a little bit of a chance 'cause you've mentioned that your own personal expertise is in men's clothing, but you've mentioned women have slightly different challenges. It seems to me that most of what you've said would apply to women's clothing just as well as men. But maybe there's some additional challenges that women have that men don't have to face.

1:12:19.3 DG: Yeah, I definitely think that there are many unique challenges. I mean, I don't comment on women's clothing online because it's not my area. There are people who know much more about it than me. To me, it's sort of like asking someone who studies English to comment on Chinese or something. They're just different languages. So I don't know. I mean, if you ask for one, I'm not a woman. I don't buy women's clothing. So someone who buys women's clothing is going to know like, oh, this was, this flatters, or this doesn't flatter, or this signals this and this signals that. Those are not signals that I know because I don't pay attention to this language. But certainly they face many unique challenges. I'm thinking of a New York Times article that was written, I wanna say about 10 years ago. It came up with a sexual harassment case at UC Berkeley, where a graduate student brought a sexual harassment case against her advisor. And she was called to testify on it, in front of a board. And she had to think how to put together an outfit that was convincing that she would be the person that would be sexually harassed, but also was a reliable voice. I mean, there are all these like, crazy considerations.

1:13:34.1 DG: I mean, if someone kind of just Googles the article, they'll find it. It's like this long list of considerations I had never had to consider. And I mean, that's obviously a specific case, but just women face unique challenges than men and therefore their clothes are, intersect with that. And I think that's true for everybody, everyone has like their own kind of unique circumstances. So that's partly the reason why I don't comment on women's wear because I don't have that background or experience and to me it's just a different language.

1:14:13.7 SC: Yeah. And, that is perfectly fair. So for the last question then I wanted to bring up another Twitter controversy. This is an extremely minor one, but someone posted a picture of, someone wearing what looked to me like a perfectly good tie and a perfectly good knot. And you, disagreed that this was a good tie knot. I think this is the first time that you've given advice that like hit me where it hurt. I'm like, oh no, I'm that guy dressing badly according to Derek. And you argued for a slightly askew tie knot, and the justification was that we should look really good, but not like we're trying too hard to look good. And I don't even know if you realize, but this was quote tweeted by some philosophers and they got into an argument about whether or not that is a good way to go through life. Looking like we don't try too much. I mean, say more about why our ties should be just slightly asymmetrical.

1:15:15.2 DG: So there are many, there are many ways, again, I think of there are many ways to think of aesthetics. So, a sociological view, so we're talking, a four-in-hand is what you're referring to. A four-in-hand is a slightly asymmetrical knot where one side of the knot is straighter than the other side. And this is different from the more popular half Windsor or full Windsor even, where the two sides of the knot are symmetrical. I'm gonna say something that I think is just a sociological observation. I'm not making a, it's not my own personal value judgment, but I'm just making a sociological observation. The four-in-hand conforms to notions again of capital G, capital T Good Taste because it was often the knot used by people who went through private schools and had to wear a certain uniform and often used by people who were like in elite classes essentially.

1:16:25.4 DG: So the four-in-hand was just considered more of a "good taste knot" again in a sociological sense. And that's why it's often favored by people who are obsessed with good taste. The other thing in terms of like how it looks is that I think the four-in-hand is better because it's a smaller knot, it depends the size of the knot depends on the tie, how the tie was cut, the interlining that was used inside and the shell fabric. These are all kind of like elements that play. But generally speaking, the same tie will look thick. The same tie will tie a thicker knot if you use a half Windsor or a full Windsor than a four-in-hand because you're wrapping it the way you wrap the knot together. And I think a smaller knot looks better because it just becomes less of like this big thing under your chin.

1:17:20.3 DG: That's the other thing. But there's also this idea of a slightly askew knot conveys, in my opinion, also this kind of casual nonchalant naturalness to it where things don't look perfect. It's sort of the same reason why if you're still, if you're and I wear pocket squares, it's not value judgment. But if you're, if you're one of those guys that still wears a pocket square, to me it looks better if you just stuff it in rather than if you like go through these like origami, like folds and you always, I think you always look best if the outfit looks like this is just how you happen to look versus I put a ton of effort into this thing, partly because it looks a little bit more natural. And then I think naturalness looks good. It's sort of like the same with skateboarding or whatever it is.

1:18:10.0 DG: Any skill that you exhibit when it looks a little bit more natural, it's impressive. And then also in dress, it suggests to the viewer that I could look better if I put in more effort, but this is just my disheveled look. Like this is just like me throwing stuff together. And when you look at kind of like really well-dressed men in the past, they often exhibit this kind of character where the clothes highlight the person and it doesn't, you don't end up being just the thing that lifts the clothes through the room. The clothes don't speak louder than you. The clothes support you as the person you end up just looking as natural and comfortable as can be. And I think the slightly askew knot the, kind of like stuffed in pocket square, if you're still the kind of guy that wears pocket squares, if the tailoring is beautiful and that to me is where all the effort comes at the front.

1:19:04.5 DG: You learn what colors go together, what textures go together, what fabrics go together. You figure out what fits, you figure out what silhouettes look beautiful. If you happen to use custom tailors, you go to good custom tailors, not bad custom tailors. You do all the work up front and then in the morning you just throw stuff on. And when you kind of like meet very beautifully dressed people, in my view, it just looks so natural. It just is like they threw something on, they didn't think too hard about it and it just looks beautiful in that sense versus when everything is so perfect, it almost gives up the game. Yeah, it just doesn't, it doesn't come off the same way to me. But...

1:19:53.7 SC: Go ahead.

1:19:55.8 DG: To me it's a minor thing. It's a minor thing if someone wants to wear a half Windsor or a, if you're wearing beautiful tailoring, it's beautiful tailoring whether you wear half Windsor or four knot, that's a, such a trivial, small detail. I would never say that someone's badly dressed 'cause they're wearing a half Windsor.

1:20:09.1 SC: Well, I think you've changed my life here. I love the philosophy of the slightly imperfect nonchalance. That's something we can all aim for. So, Derek, thanks so much for being on the Mindscape podcast.

1:20:20.9 DG: Thanks so much for having me.

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