Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 9, 1995 TAG: 9504070022
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MATT CHITTUM
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
If I'd felt like it, I would have put them straight on something. I'd have given them my theory on men's fashion.
I'd have told them men's clothing and fashion are only vaguely related. Distant cousins - maybe five or six times removed - at best.
Fashion is about this year, this season, this minute. Real men's apparel, like the blue suit, the tweed jacket, the oxford shirt, doesn't change much.
Here's my theory: Traditional men's clothing is based on something like a genetic code, a sort of DNA of duds, and when you fiddle with it, you get mutations.
Like, for instance, a classic blue silk tie with a conservative red and white diagonal pattern becomes the double-knit double-wide fruit-stripe ties my dad wore to church when I was a kid. Zip yourself into some high-buff shoe-boots from Thom McAn, and you're ready to pass the plate in style.
But perhaps the greatest mistake ever of fashion engineering was the leisure suit - the Edsel of men's attire.
I got my one and only leisure suit when I was 10.
My mom dragged me to the Miller & Rhoads at Roanoke-Salem Plaza, locked me in a dressing room and wouldn't let me come out until I'd put it on.
It was a pasty-looking mint-green. I think it had about 37 buttons up the front, flaps on the pockets, and was cut from a vile man-made substance that, if you touched it while your skin was dry, gave you the same loathsome, recoiling sensation as chewing on tin foil.
To complete the look, she bought me a 100 percent polyester shirt with mandolins and lutes on it and a collar big enough to tuck into my mint-green pants.
On Easter Sunday, she hauled me out onto the lawn before church and made me pose for the camera. In the picture she took, now thankfully lost, I look like I'm trying desperately to somehow wear the suit without touching it. (I always get dry skin in the spring.)
Just to make sure this polyester behemoth will never be the curse of another young man, I did some deep cover investigative reporting at some of the more respectable men's clothiers in downtown Roanoke.
I asked Jim Fox, who has worked at Davidsons on Jefferson Street for 44 years, if he had any leisure suits in stock.
His mouth broadened to a big grin.
"That's a good one," he said. "No, but if we did, we'd be nuts."
Fox agrees with my theory on apparel mutation.
"Don't forget the Nehru jacket," he added.
He said Davidsons carried both leisure suits and the dreaded Nehru - when they were in.
A similar query at Mitchell Clothing on Church Avenue drew only a steely-eyed "No" from Bill Evans, a sales associate and, ahem, graduate of the Barbizon School of Modeling.
Apparently they take men's attire a little more seriously at Mitchell - and at the Barbizon School.
Back to my theory: Bruce Young, manager at the downtown Davidsons, says I'm actually not too far off the mark. Traditional men's clothing is all about showing respect for whoever it is you're going to see, he says. The leisure suit, a casual garment, was not supposed to be worn in some settings.
Its demise, Young says, was the result of abuse: Probably some addle-brained bank executive decided it was a good idea to go to a board meeting in a peach-colored polyester ensemble with lapels certain flightless birds would envy.
But, thankfully, some things never change.
Here's a case in point, a bit of a Cinderella story:
About 10 years ago, I decided I needed a pair of black wingtip shoes.
I found a pair in my size at a Roanoke thrift store and picked them up for a measley $2.50.
At first my girlfriend's younger brother, Luke, got more use out of them than I did. He wore them, with a rented tux, to two straight high school proms.
Eight years later, I married his sister in those wingtips - and a rented tux.
Matt Chittum is an editorial assistant and night police reporter who is proud - and grateful - that his mother no longer dresses him.
by CNB