How to make your suit look worse
Getting married is the most legally significant thing you can do in life, other than die. It makes sense, then, that the suit - once the epitome of style - is nowadays only reserved for such occasions.
As such, our relationship with dressing well has become a little strained. Most people on the street see wearing a suit as a bit of a chore, akin to being forced to wear someone else’s clothes and pretend to have a good time.
There are approximately thirty million articles (probably, I got bored counting) on how to dress better and make a suit look great, catered towards the seemingly select few who actually give more than a singular sausage about looking good.
However, I’m here to give the people what they want. Maybe you don’t want to stand out for all the right reasons? What if you actually quite like blending in with everyone else?
So, if you have a wedding coming up or a funeral to attend, here are my top tips on how to make your suit look rubbish and fit in with everyone else around you.
Fit doesn’t matter
Let’s begin at the source. You’re buying a suit off the peg, it is imperative that you correlate the amount of money you spend with the amount of time you spend considering it.
Therefore, the cheaper the suit, the less time you should take doing wildly unnecessary things like ‘trying it on’. Simply lay the jacket over your torso and ask your disinterested partner for their thoughts - if you’ve planned ahead and displayed the correct amount of apathy towards buying the suit in the first place, they’ll be annoyed enough to tell you that it looks fine without even paying attention.
Of course, you could try it on at home, but returns are a bit too easy if anything.
Ideally, when the day comes, you want the sleeves to be long enough to dip into your food, the waist to be too tight to fasten without considerable strain, and the trousers to have a healthy amount of bunching around the ankle.
If the trousers fit a bit too well, you can always push them downwards, achieving the ideal sagging around the rump and ensuring your shirt becomes immediately untucked.
The fact that you can have suit alterations done inexpensively at your local dry cleaners simply reeks of convenience. If you’ve got a board meeting to get to, or a parliament to run, I wouldn’t bother.
Bowed chest, long sleeves, tight waist, and about to get mowed down by a tram. Perfect style.
Don’t give a shirt
Shirts originally were classed as underwear, so why treat them with any more consideration than your pants?
Just like the body-hugging budgie-smugglers that you wear beneath your trousers, the buttoned shirt that you choose to wear with your suit should be fitted - and when I say fitted, I mean tight. Those buttons had better be praying for their lives. Extra points if the tension around the chest area displays a flash of skin and hair.
Speaking of buttons, there are different rules regarding which ones you should do up and which are to be left unbuttoned, but what is this, 1950? Rules are there to be broken, so why not reject these widely-recognised and easily-Googled rules and do the complete opposite: fasten every button on your jacket and waistcoat to fully box yourself in, but most importantly, always keep the top button of your shirt undone, even when you’re wearing a tie.
The easiest way to achieve this louche look is to buy a shirt which is too small, so any attempt at doing the top button up results in suffocation. Nothing says style like self-preservation!
Tie? Die!
Being forced to wear a tie is one of the greatest injustices of the modern world. They’re instruments of torture, sartorial suffocation, and are only available in blue and red. Sometimes they’ve got dots on.
You’ll find that most of your contemporaries these days don’t bother wearing one, so neither should you. Let your chest hair do the talking and leave any creative expressions in the past where they belong.
Regardless, you will encounter circumstances where ties must be worn. It’s customary at this point to voice your issues with this huge inconvenience with whoever is close by.
Ideally, the tie should clash with any other colour you’re wearing and, if you must be creative, should have a matching pocket square. Particular emphasis should be placed on having part of the tie poke out from underneath the back of the collar.
As for how to tie it, it really doesn’t matter as long as the knot is massive, and the end of the tie is a good few inches away from your waistband in either direction.
Don’t forget to ignore your shoes
Look around you: for all that talk about shoes being the most important part of a person’s outfit, why is it that no one seems to be wearing good ones?
Wearing nice shoes is the quickest way to get noticed, so if you’re looking to create an underwhelming ensemble to fit in with the people around you, you’d best pick a pair of shoes that wouldn’t be out of place in a call centre.
Don’t waste your time on good materials or build quality, as this could easily garner compliments from other human beings. Instead, walk into TK Maxx with your eyes closed and pick out the shoes which feel the stiffest when handled.
Versatility in footwear is very important, especially when you’re spending upwards of £40, so opt for an anaemic tan colour which will work with nothing and everything at the same time.
As is the case with your suit, the issues of fit also extend to shoes. You either want them to be baggy enough around the heel to sound like flip flops, or so excruciatingly tight that the outline of your toes are visible.
You’re a busy man-about-town, so your complete inability to fathom how to tie laces is understandable. There is a veritable plethora of square-toed slip-ons out there which scream success - but not too much.
Whichever style you go for, it isn’t necessary any more to polish your shoes, especially since Kiwi halted production. In lieu of finding better alternatives, let your shoes age gracefully by neglecting them instead. If there’s one thing people love, it’s the musk of a man who wears ill-fitting non-breathable materials on their feet all day.
The ideal shoe for work and play - just be sure to buy two of them.
Sock it to ‘em
Socks! You forgot about socks, didn’t you? Thankfully, so did everyone else.
Honestly, at this point, you can do what you like. Odd socks? You’re so zany! Novelty designs? Such humour! Holes in the toes? Who cares!
If you’re at all worried about length (who isn’t?), you want your socks to be short enough to show off your hairy shins when sat in a cross-legged position.
Not hairy enough for our liking, but a solid choice in terms of quirkiness and colour
As you can see, the art of looking as bad as everyone else isn’t as easy as it seems; some would say it’s actually much more difficult.
Wearing clothes poorly is a frame of mind. So, next time you’re considering putting effort into wearing your suit, remember: the allied forces didn’t wear suits when they stormed the beaches of Normandy, so no-one has the right to tell you what to wear.
