- Joined
- Feb 10, 2009
- Messages
- 8,543
- Reaction score
- 30,080
myshoeiswet
Original WAYWT post here
What this looks like: A Druidic Bomber Pilot from a Dystopian Future
The small-dog dog park is packed with exhilarated and miniscule canines. Your own furry best friend is quivering with excitement while coating everything he can reach with urine. You open the gate that leads into the doggie holding cells, preparing for a mad rush into the fray, and bump into a man who’s on his way out – well, really, your dog decides to latch onto the trailing end of his long cardigan, which jerks his neck forward. He makes a sound like “nnnGHRHG” and trips over feet, dogs, and cardigan.
“****,” you say.
“It’s cool,” he says, one hand on his throat, “I’m cool. I’m cool.”
“You sure?” your dogs are now wound together, choking themselves while trying to sniff each other’s butts. You give him a hand up, and he brushes himself off.
“Wow, sorry about that.”
“He must like me, I guess.”
“He must!” You’re glad that he’s taking this so well, but mostly you’re trying to identify the familiar odor that’s filling your nostrils.
“It’s probably because of my job. I’m a baconeer,” he says, reaching for the gate.
“A what?”
“I make bacon. All kinds of bacon.” He lifts the latch.
“Bacon?” Too late, you realize that the park has gone silent.
“Wait!” you say, but the gate swings open, and the howling of ravenous, shin-high canines drowns out the world.
The Goods:
Cardigan: MA_Julius
Shirt: Silent
Pants: Zam Barrett
Boots: Buttero
What were you thinking about when you put this outfit together?
More and more, I want to play around with silhouettes. The MA_Julius cardigan was fun for this; it's a really lovely knit, with raised seams and raw hems, and a nice elongated shape; the really long ends on the front practically reach my feet! I paired it with some more subtle, supporting pieces – Zam Barrett DNA pants for some nice stacking, a cold-dyed Silent tee for a little contrast, and a boot tuck for a little more proportion fuckery.
I've gotten comments about how it looks like I'm wearing a bathrobe; it's amusing, fascinating, and humbling to hear the perspectives of people who aren't invested in fashion.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Syeknom
Original WAYWT post here
What this looks like: Those cool, artsy photos in magazines about stylish urban living that you want to replicate but just can’t.
“What’s with the new pants, dude?”
“I’ve been liberated,” says your friend, “Mentally and physically.”
“Huh?”
“Look at this swish,” he says, walking forward and demonstrating the billowy nature of his pants. “See that? No sweat, no chafing.”
“Are those often concerns?”
“Chafing is always a danger. Proactive management is the best practice.”
“Right, but aren’t you worried about spiders?”
“Spiders?”
“Yeah, nesting in your pants.”
“That...hadn’t crossed my mind. Thank you.”
“Yeah, maybe a spider would crawl in there ‘cause it’s so spacious and give birth, and then you’d have like a billion tiny baby spiders all crawling over your-“
“Thanks. Thanks for that. That’s great.”
“I’m just looking out for you.”
“You’re a horrible person.”
“Have you seen those shows on Animal Planet? I feel like I should get the scalpel ready now.”
“Just stop. I’m trying something new, okay? And it’s comfortable.”
And it ends there. You apologize and tell him he looks nice. You part ways, head back to your place. You relax. Firmly entrenched in front of the television, you crack open a beer and absently scratch the little red bump on the back of your hand.
The Goods:
Cardigan: Stephan Schneider
Shirt: Stephan Schneider
Pants: Yohji Yamamoto
Boots: Maison Martin Margiela
I know this outfit was technically for one of our weekly challenges, but did you learn anything new about your wardrobe? Any new insights about how you'd like to dress? Why do Belgians have such good taste?
Yeah for sure. Although I'm certainly a fan of wearing wide trousers these Yohji ones can prove challenging to wear well. They feel amazing no matter what, but sometimes I look at photos of outfits with them in and reconsider things quickly. Normally I wear them pretty high up (the rise can reach up to my chest!) and cropped, but this is the first time I tried slinging them lower with break. A happy accident of this was discovering how fun a columnar shape can be. Exploring new angles and approaches to one's clothing can open up such interesting and unforeseen directions.
Dressing slouchy and relaxed is something I consciously aim for a lot of them time when dressing outside of work. I feel like trousers are 80% of the battle there. I'm also trying to more actively "let go" and embrace the disheveled, the sloppy and the imperfect.
I am British though, not Belgian despite living here.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sipang
Original WAYWT post here
What this looks like: A Cornet of Frites
“Arithmancy?”
“Yeah.” The worried-looking guy at the bar next to you lifts his beer and finishes half of it. It’s a cozy place, a perfect escape from the sideways rain that’s a trademark of Brussels. “Used to do geomancy too, but my funding got cut off after I won too many games of lawn darts.”
“So, numbers?”
“Yeah. And the occasional necropolis.”
“Sounds cool.”
“It’s not.” His eyes flick to the circle of condensation your glass left on the bar, and you blot it with a coaster.
“Sorry,” you say.
“That’s what I’m talking about,” he says. “I see a circle, I start thinking about astrology and the planets and the burial grounds of the druids. Even the pattern on this thrice-damned sweater makes me think of monoliths.”
“What do you even do with arithmancy? What’s it good for?”
“Stocks, mostly. I guess I could predict an eclipse or two,” he says, slumping over the bar. “Numbers, numbers, numbers. I can’t sleep anymore. Everywhere I look I see divinations and chalk circles and cities of the dead.”
You take a long drink of your trippel, squirming in your soaked jeans.
“Hey,” you say, “how did you stay so dry?”
He looks at you with sad, bloodshot eyes, mumbles “Calculations,” and bursts into tears.
The Goods:
Jacket: Stephan Schneider
Sweater: Stephan Schneider
Pants: Damir Doma
Shoes: Vans
Why Schneider?! (I've been wondering for years now)
I don't really know how to answer because, as shocking as this may sound, I don't wear Schneider stuff that often (admittedly the fit I posted does a pretty poor job at illustrating this). My approach to this whole thing tends to focus on shapes and silhouettes first and foremost; I relate a great deal to things like Yohji's reclaiming of public space through flowing fabrics
or Raf's more forceful early monolithic volumes. Schneider is somewhat peripheral to all that; it fulfills a need for touches of color and patterns here and there to break off walls of blacks, navies and grays. It does it in a more modest, subdued and abstract manner than, say, Dries, which I also like quite a bit but find harder to incorporate.
Bleh
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Shoreman1782
Original WAYWT post here
What this looks like: Every professor you wish you had but didn’t
I tried to write a funny story about this picture, but then I looked in the mirror and was so overcome by inadequacy that I gave up and sat in my closet with the lights off and the door shut for three or four hours. Then I read his response to my question and started hyperventilating. Maybe we don’t have that to-die-for salt ‘n peppa hair, but let’s step our game up. You like knits, right? Shoreman wears knits under knits. Knits that are also jackets. His jeans are probably older than you are, and have sharper fades than your Macklemore’d dome. This is mature, like a Chateau d’Yquem full of snark and swag. You can’t buy that wabi-sabi, kids. You’ll get it when you’re older. Or maybe you won’t. Maybe there’s no hope for any of us.
The Goods:
Jacket: Engineered Garments
Sweater: SNS Herning
Jeans: APC Petit Standard
Socks: White Mountaineering
Boots: Supreme + Padmore and Barnes
You've been on the forum for years and years now. How have the general tastes changed? How have your own tastes changed over the last decade?
I joined the forum in 2004, when I first got a job that didn't provide me with embroidered polos to wear to work. I was looking for advice on business dress, and for the most part I wanted to look older than my 23 years--I thought people would be more likely to believe my bullshit if I wore a tie (which was true). I also have a strain of mixed-up Anglophilia contracted while attending a WASP-y college and spending some time in London. Styleforum was the perfect place to learn why Charles Tyrwhitt was a pretender and how to order REAL Jermyn Street shirts, as well as MTM shirts from Jantzen in Hong Kong for $40 a pop. I think I literally faxed an order to Jantzen from my office in 2005, and got no response but a brown envelope in the mail a month later containing wildly patterned shirts with turnback cuffs that didn't reach my wrist (my fault, not theirs). The WAYWT threads from back then seem absurdly primitive--they were unillustrated lists. On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog wearing sweats and claiming you're in Kiton.
Mixed in with the threads on “proper” dress were threads on the nascent high-end denim scene and on obscure brands like Spruce (pre Wings and Horns) and Engineered Garments. The only expensive denim I'd been exposed to was Diesel, so a brand like Nudie (European, hard to find) seemed impossibly cool. When SF split Streetwear and Denim from Men's Clothing, I began to notice I was posting in the streetwear subforum more, even though the word "streetwear" meant very little to me. I was at that point mostly satisfied with my interview suits and more interested in what was “cool.” I spent my teens rooting through used record stores for nuggets and ordering 7 inches based on one-sentence MRR reviews, so questing for obscure brands because of sketchy SF testimonials felt natural. At the same time, my price sensitivity, and that of the forum, elasticized, as I talked myself into amortizing costs and spending more on a single pair of jeans than I was accustomed to spending on clothing in a year. Slowly the value focus that, to me, characterized early SF ("where to get a cheaper version of an expensive thing," thrift store bragging, etc.) eroded in favor of seasonal cycles of what's new, what's cool, and what's next.
Internet culture was changing on SF and beyond, too, and people's online and real-life selves were merging, something that crystallized for me at one of Mauro's parties at Denim Bar in Northern Virginia, when I had to explain to my girlfriend why we were going to a party at a store and some of the guys there might recognize me and vice versa. Soon after, I was going to tradeshows in New York with Fok and Albert and Natan, reporting back to SF on what we thought was cool and what was next.
Now I arguably dress young for my age. I'm 33 and although I feel maybe most at home in what I'd consider basic grown-up clothing (e.g., a Shetland sweater, oxford button down, and blue jeans or khakis), I also like to wear stuff that makes my wife (the girl I had to explain Mauro's party to) roll her eyes--like fancy sweatpants, Visvim FBT moccs, or an extra-long flannel shirt. The one place the forum has arguably moved more quickly than I have chosen to keep up is in designer clothing--runway show designers like Rick Owens and Raf Simons, and dark artisanal stuff like Carol Christian Poell. There's always been a number of designer-savvy posters on SF--Fok and Fuuma come to mind--but I still can't get over the late 1990s, when lines like Prada and Dolce and Gabbana and Calvin Klein seemed overly glossy, rootless, and removed from real life. It’s really a reaction to that category of industry-endorsed, mega-marketed clothing that brought a lot of us to SF in the first place, as an information-rich alternative to the half-advertising monthly print magazines. I realize my designer fashion allergy is a bias, but there it is. Plus, I'm a sedentary office worker in my 30s; I'll leave the more directional stuff to guys who live the lifestyles that support it. One thing has remained essentially true throughout the time I've been reading and posting on SF, though: we all want to wear cool ****.
Original WAYWT post here
What this looks like: A Druidic Bomber Pilot from a Dystopian Future
The small-dog dog park is packed with exhilarated and miniscule canines. Your own furry best friend is quivering with excitement while coating everything he can reach with urine. You open the gate that leads into the doggie holding cells, preparing for a mad rush into the fray, and bump into a man who’s on his way out – well, really, your dog decides to latch onto the trailing end of his long cardigan, which jerks his neck forward. He makes a sound like “nnnGHRHG” and trips over feet, dogs, and cardigan.
“****,” you say.
“It’s cool,” he says, one hand on his throat, “I’m cool. I’m cool.”
“You sure?” your dogs are now wound together, choking themselves while trying to sniff each other’s butts. You give him a hand up, and he brushes himself off.
“Wow, sorry about that.”
“He must like me, I guess.”
“He must!” You’re glad that he’s taking this so well, but mostly you’re trying to identify the familiar odor that’s filling your nostrils.
“It’s probably because of my job. I’m a baconeer,” he says, reaching for the gate.
“A what?”
“I make bacon. All kinds of bacon.” He lifts the latch.
“Bacon?” Too late, you realize that the park has gone silent.
“Wait!” you say, but the gate swings open, and the howling of ravenous, shin-high canines drowns out the world.
The Goods:
Cardigan: MA_Julius
Shirt: Silent
Pants: Zam Barrett
Boots: Buttero
What were you thinking about when you put this outfit together?
More and more, I want to play around with silhouettes. The MA_Julius cardigan was fun for this; it's a really lovely knit, with raised seams and raw hems, and a nice elongated shape; the really long ends on the front practically reach my feet! I paired it with some more subtle, supporting pieces – Zam Barrett DNA pants for some nice stacking, a cold-dyed Silent tee for a little contrast, and a boot tuck for a little more proportion fuckery.
I've gotten comments about how it looks like I'm wearing a bathrobe; it's amusing, fascinating, and humbling to hear the perspectives of people who aren't invested in fashion.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Syeknom
Original WAYWT post here
What this looks like: Those cool, artsy photos in magazines about stylish urban living that you want to replicate but just can’t.
“What’s with the new pants, dude?”
“I’ve been liberated,” says your friend, “Mentally and physically.”
“Huh?”
“Look at this swish,” he says, walking forward and demonstrating the billowy nature of his pants. “See that? No sweat, no chafing.”
“Are those often concerns?”
“Chafing is always a danger. Proactive management is the best practice.”
“Right, but aren’t you worried about spiders?”
“Spiders?”
“Yeah, nesting in your pants.”
“That...hadn’t crossed my mind. Thank you.”
“Yeah, maybe a spider would crawl in there ‘cause it’s so spacious and give birth, and then you’d have like a billion tiny baby spiders all crawling over your-“
“Thanks. Thanks for that. That’s great.”
“I’m just looking out for you.”
“You’re a horrible person.”
“Have you seen those shows on Animal Planet? I feel like I should get the scalpel ready now.”
“Just stop. I’m trying something new, okay? And it’s comfortable.”
And it ends there. You apologize and tell him he looks nice. You part ways, head back to your place. You relax. Firmly entrenched in front of the television, you crack open a beer and absently scratch the little red bump on the back of your hand.
The Goods:
Cardigan: Stephan Schneider
Shirt: Stephan Schneider
Pants: Yohji Yamamoto
Boots: Maison Martin Margiela
I know this outfit was technically for one of our weekly challenges, but did you learn anything new about your wardrobe? Any new insights about how you'd like to dress? Why do Belgians have such good taste?
Yeah for sure. Although I'm certainly a fan of wearing wide trousers these Yohji ones can prove challenging to wear well. They feel amazing no matter what, but sometimes I look at photos of outfits with them in and reconsider things quickly. Normally I wear them pretty high up (the rise can reach up to my chest!) and cropped, but this is the first time I tried slinging them lower with break. A happy accident of this was discovering how fun a columnar shape can be. Exploring new angles and approaches to one's clothing can open up such interesting and unforeseen directions.
Dressing slouchy and relaxed is something I consciously aim for a lot of them time when dressing outside of work. I feel like trousers are 80% of the battle there. I'm also trying to more actively "let go" and embrace the disheveled, the sloppy and the imperfect.
I am British though, not Belgian despite living here.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sipang
Original WAYWT post here
What this looks like: A Cornet of Frites
“Arithmancy?”
“Yeah.” The worried-looking guy at the bar next to you lifts his beer and finishes half of it. It’s a cozy place, a perfect escape from the sideways rain that’s a trademark of Brussels. “Used to do geomancy too, but my funding got cut off after I won too many games of lawn darts.”
“So, numbers?”
“Yeah. And the occasional necropolis.”
“Sounds cool.”
“It’s not.” His eyes flick to the circle of condensation your glass left on the bar, and you blot it with a coaster.
“Sorry,” you say.
“That’s what I’m talking about,” he says. “I see a circle, I start thinking about astrology and the planets and the burial grounds of the druids. Even the pattern on this thrice-damned sweater makes me think of monoliths.”
“What do you even do with arithmancy? What’s it good for?”
“Stocks, mostly. I guess I could predict an eclipse or two,” he says, slumping over the bar. “Numbers, numbers, numbers. I can’t sleep anymore. Everywhere I look I see divinations and chalk circles and cities of the dead.”
You take a long drink of your trippel, squirming in your soaked jeans.
“Hey,” you say, “how did you stay so dry?”
He looks at you with sad, bloodshot eyes, mumbles “Calculations,” and bursts into tears.
The Goods:
Jacket: Stephan Schneider
Sweater: Stephan Schneider
Pants: Damir Doma
Shoes: Vans
Why Schneider?! (I've been wondering for years now)
I don't really know how to answer because, as shocking as this may sound, I don't wear Schneider stuff that often (admittedly the fit I posted does a pretty poor job at illustrating this). My approach to this whole thing tends to focus on shapes and silhouettes first and foremost; I relate a great deal to things like Yohji's reclaiming of public space through flowing fabrics
Bleh
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Shoreman1782
Original WAYWT post here
What this looks like: Every professor you wish you had but didn’t
I tried to write a funny story about this picture, but then I looked in the mirror and was so overcome by inadequacy that I gave up and sat in my closet with the lights off and the door shut for three or four hours. Then I read his response to my question and started hyperventilating. Maybe we don’t have that to-die-for salt ‘n peppa hair, but let’s step our game up. You like knits, right? Shoreman wears knits under knits. Knits that are also jackets. His jeans are probably older than you are, and have sharper fades than your Macklemore’d dome. This is mature, like a Chateau d’Yquem full of snark and swag. You can’t buy that wabi-sabi, kids. You’ll get it when you’re older. Or maybe you won’t. Maybe there’s no hope for any of us.
The Goods:
Jacket: Engineered Garments
Sweater: SNS Herning
Jeans: APC Petit Standard
Socks: White Mountaineering
Boots: Supreme + Padmore and Barnes
You've been on the forum for years and years now. How have the general tastes changed? How have your own tastes changed over the last decade?
I joined the forum in 2004, when I first got a job that didn't provide me with embroidered polos to wear to work. I was looking for advice on business dress, and for the most part I wanted to look older than my 23 years--I thought people would be more likely to believe my bullshit if I wore a tie (which was true). I also have a strain of mixed-up Anglophilia contracted while attending a WASP-y college and spending some time in London. Styleforum was the perfect place to learn why Charles Tyrwhitt was a pretender and how to order REAL Jermyn Street shirts, as well as MTM shirts from Jantzen in Hong Kong for $40 a pop. I think I literally faxed an order to Jantzen from my office in 2005, and got no response but a brown envelope in the mail a month later containing wildly patterned shirts with turnback cuffs that didn't reach my wrist (my fault, not theirs). The WAYWT threads from back then seem absurdly primitive--they were unillustrated lists. On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog wearing sweats and claiming you're in Kiton.
Mixed in with the threads on “proper” dress were threads on the nascent high-end denim scene and on obscure brands like Spruce (pre Wings and Horns) and Engineered Garments. The only expensive denim I'd been exposed to was Diesel, so a brand like Nudie (European, hard to find) seemed impossibly cool. When SF split Streetwear and Denim from Men's Clothing, I began to notice I was posting in the streetwear subforum more, even though the word "streetwear" meant very little to me. I was at that point mostly satisfied with my interview suits and more interested in what was “cool.” I spent my teens rooting through used record stores for nuggets and ordering 7 inches based on one-sentence MRR reviews, so questing for obscure brands because of sketchy SF testimonials felt natural. At the same time, my price sensitivity, and that of the forum, elasticized, as I talked myself into amortizing costs and spending more on a single pair of jeans than I was accustomed to spending on clothing in a year. Slowly the value focus that, to me, characterized early SF ("where to get a cheaper version of an expensive thing," thrift store bragging, etc.) eroded in favor of seasonal cycles of what's new, what's cool, and what's next.
Internet culture was changing on SF and beyond, too, and people's online and real-life selves were merging, something that crystallized for me at one of Mauro's parties at Denim Bar in Northern Virginia, when I had to explain to my girlfriend why we were going to a party at a store and some of the guys there might recognize me and vice versa. Soon after, I was going to tradeshows in New York with Fok and Albert and Natan, reporting back to SF on what we thought was cool and what was next.
Now I arguably dress young for my age. I'm 33 and although I feel maybe most at home in what I'd consider basic grown-up clothing (e.g., a Shetland sweater, oxford button down, and blue jeans or khakis), I also like to wear stuff that makes my wife (the girl I had to explain Mauro's party to) roll her eyes--like fancy sweatpants, Visvim FBT moccs, or an extra-long flannel shirt. The one place the forum has arguably moved more quickly than I have chosen to keep up is in designer clothing--runway show designers like Rick Owens and Raf Simons, and dark artisanal stuff like Carol Christian Poell. There's always been a number of designer-savvy posters on SF--Fok and Fuuma come to mind--but I still can't get over the late 1990s, when lines like Prada and Dolce and Gabbana and Calvin Klein seemed overly glossy, rootless, and removed from real life. It’s really a reaction to that category of industry-endorsed, mega-marketed clothing that brought a lot of us to SF in the first place, as an information-rich alternative to the half-advertising monthly print magazines. I realize my designer fashion allergy is a bias, but there it is. Plus, I'm a sedentary office worker in my 30s; I'll leave the more directional stuff to guys who live the lifestyles that support it. One thing has remained essentially true throughout the time I've been reading and posting on SF, though: we all want to wear cool ****.
