Sneakers With Tailoring: Yes, No, Maybe?

[breakaway01]

What, do I wear sweatpants with Crocs or something like that? Your questions were ridiculous. And entirely irrelevant. But if it somehow helps you...no, I do not wear sweatpants with Crocs.

Okay so then you do have some normative rules of your own. It might be as simple as “one shouldn’t wear sweatpants with crocs.” From where did you derive that rule? Other people in today’s society do wear that combo so an appeal to descriptive rules is insufficient. Why exactly do you find that combination inappropriate? I think this is highly relevant because if you want to attack DWW’s “rules” and his justification for them, it is important to examine your own rules and your own justification for them.

 

[FlyingHorker]

Well... yeah. That is partly my point. Why, for people outside of these sociocultural contexts, are rules of dress developed within them, in any way to be seen as foundational?



I am a professor of sociology. I don't normally put my professorial hat on here. Normally I just watch as others do their bit, but sometimes you have to talk about class and race and other things. Apparently this seems to embarrass some people, especially Americans, who seem to believe that by identifying ond talking about social division you conjure it into existance. I didn't invent society or class, and I am not responsible for social divisions (whether in HIgh School or anywhere else), but I am interested in them and their relationship to style. You may not be and that's fine. The accusation of snobbishness is particularly bizarre, because I am literally arguing *against* snobbishness, so I am really not sure how you came up with that one.

Anyway, I'm off the bed. Tomorrow I will be back to not-very-amusing gnomic one-liners and you will be safe from sociology.

Ok, I took it personally and made the accusation of snobbishness and condescension out of lashing out, that was my bad.

I had to think about this one. This won't be organized, just my thought process.

The simplest answer to the question posed, is the "foundations" are a practical guide on where to start for CM, hence a lot of the talk in this thread. The cliche of knowing the rules, so you can break them.

To go deeper with class and race, I'm the farthest thing from a british aristocrat. My parents came from India, which was colonized by the British. In a sense, there is a deep irony from me wearing this clothing. I'm sure someone could argue that my mind is 'colonized' itself and I'm insecure or something and aspiring to be something I'm not.

I feel far enough removed from that context to where I feel I can reappropriate CM clothing. A similiar idea to separating art from the artist. It will be obvious to anyone who sees me that I have 0 connection to that sociocultural context...which is exactly why I feel I can do it.

To the other post, I can definitely understand the revulsion to a particular aesthetic due to particular experiences, background, politics, etc. Smell memory alone is very powerful, and combine smelly tweeds with asshole individuals, and I'd probably never want to look at CM again. I had similiar connotations to tweeds and corduroy growing up. Somewhere along the way, I shed them and now enjoy their aesthetics.

I see you did something similiar, but seemingly dropped it when it became 'cosplay'? To me, that word lost all meaning, I've tossed it away with words such as 'Karen' and 'Hipster'. Cosplay as a descriptor has become so overused that nothing and everything is cosplay.

At it's most basic, I simply enjoy and find a lot of this clothing fun. Bonus that I can wear it to most places.

 

[emptym]

... I come from that culture and it's miserable, it's cruel, it's not admirable and it's not worth emulating. Trying to detach rules about clothes from this sociocultural system means you've already decided to ignore a whole lot about the purpose of those rules, so what makes them so sacred? For me, I guess I could 'reclaim' them in some weird perversion of identity politics, and indeed I tried that in an ironic way for a few years, which worked only because I was now in Canada and no-one dressed like that...

Reminds me of Ricoeur's hermeneutics of suspicion, which is marked by rejection. I'm all about that recovery or reclamation stage, w/ some irony, but mostly sincerity. You could truly reclaim CM, recover it, redeem it. The rejection reminds me of this old comic:

... I like oxfords, because I think oxfords have better stylistic choices...

We've now moved from shoes as objects to shoes as subjects.

...Tassel loafers are just cool things to me, not something associated with politics...

So, shoes as objects, eh?

...I might add that if there is no place in that outfit for those shoes, then the shoes themselves -- especially if they have a damn rubber sole! -- are such a niche item that it is hard to imagine justifying them as a useful part of any wardrobe.

They'd go great with all kinds of suits, particularly flannel, tweed, corduroy.

...The whole aesthetic is unmoored. It's nothing more than 90s business casual with random designs that shoe salesmen pitch nowadays because they need to compete with sneakers.
View attachment 1682562

It's definitely moored, as you mentioned, in the 90s. If only it was more moored there...

 

[JohnMRobie]

If Yeossal offered them, then you could get the whole outfit at a one-stop shop!

In fairness - I doubt those chinos from Ambrosi will look super dated any time soon. They may not be as popular down the line or have as many people trying to replicate their style but there’s nothing new about Neapolitan trousers (those aren’t ghurka trousers, that’s just Ambrosi’s signature extended waistband) and their family has been making trousers for 4 or 5 generations.

 

[radicaldog]

Why the hell would you ever wear thick heavy workwear to protect your legs and then think wearing delicate feminine shoes without socks can in any way be a coherent look???

This shows how historical references can misfire. The counterculture movement of the 60s won big time (on superficial matters) and by now most jeans are a completely vanilla, basic item. They can be worn without evoking cowboys or anything like that, just like chinos can be worn without evoking the army, and so on. The lesson here is that the meaning of clothes does change over time. Maybe if the multicoloured-oxfords-with-tight-chinos brigade succeeds in imposing their dapper cubicle farmer aesthetic (fat chance), in fifty years we will see that look as coherent. But for the time being it isn't.

Also, I think your exclamation and question mark keys are sticky.

 

[radicaldog]

Conversely, if my jeans cost 500 dollars and models wear them, pairing them with some suede oxfords wouldn't seem discordant to me.

This idea that price has anything to do with formality is even more bizarre than the idea that elegance has anything to do with formality.

in effect, my viewpoint is that if there is wiggle room to casualize an outfit, there is wiggle room to formalize an outfit.

I'm sorry to have to repeat myself, but this is just not how what we (used to?) call CM evolved. You can wear a fuzzy wool tie with a business suit but you can't wear a fancy woven silk micro-pattern with tweed and flannels. The whole of CM is a casualisation of earlier norms--that has been the direction of travel for over a century now. If you're talking about a different aesthetic, then sure.

 

[apShepard]

#

In fairness - I doubt those chinos from Ambrosi will look super dated any time soon. They may not be as popular down the line or have as many people trying to replicate their style but there’s nothing new about Neapolitan trousers (those aren’t ghurka trousers, that’s just Ambrosi’s signature extended waistband) and their family has been making trousers for 4 or 5 generations.

My take is that it's not the trousers really. It's the look as a whole, the sockless string loafers and then tucking in a polo for no aparent reason other than to show of your cool expensive pants.

 

[acapaca]

Okay so then you do have some normative rules of your own. It might be as simple as “one shouldn’t wear sweatpants with crocs.” From where did you derive that rule? Other people in today’s society do wear that combo so an appeal to descriptive rules is insufficient. Why exactly do you find that combination inappropriate? I think this is highly relevant because if you want to attack DWW’s “rules” and his justification for them, it is important to examine your own rules and your own justification for them.

I think everyone who dresses with any sort of intention in the least has 'normative rules' of their own, if you want to put it that way. I don't think that's saying anything profound. It's trivial, it's self-evident, it's meaningless.

Now, where those sensibilities derive from is entirely meaningful, which is exactly my point. I don't know anyone, even the ones on this forum with the loudest voices and narrowest range, who dress from sheer academic principles and without any social sensitivity. We all pay attention to what is going on around us. It's just that some of us pay better attention than others.

To observe that some number of others dress in ways that we find personally distasteful is precisely to observe that not everyone dresses in the same way. Again, far from profound. Asking why anyone does not imitate the worst examples they see, if anything truly goes, is to show that this entire conversation is whooshing over your head. Nobody, and I mean nobody, is arguing for that, or ever would.

 

[JFWR]

These are very nice chinos. They’re cut more like trousers - You’d mentioned thinking it would work with chinos that are “indistinguishable” from another type of dress trouser. Because you seem concerned with price/quality of the chinos in the equation, these are made by Ambrosi. One of the better RTW trouser makers in the world. This outfit would be ruined by pairing oxfords with it. View attachment 1682568

Add a sports coat and socks and I don't see why oxfords would look inappropriate here. I don't see the discordance at all.

 

[JFWR]

This idea that price has anything to do with formality is even more bizarre than the idea that elegance has anything to do with formality.



I'm sorry to have to repeat myself, but this is just not how what we (used to?) call CM evolved. You can wear a fuzzy wool tie with a business suit but you can't wear a fancy woven silk micro-pattern with tweed and flannels. The whole of CM is a casualisation of earlier norms--that has been the direction of travel for over a century now. If you're talking about a different aesthetic, then sure.

Okay. If you really think we can only dress down CM, then we disagree. I don't see why you can't dress up an outfit if you can dress down.

I also was using the price/model thing as an explanation of just this: there are casual jeans, regular jeans, and dressier jeans. I think that is reasonable to believe.

 

[dieworkwear]

The horror of this outfit looks like a geological stratum of clothing formality

 

[mjs]

Add a sports coat and socks and I don't see why oxfords would look inappropriate here. I don't see the discordance at all.

They would look inappropriate for the same reason a tuxedo jacket would, they are, by convention, more formal than the rest of the outfit so they are incongruent.

In a harmonious or coherent outfit there are symmetry relationships between the different parts, especially in terms of formality and color. By convention, less-formal shoes can break the formality symmetry in a good way, but more formal shoes can't.

There is nothing intrinsically better or worse about one style of shoes or another, or one style of jacket or trousers than another, there are just social conventions about them. If we are going to accept these conventions, for example against wearing sweat pants with a tuxedo to a function, or a tuxedo shirt with shorts to the beach, or a cummerbund with a business suit to the office, then we're not in a strong position to pick and choose just because we happen to really really like oxford shoes.

 

[yorkshire pud]

This shows how historical references can misfire. The counterculture movement of the 60s won big time (on superficial matters) and by now most jeans are a completely vanilla, basic item. They can be worn without evoking cowboys or anything like that, just like chinos can be worn without evoking the army, and so on. The lesson here is that the meaning of clothes does change over time. Maybe if the multicoloured-oxfords-with-tight-chinos brigade succeeds in imposing their dapper cubicle farmer aesthetic (fat chance), in fifty years we will see that look as coherent. But for the time being it isn't.

Also, I think your exclamation and question mark keys are sticky.

Thanks, I don't realise I'm doing it, force of habit unfortunately (!!!!!)

Don't get me wrong, I don't favour Oxfords with anything (Not really my style) and I might only wear them once or twice a year with a suit. However I feel confident I can defend the position that it's not an enforceable "rule" and it's fine for people to wear them casually.

I think the historical context of Jeans and Chinos is still very relevant for many reasons, in fact almost everything we accept as "classic menswear" is derived from Military or Practical work clothing (particularly the textiles used)

I think Chinos/Oxfords (even distasteful ones) actually look more coherent than Jeans/Mankles/Loafers ?

I would go as far as saying Loafers do not work with any masculine outfits, without socks they look downright effeminate.

I'm not really a "shoe guy" either, I like the ones I have but I don't have them specifically made or anything (I just have the essentials minus the slip on's ?)

 

[stdavidshead]

I don’t remember who here first made the comparison between clothing and language, but the more I think about it, the more fitting the comparison seems.

I have an Italian friend who hates the neologism “il weekend”. So far as I can tell, he feels this way not because he’s a jingo or a purist, but simply because there’s already an Italian word with the same meaning and connotation. Said differently, there’s a better choice if you’re speaking Italian. This position doesn’t logically imply that Italian is superior to English or that all neologisms are in poor taste.

Both sneakers with suits and oxfords with jeans seem like “il weekend”. There’s a better choice. You don’t have to accept that classic menswear is dead in order to think so.

 

[breakaway01]

I think everyone who dresses with any sort of intention in the least has 'normative rules' of their own, if you want to put it that way. I don't think that's saying anything profound. It's trivial, it's self-evident, it's meaningless.

Now, where those sensibilities derive from is entirely meaningful, which is exactly my point. I don't know anyone, even the ones on this forum with the loudest voices and narrowest range, who dress from sheer academic principles and without any social sensitivity. We all pay attention to what is going on around us. It's just that some of us pay better attention than others.

To observe that some number of others dress in ways that we find personally distasteful is precisely to observe that not everyone dresses in the same way. Again, far from profound. Asking why anyone does not imitate the worst examples they see, if anything truly goes, is to show that this entire conversation is whooshing over your head. Nobody, and I mean nobody, is arguing for that, or ever would.

Ok this is good. But how do you decide what are “the worst examples” and what are the best examples if you refuse to go along with ideas of tradition and history, which is what DWW I think is advocating for (and I do too, at least to some extent). If it’s all about what you observe around you, how do you assign value to one outfit versus another? Do you, for example, attach more value to how some people dress over others? I think this is a common method. How do you decide who these people are, and is this so different from DWW pointing out that there are people he admires? You think this is not profound — and I acknowledge that we’re just talking about clothes and shoes— so then why so much vitriol towards some of these normative rules?