Dressing up for holiday parties might delight some, but instills mad fear in others.Getty Images
In my closet, I have a yellow waistcoat, a beautiful four-pocket, worsted number with gold-silk backing and mustard-coloured buttons carved with the face of a wolf. It was a present from my wife. I wear it to parties, and, mostly, at Christmas – if I'm slim enough. A waistcoat may or may not be fashionable, but it's always classic and dressy in the English tradition, and therefore stylish, and perfect for the holiday season; that generous but often trying time of year when we perform ancient pagan rituals such as dressing up to be with one another.
But the fact that I wear a waistcoat doesn't mean that I do it readily. It is capable of making me look, and feel, like a fat lemon.
In other words, there are really only two genuine reactions to an invitation's instruction to "Dress: Festive!" The first is unbridled enthusiasm. A woman I know – who doesn't want to be named, so fraught is the subject – falls into this category. "There's so very, very few chances to get dressed up – and I come from the era when you got dressed up for an airplane trip and for church."
The second and more problematic response is despair. Behold the melancholy of the reluctant party dresser.
He is widely misunderstood. Mr. Reluctant Dresser is not an angry sociopath, though he can behave like one. "You can tell if someone is a reluctant dresser the moment they come out of the fitting room, by the way they look at themselves and by their posture," Melissa Austria, the owner of GotStyle in Toronto, says.
Mr. Reluctant Dresser wants to go to the party, but wearing "fancy" clothes has always made him feel uncomfortable and self-conscious. And so he goes to the party wearing the comforting but ramshackle sweater and jeans he wears to work, whereupon people really do stare at his stubborn schlubbiness and his self-consciousness becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
According to Ms. Austria, he tends not to be a millennial – they like to dress up, in general, "because they don't want to dress like their dads." He could be a boomer, but boomers suffer more from outfit dinosaurification than from an allergy to finery. He is far more likely to be a Generation Xer. "They grew up with the TV show Friends, which was all about boxy untucked shirts and baggy jeans," Austria observes.
In the space of his own lifetime, Gen X-man has watched men's going-out clothes whiplash from the billowing boxy double-breastedness of the late-Mulroney era to the preshrunk PeeWee suit and the prostate-revealing skinny jean. No wonder he has over-retreated into ill-fitting looseness. "The guys who are reluctant to dress up are often wearing clothes that don't fit them properly, or they're wearing clothes that are casual and loose," Austria says. "Fit is still the biggest culprit."
But the times and textiles have changed. It is now possible to be comfortable in slightly tighter, infinitely better-fitting going-out clothes, no matter one's body shape. But you have to admit your fragility and get help – and not from your spouse or your lover or anyone else with whom you have a psychologically complex relationship. You have to find a good, open-minded, generous haberdasher.
You won't find such a person in a department store, if you can find any sales person at all. What you need is a small, hip (but not ultrahip) men's clothing store displaying in its windows garments ever so slightly more daring than you think you would wear. Then you need to befriend the owner and his/her salespeople. You need to do this more than two days before the big party you have to attend.
Be candid, as you would to a psychiatrist. Explain how you would like to dress well for the holiday party season, but are afraid of tightness; how you need to upgrade, but don't want to commit the mortal sins of trying to dress younger or hipper.
Miranda Black, who owns Theodore 1922 in Toronto's Annex neighbourhood, believes that becoming a more stylish dresser is a five-year project, but that one can start small. "If you're only comfortable in jeans and a sweater, find a sweater that looks great, or add a scarf to it that doesn't make you look like someone who came straight from work."
And the jeans – these are not your father's Levi 501s, sonny boy. No. The new silhouette-trimming narrow-but-not-skinny-cut jeans, such as Paige Transcend Lennox skinny fit soft denim jeans, are made of rayon, cotton, polyester, and spandex, for $265. I was frankly ashamed to be trying them on, because the very idea of spandex in my jeans somehow offends my Anglican sense of sin. Comfort and pleasure?! Begone, Satan! Both Austria and Black say to buy them "superdark and superclean," – that is, in deep navy blue or black, and with no holes or distressing. Then buy a pair of black Chelsea boots for $295, although you might get away with a cool, clean, hybrid sneaker. The ground floor of your style renovation is now complete.
Ah, but the invitation says black tie optional – a confusing term that actually means "at the very least wear a suit." In that case, Mr. Reluctant Dresser, you might buy a tuxedo jacket – one you can wear as bare-minimum formal wear with your dark clean jeans, Chelsea boots, collared white shirt (we're coming to that) and tie (ditto). In the new you-can-be-you world, tuxedo jackets are almost sports coats, and vice versa: The other day I saw a ravishing black-and-navy glen plaid sports jacket in the window at Borgo, a tiny but intelligent men's shop on Cumberland Street in Toronto, that could easily pass for a dinner jacket.
If you wear a tie, it can't be one of your old ones wide enough to diaper an infant. If Mr. Reluctant Dresser is feeling especially zesty, he can accessorize his new jacket and pants with a tie (knit or silk, but not super-narrow), a pocket square (subdued is the new thing, solid colours with coloured trim), or (but not and) a pair of snappy socks. Not wild socks – a trend now so out it could be on Haldol. "The guy who's a late adopter, he's just getting into crazy socks," Austria says. "Men are really slow."
But for a less than black-tie Christmas party, you can't (and needn't) do better than a collared shirt and a well-cut unstructured jacket of flannel jersey. I know, those very words – "unstructured," "flannel," "jersey"– are enough to make Mr. Reluctant Dresser head for a shack in the deep woods. But fear not. Try Blue Industry's black-grey blazer in cotton, viscose and elastane, for $355. "It's feels like you're wearing your favourite sweatshirt," Austria says. You can even wear it with a T-shirt, as long as the T-shirt doesn't bear the logo of a grime band or a soft-drink bottler. If you want something classic, slip on Cicolo 1901's charcoal cashmere glen-plaid blazer in a blend of cotton and the aforementioned elastane. I don't know what elastane is, but it's so comfortable you'll want to invite it over for a beer and a chat. That's $750. Add a De Soto high-collared shirt – checked or patterned or (best of all) flowered in stretch cotton (more elastane!) that doesn't look like it stretches –for $165. Now, you can go anywhere, any time.
We see fancy dress as the garb of the rich and the superficial, as something we to do make onlookers think more highly of us (which in fact they do, according to many scientific studies). We equate dressing up with falsity, with hiding our naked, wanting and (we believe) truer selves. But dressing up is actually just a different form of sincerity. A group of scientists out of California State University at Northridge recently discovered that donning more formal attire than usual makes people think about the big picture, rather than getting lost in nitpicking details. They become less vulnerable to insults and criticism, and are instead more holistic and outgoing. In other words, dressing up for the holiday season may or may not make you feel better about yourself. But it will make you feel more warmly toward others. Which, after all, is the point.
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