Workday Blues: The Bleu de Travail

Confessions of a clothes horse

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I think inordinately about clothes. It’s a vice that has come on so gradually it would be hard to pinpoint a precise beginning, though it had certainly set in by the summer before my senior year of college, when my friend Peter and I would amble through J. Crew and swoon over, of all things, brown cotton suits, as if two twenty-year-olds living in Western North Carolina and working odd hours as busboys in casual dining restaurants would ever have occasion to wear such a thing. I remember sitting in Peter’s basement apartment, with the little ground-level window open to the summer air, counting our meager tips and calculating that, just to buy the jackets, we would need to work for two summers on end.

The obsession lay largely dormant during my impoverished and grad-school-oriented twenties but has come back with a vengeance during my comparatively stable thirties. For someone in my walk of life—teacher, dad, and gardener living north of Boston—it’s manifested in far more reading and scrolling than actual purchasing, though the number of foolish and poorly-timed expenditures has certainly been high. How do you justify a $98 knit silk tie from Charvet when you need to teach night classes just to pay the mortgage, even if it is your only birthday present?

Being a clothes horse is a vice, but one of the virtues you can safely associate with it is that it fosters a certain kind of practical self-knowledge. Those who share my affliction and have pursued it with some level of self-awareness will know that the Clothes Obsession typically begins with a phase I'll call the Erratic Buying of Lots of Stuff. It’s a kind of awkward adolescence where intense interest and lack of confidence combine to make you flail around, purchasing things of varied styles, quality, and usefulness, only about 20% of which will ever be regularly worn.