Don't Confuse Comfort with Laziness

We often lament the loss of decorum in society in general. By we, I mean myself and the other odd-balls who seem to be reading this blog and others like it. Don't get offended by that, the oddest thing about us is that we take care to present ourselves well and see it as something more than just a clothing fetish. Aiports, of course, provide a particularly extreme example of the opposite of my way of thinking in sartorial matters. Recently, this article about the legendary Gay Talese has been floating around, which illustrates another kind of extreme. Somewhere between the two is a workable medium. In a recent email, my old pal Keohane (the guy who kindly opened a juicy can of worms on this blog in the past) had this to say about it:

I don't wear a three-piece suit when I fly, but I always wear a blazer, a button down shirt, and often a nice hat. It pains me to no end to see some maundering bag of food draped in matted velour sweatpants waiting at the check-in line. The 60s are big again style-wise, yet the idea that you should be presentable when you fly (which was a hard, fast rule forty years ago) remains inconceivable to most people. The wonder and ceremony, like in most other parts of life in America, are all gone. When J*** and I were flying to Argentina in 08, I had my usual uniform--jeans, shoes, button down, grey sportcoat, straw fedora, on. The kid checking IDs at the gate did a double take and said, "You look like a movie star, yo."



People bitch to no end about treated brusquely causally by airport personnel. But if you don't dress in a way that expresses a measure of self-respect, how can you expect people to treat you as anything but cattle? I find I'm almost always treated better when I fly, because my appearance suggests that that's what I expect from people. This is a general rule for life, I think.

Well said, old friend, well said.