Suited

Speaking of things that I’ve probably purchased for the last time, I went out and bought a suit today.

It is a nice suit, as suits go. Charcoal grey. Wool. Jacket and slacks. Suit-like, really. There’s actually a store here in Our Little Town devoted solely to such things – you can rent them for proms and such, or just buy them new – and they are very friendly and helpful about measuring and getting the proper sizes. They have another store in a Nearby Town that had the correct combination of size and color that I liked, and they were happy to collect it for me and hem the pants to the measured length. And since I needed it [pause to check clock] tomorrow, they were very nice about expediting all this. I can recommend them wholeheartedly for all your men’s suit needs.

They even threw in a coupon for a free dry-cleaning, which was cheerful of them.

I do not like formal wear of any kind, to be honest. I was a college graduate before I figured out how to tie a tie and it is a skill I would gladly forget except that every few years I need to remember the process. I would happily spend the rest of my days in my comfortable pants plus t-shirts or sweatshirts (depending on weather), with occasional forays into my teacher uniform, which is the same comfortable pants plus a button down shirt, and the older I get the less interested I am in how I look anyway.

But needs must.

It's been a long, long time since I bought a suit. It might have been before the kids were born, but I suspect it was probably later than that. You can’t really tell with suits. The joy of men’s clothing is that unless you are out there on the bleeding edge of fashion it never really changes all that much. If you get something in a conservative color, with medium lapels, and put on a pair of black shoes, you’ll always be just slightly out of the current look but not so much that anyone will complain and you can just wear it forever after that.

It's been a while since I had to wear a suit of any kind. I don’t travel in the sorts of circles where such things are part of my every day – or even every year – experience, and fewer and fewer events ask for them anymore. During the pandemic I went an entire year without putting on even a button down shirt – the joys of Zoom meetings, where people were just glad you were wearing anything at all really. If there are any silver linings whatsoever to be gotten from a worldwide plague, one of them surely must be the general turn away from any sort of formal wear outside of rather limited and obviously formal occasions. Nobody really wears suits much these days that I can tell, and this is no great loss.

The last time I wore a suit was last May, when I was the graduation speaker at one of the high schools that sends students to my remote class. I figured I should dress for that one. The time before that was my mother’s funeral, and the time before that was probably my dad’s and now we’re back to 2016.

But I have a wedding to attend tomorrow and the invitation said “semi-formal” and I’m not entirely sure what that means other than the fact that I should wear something that lies between a tuxedo and a Green Bay Packers jersey (“Wisconsin Formal”) to this event, so a suit it is.

Unfortunately, the last few years have been both sedentary and – for those of us who pay attention to the news – infuriating, which means I have rage-snacked a great deal and not actually burned off any of those calories, and the old suit just wasn’t going to cut it.

So now I have a new one.

Assuming I remain roughly the same dimensions, I will probably wear this one a dozen times over the next twenty or thirty years and then it won’t be my problem anymore.