Let me be honest with you from the start, because we are going to be spending some time together. I have never made a single dollar from clothing. Not one. This has been, for my entire adult life, the most expensive hobby a reasonable man could choose and several that no reasonable man would. I had a career, a real one, with meetings and a title and the whole apparatus of a serious professional life. But if you had asked me at any point during that career what I actually did, the truthful answer was always the same. I thought about clothes. I just had the good manners not to say it out loud in the meetings.
This is the story of a lifelong obsession that never once paid rent, and I would not trade a minute of it.
It started, as these things do, with a bow tie
Somewhere in my youth I decided that the four-in-hand necktie, that reliable strip of silk hanging down the front of every man in every room, was simply not for me. Everyone wore one. That was the problem. So I took up the bow tie, which in those days marked a young man as either a genius, a waiter, or slightly unwell, and I did not much care which, because I had learned to tie my own and that felt like a secret power. I have spent the decades since defending the bow tie to skeptics, and I regret to inform them all that I was right and they were wrong. A man who can tie his own bow tie can do anything. It is the small competence from which all other confidence flows.
From the bow tie, the disease spread, as it always does. First to the collar stays, then to the cufflinks, and once a man is thinking about cufflinks he is, medically speaking, beyond saving.
The sport coat problem
Here is a thing no one warns you about. You cannot own one good sport coat. It is not possible. A good sport coat demands a companion, and then that companion requires an alternative for warmer weather, and the warm-weather one implies the existence of a rougher one for the country, which of course cannot be worn to town, which is how a grown man ends up standing in his closet at seven in the morning conducting a genuine internal debate about hopsack versus flannel as though lives hang in the balance. My wife has watched this debate happen more times than either of us will admit. She no longer asks. She simply waits, the way one waits out weather.
I tell people I collect sport coats. This is a generous way of describing what is, objectively, an accumulation. But every one of them has a reason, a story, a specific Tuesday it was born for, and I can produce that reason on demand, at length, whether or not anyone asked.
On shoes, and the madness of good ones
I came to fine shoes the way most men come to religion, suddenly and against my better financial judgment. One day I understood that a properly made shoe, welted and lasted and built to be resoled for thirty years, was not an expense but an heirloom, and that understanding cost me a great deal of money over the following decades. I learned to shine them myself, which is its own meditation, a Sunday-evening ritual of cloth and wax and water that I would not surrender for anything. I have opinions about patina that I will share with strangers. I have, on more than one occasion, been genuinely happier about a pair of shoes than the situation warranted. I have made my peace with this.
The color question, which is my favorite question
Somewhere along the way I became consumed by color, by the quiet mathematics of what sits next to what. A burgundy where everyone expects black. A forest green knit doing something unexpected under a grey jacket. The way a single considered note of color, deployed with restraint, does more work than an entire loud outfit shouting for attention. I can lose an afternoon to this. I have lost many afternoons to this. My family has learned that when I go quiet and start holding two pocket squares up to the light, I am not to be disturbed, because important work is happening, even if it is important only to me.
The passion went global, and so did I
An obsession this size cannot be contained by one country, and mine went looking for its raw materials at the source. I have stood in the silk markets of China running fabric between my fingers like a man defusing a bomb, trying to look calm while my heart did something athletic. I have haggled for textiles in India, badly, cheerfully, and at length, coming away every time with more than I needed and exactly what I wanted. I have looked at gemstones under a jeweler's loupe with the concentration of a surgeon and the budget of an amateur, chasing the perfect stone for a cufflink that the world was not asking me to make. I brought it all home, every bolt and stone and spool, because the hunt was never really about the object. It was about caring enough to go and find it.
I have never made a dollar from any of this, and it has enriched me beyond measure. Both things are true.
Why the journal, and why now
For most of my life this was a private affliction, indulged in closets and tailors' shops and foreign markets, explained to a patient few and inflicted on an unlucky several. Whatever Suits You is what happened when I finally decided to let the obsession out of the house. It is not a business. It has no sponsors, no algorithm, no one to answer to. It is one man who cared too much about this for too long, writing it all down at last, in the hope that somewhere out there is another man standing in his closet at seven in the morning, debating hopsack versus flannel, who would like to know he is not alone.
He is not alone. I am right here, and I have opinions about his cufflinks.
Dress for yourself, not the room. I have been doing exactly that my whole life, at considerable expense and enormous pleasure, and I recommend it without reservation.
Whatever Suits You · Style. Sound. Substance.