as my impending move to china looms, i’ve relegated a portion of each day to the tedious task of packing my life away into two luggage bags 22kg a piece and a carry-on sized tote. well, perhaps not my entire life, but what i deem necessary to survive on anyway. the rest, i suspect, will be carted off to charities or remain, silent and dusty in the forgotten nooks and crannies of my room (there are many). what i’ll be bringing most of, i’ve decided, is clothing. that, and books and toiletries. i’ll try to forget about the junk and trifles, or junky trifles, that saturate the beautiful mess that is my room and imagine that i’m starting life anew (and also that my parents are blind to the remainder or just very, very accomodating).
right now, as i write, i have the enviable chore of editing my unbalanced and much-too-large wardrobe into staples for the new year. even before i’d cast one reluctant eye at the garment mounds scattered around my room, i’d decided that i could survive on four blazers, six dress shirts, a sweater or two, a pair of jeans and several pairs of pants, and five or so t-shirts. i was satisfied with the lean wardrobe i’d fashioned for myself, and had convinced myself was ascetic-worthy. almost.
anyway, when i dragged myself down into the laundry room the other day, i discovered that my favourite white dress shirt from j.crew was spattered with blue stains, along with the pink h&m version i’d worn to my graduation. i was upset, needless to say, but not as much as i’d expected, although the prospect of going to work without a proper white dress shirt never occurred to me before. and before the thought of heading to the shopping mall occurred to me, i recalled the beginning of thoreau’s walden, which i have been reading on and off.
it is quite a coincidence that i’m reading thoreau, as walden concerns his experiment in simple living (in a self-constructed shelter by walden pond), which in turn required, or so it seems, a lengthy but delightfully eloquent passage on what, exactly, is constituted by the term ‘necessity’. clothes, thoreau argues, are a ‘necessity’ simply because they provide heat, as well as a covering for our nakedness. it is his writing on new clothes, however, that really caught my interest. he claims that “a man who has at length found something to do will not need to get a new suit to do it in” and “old shoes will serve a hero longer than they have served his valet — if a hero ever has a valet — bare feet are older than shoes, and he can make them do.” only regulars at balls and soirees ever need a new suit of clothes, for who amongst us actually wears his/her clothes down to its threads that it is not an act of charity to pass it on to someone more needy than we are? i have reproduced the rest of the passage in its entirety below, as i cannot phrase his sentiments more perfectly:
“I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit? If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes. All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be. Perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we have so conducted, so enterprised or sailed in some way, that we feel like new men in the old, and that to retain it would be like keeping new wine in old bottles. Our moulting season, like that of the fowls, must be a crisis in our lives. The loon retires to solitary ponds to spend it. Thus also the snake casts its slough, and the caterpillar its wormy coat, by an internal industry and expansion; for clothes are but our outmost cuticle and mortal coil. Otherwise we shall be found sailing under false colors, and be inevitably cashiered at last by our own opinion, as well as that of mankind.”
amen. now if only we could all also be blind.
many of you who know me will likely notice my penchant for pink shirts. i have long sought to understand this strange colour fetish and i can only say this: pink stirs up memories in me of strawberry ice cream, cotton candy, bubblegum and countless incarnations of sweet things and sugary goodness. it is also pleasant, soft, and warm. true sartorialists will say they dress to express, not impress, and i couldn’t agree more; my choice of pink in my shirts expresses the values, qualities, and memories, or at least some of them, that i hold dearest to me. perhaps this also explains my curious obsession with vanilla, which is warm and creamy and unassuming and as some would attest, boring. my girlfriend isn’t a fan and was less than enthusiastic when i decided to purchase a 600mL bottle of swiss vanilla body moisturizer from the local drugstore about a month ago. but to me, vanilla is absolutely brilliant. opponents of vanilla will undoubtedly ignore its presence in the london fog, various bakery goods, and countless fragrances. but i digress.
historically, the pink shirt has with it aristocratic connotations; apparently, it was also the shirt of choice for young Gordon Gekko yuppies in the heyday of the ’80s. a pink shirt looks best with a suit, and it will match any suit in one’s closet (although extremists will point out that one should try to stay away from black, whose soul mate is always white). personally, gray or navy will do for me. i have also long sought to understand my love affair with the suit. perhaps it has to do with all the time i’ve spent perusing the pages of gq in chapters aisles and sitting unblinkingly in front of old movies from the ’50s and ’60s (both decades widely held to be pedestals for men’s dressing). my beloved girlfriend, again, has/had to get used to my penchant for this 200 year old staple of the male wardrobe. after much reflection, i have come to the conclusion that the suit, like the pink shirt, has much to do, once again, with personal expression. yes, it is a blank canvas for individual expression, but it is first and foremost, a uniform.
witness the gregory peck movie ‘the man in the grey flannel suit’. i find that movie heroic, if only because peck’s character, a war veteran, struggles film-long to provide a better living for his family, to obtain that elusive but marginal pay raise by switching jobs, jobs that he cannot stand. he endures the daily drudgery of going to work because he is doing it for something larger than himself, even if that larger purpose includes an ambitious and hard-to-please wife; that, to me, is a character worthy of admiration. (on a side note, it is statistically proven that married people are most likely to accumulate wealth because, among other things, of this aforementioned reason, the need to work for more than self). so, the ’60s working man is a character i admire. and his uniform? a (gray) suit.
this being said, i do not see the blue-collar worker in a different light. the blue-collar uniform, for one, is an american staple and a classic, serving as inspiration for designers as far off as japan. at the root of this uniform is utility; however, when worn, the clothing acquires a heroic and individual quality to it over time: frayed edges, marks from hours spent on one’s knees hammering, dirt stains. it is the paradoxical unity of the impersonal (work) and the personal.
i have had many odd jobs; these past four years alone, i’ve worked as a christmas elf, a mcdonald’s slave, a tutor, sandwich artist, menswear sales associate, and currently, as a cook at IHOP. i know the drudgery of going to work, work which one detests, day in and day out. and most of the time, one endures this only to put food on the table, or to ensure that there is hot water and electricity at home, and that bills can be paid. or else one also has others in mind, which is one’s only source of motivation during the daily grind. this drudgery, i can only describe it by assigning it a colour, is gray as the suit peck wore.
henry david thoreau wrote an interesting book in the 19th century. it’s name? walden. in it, thoreau dissects in great detail and with lyrical prose, the nature of work in the modern era. he writes in the opening pages that ‘the labouring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his labour would be depreciated in the market. He has no time to be anything but a machine. How can he remember well his ignorance—which his growth requires—who has so often to use his knowledge?’. according to thoreau, we have changed the original concept of working to live into living to work. as such, we’ve turned ourselves into machines, barely able to wonder anymore about the state of our existence, stunted in our ability to live in a state of measured ignorance, an ignorance essential to the bettering of ourselves. for this reason, thoreau decides to put aside all excess and to trudge into the woods, living only with necessities of life (i.e. food, shelter, some clothing). walden is his account of this experiment, the re-exploration of working to live.
of course, and as i’ve touched upon, this is not to say that there cannot be heroism amongst machines. i detest my job. it is tedious, greasy, sometimes lonely, and very stressful. however, this past thursday and friday, i was able to work with a chinese gentleman who has supported himself and his family by cooking for over 20 years. he told me that his father died at age 50, leaving only his mother to support the family. as such, he had to put all plans for university aside, and supplied income from his job as a cook in prince george. now, two decades later, he has a wife and a daughter whom he has been able to put through university. i will survive this job as long as i have stories like this and my upcoming wedding (hehe) to inspire me.
