Week Thirty: Pink Shirts and Double-breasted Suits

Rest assured that the novelty of Kumee's new Eton pink shirt will fade for him at some point, but in the meantime, we might as well take the opportunity to demonstrate and really, showcase, the versatility and wearability of the "rose" shirt!!! In this pic, Kumee coordinates it with a double-breasted sports jacket. It's a pity how the bad rep the double-breasted suit had gained from its boxier and wider construction in the 80's has stayed with it until now and how as result, efforts to "bring it back" hasn't met with much success. Is it any wonder why the misconception that the double-breasted suit adds weight and girth prevails?

The entire 80's decade and the following couple of years well into the 90's were infamous for its fashion or lack thereof! With the exception of a few trends which we now covet and revere as "vintage," by and large, this era wasn't exactly the sartorial golden age, was it? These days though, the fashion-o-meter is a-spikin' and even the double-breasted suit wanted "in" on the fashion action and has gotten streamlined, too! With proper tailoring, it can be very flattering to the beefier guy, even more so than the regular suit. Isn't that the holy grail of dressing for both men and women? To create a semblance of trim? I will stand corrected, but I'm pretty sure that the secret to the double-breasted suit's ability to shave a couple of pounds off one's appearance lies in its slight overlapping structure that holds in/ contains, controls and cinches. But of all its many virtues, I looovvvve how the double-breasted suit lends "presence" to and bestows upon its wearer, a "distinguished" air:

Week Twenty-nine: *Real* Men: Beware of the Menacing Man-Purse!!!

So I followed a friend's (who happens to be a writer) advice to "find a niche" and so yes, this blog was born out of a need to kinda narrow down the things I write about. And naturally, after winnowing off all the chaff, Kumee/men's fashion is the grain that remained. Now, just when I thought that this was niche enough, I came across a site devoted to satchels and only satchels, lol. Just how much blogging can one do on satchels alone? Plenty...apparently, lol! On that site you'll find anywhere from the latest styles and innovations in satchels (e.g. ones with neat built-in battery chargers!), references to them in the media (e.g. protagonists "Indiana Jones wears one" or more recently "Jack Bauer wears one" (wazzz uppp???) and literature, to sightings of notable people sporting satchels a.k.a the man-purse.

I'm grateful to have stumbled upon that blog because honestly, personally, all I had on them is that Kumee has a handsome Cole Haan one (that I would totally use if only it wasn't such a pain to switch bags and transfer my personal effects each and every time, uh, forget that!!!) which doesn't make for a very interesting blog post, and yet satchels, are a metro staple, that certainly deserves some mention.

If I had concluded on two posts back, that there couldn't be anything else that is the "object of so much scoff from the self-professed "machosexual" (what a ridiculous term, lol!) other than the pink shirt," then, the man-purse definitely takes the cake as the runner up!!!

The Veerrrryyy Menacing Man-Purse:


(photo credit, Deb of PIX Me Photography, thanks a gazillion!)

Week Twenty-eight: More Fancy-Smancy (Men's!) Hosiery

So, nope, I wasn't exaggerating, not at all, when I said that Kumar would totally wear some bold socks like the ones in Deb's pic from the previous post...ok, these ones may be a lot "quieter" (as opposed to loud!) and are an otherwise boring pair of beige socks if not for the canary yellow heels and hotrod (my adjective!) orange toes!!! So I wasn't going crazy after all when I had thought that I had seen a flash of yellow...and yes, that's exactly how short these pants of Kumee's are for them to have been visible: if one of our friends has become addicted to having his suits taken in to be snugger and snugger (literally "within an inch of it's life" for one of them at one point before it went rrrriiipppp!!!!), Kumee seems to have developed a thing, too, for receding hems and doing without pant breaks. Will men's pant lengths be the new basis for predicting stock market prices according to the hemline theory???

Week Twenty-seven: Pink!

Last Tuesday found Kumar on one of those rare occasions where he couldn't decide on what to wear to a business dinner. The weather being seasonally mild but bound to drop as the evening progressed just compounded his dilemma. Kumee finally chose to wear his eleven-ounce navy blue cords suit, navy being a year-round color, the cords still perfect for this time of year, but definitely too heavy after April-ish, and his new pink Eton shirt. Ah, the pink shirt: while the metrosexual will wear one without a moment's hesitation and with much sartorial aplomb, I don't think there's anything else that's the object of so much scoff from the professed "machosexual" and if I were to be completely honest, that shirt does remind me of my binky blankie from when I was Jaden's age with it's fine gingham pattern, and yet it's darn inarguably handsome:

Week Twenty-six: At the Half-way Mark!!!

Woohoo!!! We're at the halfway mark!!! (yeah, baby!) When Kumee and I first conceived the idea of this blog, we originally planned for it to be 360 days of Metro, but then, fear set in as we realized how ambitious that was and how daunting a task that would be, and so we modestly settled for 52 weeks of Metro, which we thought would be more feasible, but even then, we wondered whether we had bitten off way more than we could possibly chew! I took my first ineffectual pic and with bated breath, posted the first post and then thought, now what??? I mean, how much harping on their husband's tie hoard can one do???

Much to my delight, I'm finding out how inspiration can be drawn from the most obvious as much as it can come from the least expected of sources. I've also discovered how it can strike at the oddest times & places! And then of course, there are the generous contributors, like Deb, who's been on the lookout for great subjects that have made for the most amazing pics, like the shoes from last post! As a result, we're comfortably ahead of schedule, considering that 52 Weeks was supposed to span an entire year, one week at time! And also, thanks to Deb, 52 Weeks has gotten a makeover! (gotta love that tie pic!!!) Here's another one of Deb's wonderful pics that just mirrors my quirkiness:



Ok, now the rule is that one's supposed to match their socks with their trousers, not their shoes, but I love this playful, "costume-y" defiance of old school sartorial establishment. Granted, it's a more casual get-up where there's lots of room for latitude, based on the chinos, but Kumee would totally wear these with a suit as well. Another thing, there's no point in trying to go for whimsical with flashy socks, if they're just going to be hidden...notice, no, commit to memory, the pant length...this is a bit extreme in that the hems merely graze the ankle, but honestly, there's never been a better time to dabble a bit and experiment with short or even no breaks at all!!!

Week Twenty-five: Boat Shoes

So Kumar's really looking forward to receiving his order of Cole Haan boat shoes for this S/S. I'm glad he's settled for me once and for all as to what they're really called - "boat shoes" - because I've always thought they were called "topsiders" - that is, short (I'm just finding out like now!) for Sperry Topsiders, the original makers of this type of shoe. This is a classic example of a Filipino quirk that have them indiscriminately lumping a class of things together, referring to them by a proper noun/brandname, so that all laundry detergents are Tide, all toothpastes are Colgate, all colas are Coke, all refrigerators are Frigidaire, heck, even all male foreigners are called Kanos, that is, short of course for "Amerikano" so that, Maria's step-dad who's as German as German can be and speaks zilch English, by default is assigned an American identity by everyone in town, by virtue of his Caucasian features, lol.

Going back to boat shoes (which, when, you come to think of it, is quite a generic name!), they were born out of boaters' need for a non-slip shoe that wouldn't scuff up the decks of their vessels, hence, their trademark white sole with their not as readily obvious characteristic of special grooving simulating the soles of dog feet, in a rather ingenious feat of biomimetics (forgive the pun!) achieved by employing a special technique of splitting or "siping" of rubber soles invented and patented by a John Sipe.

Kumar's boat shoes are going to complete the nautical look he's going for, which, as I had explained in my last post, is really quite the rage these days for both the "fairer and sterner sexes" and how one need not necessarily live by a "navigable body of water" and can reside as "inland as Saskatoon" to rock this trend. The latter statement is open to open rebuttal, I being geographically-challenged and simply too lazy to verify my facts!

I'll leave the boat-shoe-wearing to Kumee once he receives them, though, they're a tad too masculine for my taste, even the ladies models. But in keeping with the shoe theme, I'll leave you with an amazing picture* courtesy of Deb, personal friend and owner of PIX me photography who knows and really "gets" what is meant by "shoe fetish"....



*I wouldn't recommend wearing these on a game fishing trip :P

Week Twenty-four: Kumee's Latest Steal/Splurge

It hasn't been very long since the last "Kumee's latest requisition" post, and yet here we are...again, go figure, lol! I'm like totally eating my words when I said that "one can never have too many white shirts" and although his two newest shirts may not be white, they're just as blank a canvas for perhaps an ultra-conservative corporate get-up that announces that you mean "business" and yet subtly interesting enough to be the basis for a fun and casual *nautical* outfit (that is soooo the rage these days for both the sterner and fairer sexes!) that one can rock regardless of whether one lives nowhere remotely close to a navigable body of water and lives as inland as, uh, Saskatoon?!

Seriously though, if you wear dress shirts on a daily basis, it's imperative to have enough shirts to last you at least until the next dry-cleaners run. Of course, if you're domestically capable, you could always pre-treat their collars, load them up into the delicates cycle, add some Zero wash, hang dry and press them yourself every week or so, but if you're a bit fussy like Kumee who had kindly told/explicitly warned me (in so many words!) to "NEVER TOUCH MY SHIRTS EVER AGAIN!" after I had volunteered to do all of the above in a feeble attempt to significantly cut down our expenses during the recent infamous market crash (and pocket myself the ridiculous amount he spends on Bellingham services!), then you're really better off just stockpiling the Etons...