Sartorial Splendour, Accidental

This week, when I got home from the plant nursery with a trunk-load of flowers plus two tomato plants, I finally noticed that I still had one pant leg rolled up from the bike ride that had preceded the plant shopping.

Argh. I comforted myself with the following sobering thought, once fatally communicated by a hairdresser to a dear friend of mine: “Nobody is looking at you anyway.”

I have decided on a preventive measure. From now on, I will roll both pant legs up so that it will look like a style, not a lapse.

But this minuscule example of elderly laissez-faire brings to mind other examples of unintentional outfit experiences.

For example, a friend of mine reported that she had gone for an important employment interview only to discover, upon returning home, that she had a sock stuck to the back of her sweater.

And a law school classmate went for an interview for an articling position and was quizzed about when he had had the brain surgery. This was because the bathing cap he had worn during his swim before the interview had left a bright red line across his forehead.

The other day, I emerged from a store behind a group of ladies. The last lady in line, the owner of splendid buttocks, had her long, wafting T-shirt wedged into the crevice. I know this is a look, but I don’t think it was the one she was aiming for. What to do? Helpfully tug it out? Do nothing? I settled on a middle course. I said to her, “You need to tug your T-shirt down at the back,” which she did. If it were me, I would want to be told.

Speaking of bad luck with clothing, my mom told the story of once trying on one of her mother’s good hats. Out on the farm, there was nowhere to parade the thing except on a trip to the outhouse, which she made. Inside the outhouse, having attended to business, she peered down the hole to inspect, and down the hole went the hat.

Clothes live in a hierarchy. First come your fanciest party clothes — clothes that you can own for 20 years and wear five times before you finally give up on them. Next come your good clothes. These are probably fairly new and fit reasonably well. Then come your old clothes. These you can wear for working around the house. The old clothes, due to accidents and carelessness, descend to the rank of “gardening clothes” or “painting clothes.” For instance, I have a lovely pair of blue leather gloves, scuffed up now, which became gardening gloves. Much nicer than the gardening gloves you can buy.

Because of this hierarchy, I seldom have clothes to give away because, over their lifetime, I wear them down to dust. Although one does look a little ridiculous gardening in a pink satin ball gown.

Once, my seven-year-old son and I were visiting one of my classmates. She pointed out to him that he had on one red sock and one green sock. His immediate reply was that he had another pair just like it at home.

Here’s another odd thing about clothes. When you buy two outfits, or two items of clothing, on the same day, both seeming quite nice, one of them will become the favourite and the other will become the non-favourite. But you don’t know, when you buy them, which will take the lead. This, along with all those decisions to keep an item because it might still do a turn, is why closets are crammed to the point of nuclear fusion.

“Clothes maketh the man” is a phrase that first showed up in The Odyssey and was repeated by Shakespeare and a few others. I wonder what those fellows would maketh of modern fashions, including bra straps and slips showing on purpose, gym tights clinging deep into every single curve, and the outrageous and original fashions freshly created by each new batch of adolescents. We all just want to maketh an impression.