The Travails of a Modern Clothes-Horse
In America today, dressing well is rare—and increasingly, hard to do.
When I was growing up, I was often referred to as a nerd or bookworm, but the title I treasured above all else was perhaps the unlikeliest: clothes horse.
Under the influence of my father—who was born, raised, and educated in Ohio, but came of age when Ivy League-style dress was nearly all-pervasive—I gained an early appreciation for dressing well. The fundamentals, as taught to me by my dad, included 3-button sack sport coats, Shetland sweaters, and slacks with neither pleats nor a break.
I could recite my secondhand sartorial preferences with such precocious authority that I managed to impress, or at least leave an impression upon, the tailor at a Jos. A. Bank store in downtown New Orleans, where my father ran a company and where I spent much of my youth. On one Saturday afternoon when my father was buying a suit—and I was undoubtedly reeling off the dos and don’ts of menswear—the tailor told me: “You’re a clothes horse like your father.”
I had never heard the term before, but I carried it with me throughout my adolescence and young adulthood. Apparently wanting to live up to the title, I never went through anything that resembled a period of slovenly dress. Now, in my very early 40s, I take it as a point of pride to dress as well as I can.
Yet being a clothes horse ain’t as easy as it used to be.
Last month, I ordered a seersucker sport coat from Brooks Brothers, whose remaining non-outlet location in the bustling metropolis of Greater Columbus closed over a year ago. (Devoted readers of this column will recall an earlier installment bemoaning that sad occasion.) Thus, my purchase was made over the internet, but, having experienced the highs and the lows of Brooks Brothers over the last four decades, I felt confident that I knew what I was getting. By my lights, it was a low-risk purchase, but the story that follows makes a mockery of my confidence.
When the sport coat arrived, I was delighted with the sack cut and even more delighted with the fit, which did not appear to require any significant alterations—not even to the length of the sleeves. Alas, I was too delighted. In my enthusiasm for my purchase, I neglected to note a near-fatal flaw in this particular garment’s construction: two buttons are meant to adorn both coat sleeves, but on the coat I received, one of the sleeves was missing buttons—any buttons.
Was this a newfangled style innovation from Brooks Brothers? If so, count me out.
The reality was far more pedestrian: After I phoned the nearest Brooks Brothers—in Pittsburgh, of all places—I learned that each sleeve did indeed call for two buttons. What I had on my hands was some sort of factory flub. Naturally, the “extra” buttons that are slipped into the inside pocket of every Brooks Brothers sport coat or blazer only contained a single—as in one—sleeve button. In all of my years of purchasing clothes from Brooks Brothers, I have bought my share of questionable ties and socks that too easily grew threadbare, but I had never encountered a snafu at once so simple and detrimental.
I could have returned and reordered the coat, but I decided I might be better off improvising a solution: On the advice of the gentleman I spoke to in Pittsburgh, I decided to call Brooks Brothers stores on the East Coast in search of a pair of spare buttons. I was prepared to spend the afternoon working my way up and down the Eastern Seaboard, but to my happy astonishment, I soon found myself chatting with the helpful manager of a store who understood my predicament. Upon identifying the exact style of my sport coat, and consulting with the on-site tailor, she was able to produce the needed buttons—which arrived, via UPS, the following week.
What is the moral of this story? To start with, a customer with a genuine dilemma—such as a button-less sleeve on an otherwise perfect piece of apparel—can still find good customer service, even if it requires long-distance calling. Most people want to help. But I think the overriding lesson is that clothes horses like me can no longer take their habit for granted. To be well-dressed in a world that does not prioritize being even presentably-dressed requires an ever-increasing amount of effort.
To that end, I am no longer in possession of those sought-after buttons. They, along with the seersucker sport coat on which they belong, are now with a local tailor who is tasked with sewing them on. All those years ago when my father taught me to appreciate the fundamentals of Ivy-style attire, he had no idea just how difficult it would be.
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