Do You Suffer from Sartorial Obsessive Syndrome (S.O.S)?
It all began with the lapels.
You used to be perfectly happy with your standard issue 8cm wide lapels. But suddenly they won’t do any more. You need 9,5 cm lapels. You despise yourself for having erred, for having gone with less than 8 centimeters. When you wear your old (6-months old) suit with the certainly-not-narrow-but-not-wide-enough lapels, you feel ashamed. It’s half-canvassed, a lovely little navy thing with a pinched waist, but those lapels…
And then, the contagion spreads. For some reason, the welting of your shoe becomes something vital. It’s understood you never went for cemented soles and pointed toes, but now, nothing will do but to eviscerate from your collection the unfortunate pair whose construction doesn’t fit with your ‘British demands’. You hate the guts of Lyman Reed Blake and stand in admiration at the feet of Charles Goodyear, Jr. To the extent that when you wear your perfectly adequate suede double-strap monks whose misfortune is a light Blake welting, you want to apologize to people in the street, who couldn’t care less, of course.
It goes without saying that you manage to show an inch-or-so of shirt sleeve peeking out from your jacket sleeve. But now, working buttons are the least you expect from your jacket sleeves. What scorn you have for those inadequate sleeves.
And the jacket shoulders…simply appearing ‘clean’ doesn’t cut it and being beautiful is hardly enough. You want NEA-PO-LI-TAN. You crave the shirring, the soft shirt-like envelopment of your rounded extremities. Anything else is too common, shoddy, conservative. Whatever.
keep reading…
