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<p>You are **SO **not a man.</p>
<p>College son wears basically what he wore in high school. T-shirts, sweatshirts, cargo shorts and tennis shoes in winter, flip flops in summer. For work, he’ll don a pair of khaki’s and a shirt with an actual collar! </p>
<p>I think he is quite unusual in one respect…he will actually iron a shirt if it has too many wrinkles. I think this habit is left over from being in Boy Scouts. I don’t know many other 19 year-olds who will do this. </p>
<p>Daughter, on the other hand, prides herself on finding cheap clothes at thrift stores and putting them together in some unusual way. Called with pride the other day because she bought 2 big bags of clothes for $5. I’m eager (and a bit apprehensive) to see her latest fashion statement when we go back in May. Sometimes I wish she’d be happy with cargos and a T-shirt! At least there would be some consistency. I know, I’m boring and old-fashioned.</p>
<p>I kind of have to second mommusic here. Well put and yes, mostly lol.</p>
<p>I actually have my own version of Garanimals for S1 - every shirt with a collar can be worn w khakis (dress code, for school); everything without a collar can go with jeans (the rest of his life). His approach to getting dressed is one from pile A (shirt), one from pile B (pants). 99 times out of 100, they get worn in the exact order of the piles, too. </p>
<p>When D still lived at home and was responsible for much of the laundry, she used to shuffle the piles. :D</p>
<p>Don’t worry. You are lucky- he has more important things to occupy himself than the pursuit of fashion. My H and S aren’t shoppers, nor do they care what the “in” brands are. There is time to dress up when he has to- no need to in college. Son is a runner, that defines his footwear, and he has plenty of shirts from HS meets and other races. Add those to his college logo apparel and there’s his main wardrobe (he also has polos left over from HS). He has a white dress shirt and a pair of black pants and shoes from Orchestra days plus another shirt or two and khakis plus ties (think HS “formal” dances and graduation) for the zero dress up needs.</p>
<p>soozievet – Beat me to it. My dh goes shopping once a year and even then he’s like a six-year old, “are we done…can we go now…?” He recently lost 30 lbs and everything he owned was hanging off his body like he was wearing a line created by the Incredible Hulk. He wanted to drag out stuff from when he was that size last…10 yrs ago? He was very disappointed to find that so much of it had disintegrated or fell apart when he pulled them on. I hated to break it to him that yes, things age even if wrapped in plastic! </p>
<p>So we went shopping…two pairs of jeans, a pair of khakis, two dress shirts, 6 polos and a bag each of t-shirts and underwear. He was more interested in the socks we bought than any of the clothes. Any day now I’m going to have to drag him back to the store for some shorts because the ones he owns are frayed, torn and three sizes too big (he thinks if he tightens up his belt, they’ll fit just fine!). Heaven lend me strength!</p>
<p>As a representative of man (a repre-man-tative, if you will), I make my statements here.</p>
<p>1) Clothing + hole = clothing. If it’s in a conspicuous location, it becomes indoor/inside clothing. If in an unassuming location, it remains clothing. Thus, all socks and underwear are usable despite your complaints. No questions.
2) You are not allowed to throw out a shirt, jacket, or pants without **written **approval. You do not know where that jacket has been (in a good sense), so consultation is a definite necessity. Throwing out any of the above without approval is asking for a furrowed brow at the very least.
3) What the hell are wrinkles?
4) Baggy clothing is clothing–there is no reason to hate based on size. Men are very accepting with clothing (as long as it isn’t too tight / doesn’t cramp our style). And man, are they useful. Example: I just put like, 40 coins, a cell phone, a wallet, two mechanical pencils, and the keys to my house and car in my left pocket. Can’t do that with pants that ‘fit’…
5) Why do you need a belt if your pants fit…?
6) We go to work to do work. Our contracts demand business casual, not hand-pressed fashion statements.
7) What is the point of spending 200 bucks on a clothing spree in a ‘mall’, when my current clothes are working right now? Just because they aren’t as pretty, you want to throw them away? They’re CLEAN and APPRECIATE ME for being ME. They always try to fit with who I am, not who I *should *be.
8) Cleanliness is next to godliness. And, men are just humble, I guess. Golly, I thought that was a good thing.
9) And here we all thought that what mattered was on the inside. Conflicting messages I see, hm ladies?
10) We want the sweatpants back, and that black sweater that you loaf around at home in. Yes, they’re comfortable. That’s why we buy them.</p>
<p>Questions for women in the defense of Men:
- Why are your purses large enough to hide small children? Are you planning something?
- Explain why pleather is better than leather. Don’t you have any sympathy for pcows?
- Those shoes cost me a week’s salary. Why did you only wear them once?
- Your mirrors make me feel self-conscious. Why so many…
- Why care so much about how we dress? We’re not doing our jobs any worse.</p>
<p>Even girls often don’t iron at college.</p>
<p>My daughter lives in an older dorm where plugging in an iron in your room blows the fuses. The power is only good enough for ironing in the laundry room down in the dungeons of the basement.</p>
<p>Although she would never have considered wearing wrinkled clothing in public at home, at college she does it all the time.</p>
<p>When I was in college, the power was so inadequate that you couldn’t use a hair dryer, either. So we went out with wrinkled clothing and wet hair.</p>
<p>As for the questions for women:</p>
<p>1) Our clothes often don’t have pockets. We have to put our stuff somewhere. And you probably take advantage of the stuff in our purses. When you cut yourself or get a headache at work, don’t you go to the nearest woman for a Band-Aid or some Advil? Men don’t carry that sort of stuff. We do.</p>
<p>3) Women’s shoes are often designed to be worn only with certain types of clothing. The sandals a woman would wear to the beach, the ones she would wear to a business-casual office, and the ones she would wear to a party are three entirely different types of shoes. Also, a lot of our shoes hurt, a concept beyond male comprehension. If we bought them to wear with a particular outfit and they hurt, we may never wear them again unless we wear that outfit again. (If it’s a prom dress, that would be never.)</p>
<p>5) We are judged by how we dress to a far greater extent than you are. (When is the last time that a man was criticized for dressing “too sexy” at a business-casual office?) You should be judged at least a little bit.</p>
<p>Shoot, I’m 51 and have no interest in how I dress. I don’t own a suit and hope to go to my grave still saying that. I only buy khakis for work because everything matches them so I don’t have to worry about what matches. </p>
<p>I do have to wear a shirt and tie to work most days so I try as much as possible to wear nothing but jeans and t-shirts or shorts, t-shirts, and flip-flops at any time that I’m not at work. If I’m not at work, collars are strictly off limits. The only time I make exceptions to this are weddings and funerals.</p>
<p>Man, I get judged for how large my posterior is constantly. I was in some films you see…</p>
<p>Just kidding. But as a note, I’m not actually asking those questions seriously. Men are simply more nonchalant as a whole than women.</p>
<p>I wish that people would acknowledge that I dress too sexy…=(</p>
<p>Wharfrat2, look around you at work. The female equivalent of your khakis is black pants. We own lots of them because almost everything goes with them. See how many of your female colleagues are wearing them on any given day.</p>
<p>But even if we are as disinterested in clothing as you are (and I happen to be very disinterested), we still have to make distinctions on a sexiness scale (is that blouse too low-cut for the office?) as well as a level-of-formality scale (whether or not our office outfits need to have jackets, whether or not jeans are appropriate for a particular occasion). You only have to deal with the formality issue. There really isn’t a sexiness issue for men.</p>
<p>My husband doesn’t own a suit, either. Techie types don’t have to.</p>
<p>Son hates shopping. We tell him, if we buy his stuff it will be our taste. We don’t want him to be odd ball in college. He does not care. Pants - jeans are no problem. It is only the tops.</p>
<p>(I think he picked up that habit from me. My wife buys stuff for me.)</p>
<p>I wonder if there is a genetic basis for disinterest in fashion. I have zero, even negative interest in clothes. My Mom shopped outlets, but as far as I know never looked at Vogue. My S, a frosh, brought home an iron on spring break, that some guy in the dorm was getting rid of, but left it here because he didn’t know how to use it. He did Prep up his wardrobe in the Fall, but the interest seems to have waned.</p>
<p>Also a man can wear the same suit 3 days in a week and nobody says a word. This is why jackets frequently came (or do they still?) with 2 pairs of pants. If a woman wore the same outfit 3 days out of 5, her manager would have a quiet word with her at some point. Or she’d show up on What Not To Wear. </p>
<p>Women’s clothes also have greater variety than men’s. There are wonderful shades, fabrics, fits ‘n’ flares…clothing is fun and the hunt for the ‘right thing’ can be very enjoyable. This goes back to the hunter/gatherer society. Women went out and searched for edibles, berries, fruits and the like. Women sorted through dozens of nearly-identical items to find the ones that wouldn’t kill you. Men crouched in likely areas and waited for the meat to lumber by and then they leapt on it. They either killed dinner right then and there or went home empty-handed.</p>
<p>At any mall today, you can see the same processes. Women search tirelessly through racks of nearly-identical clothes or shoes to find the right thing. Men go in, make their ‘kill’ (Die, Dockers!) at once or go home empty-handed. If they could crouch in the middle of the store while the clothes went by on a conveyor belt, they’d probably buy more. </p>
<p>Okay, so this is tongue-in-cheek…but there’s a certain validity there if you think about it!</p>
<p>“Women’s clothes also have greater variety than men’s. There are wonderful shades, fabrics, fits ‘n’ flares…clothing is fun and the hunt for the ‘right thing’ can be very enjoyable.”</p>
<p>That starts with when they are babies. On one business trip (son was very little then), I was sitting next to a buyer from a major dept. store in Houston. I asked him why the toddler boys clothes have a very little floor space and clothes are boring than toddler girls. His response, people don’t care what their boys wear. A t-shirt and diaper is good enough for boys, but they love to dress up their little girls.</p>
<p>My son is atypical in that he is something of a clothes horse. He likes to dress up, always has, but he doesn’t quite get the point about wrinkles. This makes for interesting dichotomies. He can’t quite understand why he needs to let me know before a performance is due, and he needs his tuxedo pants, or why I wash the shirts, then send them to the cleaner to be pressed.
My fault, partly, I always hated ironing, and that was one of the first tasks to go.</p>
<p>My son continues to wear khakis in college because he doesn’t like jeans, or sweatpants or corderoys or anything else that might be fashionable. He will not wear shirts with buttons except under duress. He will not wear shirts with logos, unless they are computer companies. He’s also okay with shirts with geek jokes. He wears short and long sleeved tees nearly all of them plain or perhaps with one stripe. Sneakers on his feet and he only wears thin black or gray gold toe socks and tevas in the summer.</p>
<p>Our S1 loves clothes–tends toward preppy style but also enjoys dressy–will chose a suit over khakis every time but may make it more casual by wearing the shirt open at the neck with no tie. He reads Esquire and other men’s magazines to look at fashions. All clothes that need ironing go to the cleaners, a habit he picked up from his dad. He also has his little brother periodically deliver new clothes to college, taking other stuff home (easy drive and little brother gets to spend the night) since his closet at school is too small to accommodate the degree of variety he wants.</p>
<p>S2 usually goes for a grunge look rather than preppy, so wrinkled is good, but he is still quite particular about what he wears. If dressing up, he usually throws on a suit rather than khakis. The khakis get worn to play golf or sometimes for a restaurant where he isn’t really dressing up but isn’t allowed to wear his normal attire either. He has to dress up enough that it doesn’t bother him but he won’t spend a lot of time getting ready, unlike S1.</p>
<p>H is a clothes horse too, although he won’t admit it, so both boys probably picked it up from him. I am a complete nonshopper and would fit right into the What Not to Wear episodes for every day attire. I made an effort for work, but H tells me I have zero sense of style so I guess that effort didn’t really achieve ideal results.</p>
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<p>the latter description is certainly true of my H, (down to the Dockers) but it is for me, too. The older I get, the more I feel that shopping is a waste of precious time which I could be filling a million more fun ways (like reading a good book.) My entire family has pretty much zero interest in clothes, so at least there’s no dissent.</p>
<p>I should rejoice. DS actually went with me today to shop for some new clothes for his summer course at the Univ. of Ala. and we did not have to buy the Garanimals</p>
<p>My son, entering college this fall, essentially wears two kinds of outer clothing: (1) t-shirts, and (2) blue jeans. He owns one pair of khakis and a couple of blue button-down shirts, worn only for college interviews. Add a few flannel shirts (never tucked in) worn on especially cold winter days, and you have his complete wardrobe, from approximately age 12 to date.</p>
<p>I have a feeling he’ll fit right in at college.</p>
<p>I do not believe that he has ever held an iron in his hands in his entire life, and probably would have no idea how to use it.</p>
<p>Summer project for him: learn to do his own laundry.</p>
<p>Donna</p>