IN TRANSITION #20
Along with what seemed like the rest of America, I took to the shopping malls last weekend. It was, in retrospect, an inopportune time to go looking for clothes -- I may have been the only person who wasn't consulting a gift list -- but as a full-fledged working adult (white-collar, anyhow) the time had come to take my wardrobe to the next level. I needed a suit, and no enormous mass of waddling Christmas shoppers could get in my way.
Partly for financial reasons and partly for psychological ones, I had put off the experience of buying my first suit as long as possible. It was a rite of passage I had, if not dreaded, at least felt especially unenthusiastic about.
And for good reason. Suits are what fathers -- and some mothers, too -- wear to work. That and bar mitzvahs have been my only associations with suits: Torah portions and my dad rushing out the door to the garage, a cup of coffee in one hand and a stack of papers in the other. Even when my brother got married, suits were the exception at the wedding, not the rule.
My conception of formal wear has been forced to mature a very long way in just a couple of years. I grew up in southern Arizona; before Boston, my idea of formality meant tucking in a shirt with buttons on it -- and maybe for a really special occasion, a tie.
''When you start working here full time, I'm going to need you to wear nicer clothes," my boss told me this summer after we decided I'd transition from part-time student assistant to full-time temp. She added, ''Not jeans!" when it occurred to her, after seeing me in sandals and shorts for months, that I might not know what ''nicer clothes" meant.
College was a fashion awakening. Apparently, here in sophisticated Boston ''black-tie" means ''full tux." My roommates snickered the first time I wore a suit to a formal dance -- a suit my parents had purchased for me back in high school. Yet I held out despite the glares and wore that suit all four years of college, through black-tie dinners, theater openings, and fund-raising balls. (Perhaps simply to play out the stereotype to its extreme, Harvard students find an inordinate number of excuses to get dressed up.)
Don't get me wrong; I appreciate nice clothes. I just typically feel an excessive amount of buyer's remorse the moment the receipt gets rung up. The bottom line just never feels justified, and as a result, I tend to draw out the purchasing process until it becomes excruciating for whoever has agreed to go shopping with me. These days I shop alone.
(My college friends can testify that at spring break in my sophomore year, it took me several hours of traipsing around downtown San Francisco before I could settle on a single pair of shoes. By the way, Brian and Sophie, I'm still wearing them. But for nearly a hundred bucks, why shouldn't I?)
All of this is to explain the shock I felt when my suit shopping Saturday went off without a hitch -- aside from the lines and hordes. I might even say the purchase brought me a significant amount of pleasure. It helps that the buy was reasonably priced, and Eric, the teenage employee who waited on me (itself an unfamiliar luxury), successfully distracted me from talking myself out of it.
(I did, however, call several friends from inside the dressing room on my cellphone to do just that. But none would. ''Buy it!! Buy it NOW!!" one friend replied in a text message.)
My new suit is navy blue with three buttons down the front. When I wear it with the tie that Eric picked out for me, I think I look pretty grown up but not so grown up that I feel old.
And best of all, it fit directly off the rack; I don't even have to get it tailored.
One step at a time.
Benjamin Toff lives in Somerville. Reach him at benjamin.toff@gmail.com.
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