I grew up in the 1960s with a father who handed down his own father's standards. Polished shoes. A belt on your trousers. A clean shirt to the dinner table. No caps in the house. Nothing fancy. Just the basic manners of the time, passed from one man to the next.
But that's not where my relationship with clothes began.
It began with my body.
I was a chubby kid, and I was bullied for it. Spat on, called names, the usual cruelty children are capable of. While my brother and sister bought their clothes at the department stores, I was taken to the men's store because that was where they could fit me. A boy being measured among grown men while the other kids shopped where the other kids shopped.
You learn something about yourself in that moment, and you don't forget it.
So I learned to dress early, and I learned it for a reason. Not for pleasure. For protection.
My palette was navy, grey and brown. Black was off limits, my mother's rule, the same rule that kept me in brown shoes when every other boy wore black. But those safe, quiet colours did a second job I don't think anyone intended.
They let me disappear.
If I got the outside right, if I drew no attention, there was less for anyone to come after. Clothes became camouflage. They were armour before they were ever anything else.
There was light in it too, and it came from two women.
My grandmother and my mother both had strong taste and stronger opinions. Into that grey world of hiding came an orange cashmere sweater from my grandmother one Christmas. An ivory Shetland cardigan with suede elbow patches. A navy, green and tan glen plaid sport coat that she let me choose myself and that I wore to church and birthdays.
I remember those garments more clearly, sixty years later, than almost anything else I owned.
I think I finally understand why.
They were the first time clothes were allowed to be joy instead of defence. The first time I was dressed to be seen, safely and with love, rather than to not be seen at all. Two women with opinions gave a hiding boy permission to have a little colour.
By my teens I had slimmed down and, at sixteen, began working in menswear.
Something happened there that is difficult to explain unless you have spent part of your life being defined by an earlier version of yourself.
These people didn't know the chubby Bill.
They didn't know the boy who had been taunted. They didn't know the embarrassment or the men's store. They knew only the young man standing in front of them.
For the first time, I was a clean slate.
And I could write whatever I wanted on it.
I already knew from childhood that clothes affected how people saw you. What I discovered as a teenager was that I could influence what they saw. A shirt, a tie, the cut of a jacket, polished shoes, the way everything came together. They were signals, and I became very good at understanding them.
It was intoxicating.
Not because I could pretend to be someone I wasn't. Quite the opposite. For the first time I could decide which parts of myself entered the room first.
By seventeen, I was choosing shirts, ties and suits for men, and sometimes for the wives who came in to choose for them. They sought out my eye. I didn't think of it as a particular talent then. It simply came naturally to me. I could look at a man and understand what would work.
The thing I had learned partly to protect myself had become an eye.
That eye would eventually become part of my professional life. Spend a lifetime in luxury, where clients, peers and executives are constantly sizing one another up, and you learn quickly that presentation communicates long before you speak.
I didn't learn that in luxury.
I arrived already knowing it.
Luxury simply gave me forty years to refine it.
But something else was happening at the same time.
I was falling in love with clothes.
Not shopping. There is a difference. I have never particularly loved shopping.
I love choosing.
I love the way a beautifully cut jacket settles on the shoulder. The relationship between a trouser and a shoe. The weight of a fabric. The proportion of a collar. The difference one unexpected piece can make to an otherwise quiet outfit.
And I love the physical sensation of wearing something that is extraordinarily well made.
Until you've worn a Kiton suit, for example, it is difficult to explain how effortlessly a suit can hang from your shoulders. It can feel almost like wearing a T-shirt.
But I can get enormous pleasure from a pair of MNG jeans and a white Frame T-shirt too.
I didn't always understand that.
When I first started working and taking control of my own wardrobe, small as it was, I confused price with satisfaction. I thought the more expensive thing must somehow be the better thing, and that owning it would necessarily give me greater pleasure.
Experience taught me otherwise.
Price and satisfaction can coexist beautifully. They just don't guarantee one another.
A remarkable piece of tailoring may be worth every dollar to the person wearing it. An inexpensive pair of jeans may make that same person feel terrific. A costly jacket can hang unworn in a closet while something bought years ago for very little becomes an old friend.
Price can tell me what something costs.
It cannot tell me what it will mean to me.
That took me a long time to learn.
There is another part of this story that has taken even longer.
The body changes faster than the picture we carry of it.
I have wrestled with body image, in one form or another, for most of my life. The strange thing about changing your body is that the mirror doesn't always get the message.
You can lose the weight. You can change your proportions. You can spend years building the body you wanted. Other people can see the evidence quite clearly.
And some days you still see the eight-year-old boy.
I don't know that this ever disappears entirely. Perhaps it doesn't need to.
I've asked myself whether I would have loved composing clothes the way I have my entire adult life if I'd grown up at a normal weight. Would I have gone into menswear? Would I have developed the same eye?
I don't know.
Maybe the eye was always there and would have found its way out regardless. Maybe the wound is why I looked so closely in the first place.
I've made my peace with not knowing.
The wound may have taught me to look. It doesn't get to take credit for everything I eventually learned to see.
When I was coming up, there were no menswear influencers. There was no social media. I had GQ and Esquire once a month in the mail, and I studied every page, editorial and advertising alike.
But I learned very early that the six-foot model with the thirty-two-inch waist and perfect jaw was not me. I could admire what he was wearing without believing I needed to own it.
That distinction feels harder today.
We live in a world engineered for instant gratification. See it. Want it. Click it. Own it.
And I wish I could tell you that after sixty years of dressing myself and forty years around some of the finest clothes in the world, I am immune to it.
I'm not.
Sometimes an Instagram Reel gets me too, even at 68.
The objective isn't to become impervious to influence. I don't think that's possible, and I'm not sure it would even be desirable. I've spent my life being influenced by people with better eyes, different experiences and something to teach me.
The important thing is not to surrender your judgment.
Because we outsource judgment remarkably easily.
It's expensive, therefore it must be good.
Everyone is wearing it, therefore I should want it.
This brand is prestigious, therefore I'll feel better owning it.
But satisfaction doesn't work that way.
Nobody else can tell you how much pleasure something will give you.
The world can tell you what something costs. A brand can tell you its history. An influencer can tell you why he loves it. An algorithm can put it in front of you twelve times before lunch.
None of them gets the final vote.
You do.
So look at everything.
Learn from people whose eye you respect. Understand your body and your proportions. Buy the expensive thing when the quality, craft or sheer pleasure of it matters to you. Buy the inexpensive thing when it makes you feel terrific. Take inspiration wherever you find it.
But learn to recognize the difference between something being beautiful and something belonging to you.
And before you buy it, perhaps ask yourself what you're actually buying.
The garment?
The craftsmanship?
The pleasure?
The status?
The belonging?
The fantasy of the person you imagine yourself becoming when you put it on?
There isn't necessarily a wrong answer.
Just know your answer.
My own relationship with clothes began with a boy trying not to be seen. Then a teenager discovered he could decide what people saw. The young man sometimes confused price with value. The older man knows better, most of the time.
The armour never entirely left me.
I still reach for navy and grey and brown. But I don't wear those colours now because I want to disappear. I wear them because they're mine.
Perhaps that is what personal style eventually becomes.
Not the ability to dress so other people recognize who you are.
The ability to look in the mirror and recognize yourself.
And on the days when that eight-year-old boy happens to be looking back too, he doesn't get the final vote anymore.
Until next time,
