I texted my husband at work today, asking if he wanted to go out to dinner later. He answered: “I am on the road very hot and my zipper broke and I have a meeting at 3.” I’m not kidding. That was not really a response to “Do you want to go out to dinner?,” but if you know my husband, it sort of makes sense. I should mention that the temperature is well into the nineties today, with the humidity making it feel as though it’s around 400 billion degrees and I know that he left the house this morning in a long sleeved dress shirt and wool pants. And he’s not a lawyer or stockbroker. Again, you have to know my husband for that to make sense. So I texted him again and suggested that he stop off at a clothing store and ask a well-dressed sales associate to help him buy some weather appropriate, fashionable, office-casual clothes with functioning zippers and buttons. His response to that: “I have meetings every hour and my zipper is open and I forgot to shave.” Right… Again, the type of response I’d expect from Phil. I could see he really did need my help so I asked him where he was on the road and when he answered, I told him where he could conveniently stop off on the way to his office to buy new clothes. His answer this time: “too hot no time people waiting in my office it’s fine George [his co-worker] is putting safety pins on me in the car.”  

Maybe I should have started by saying that Phil, my husband has absolutely no interest in fashion, and he firmly believes it’s because he’s a man and men are not supposed to care about clothes. If I buy him new clothes, he’ll wear them, but he never thinks about it himself unless his zipper breaks, and even then… I try to tell him that men’s fashion is a real thing but he doesn’t believe me, saying that I shop too much and that I have too much clothing and too many pairs of shoes because I’m a woman. Too many pairs of shoes? No such thing! But men’s fashion is a real thing. Anyone watch Mad Men on AMC? The clothes on the show are great-and I mean the women’s and men’s clothes. The hats and ties, even for casual outings. Watching a show set in the sixties is a great way to see how fashion changes for men and women. None of us dress the way they did then. Which brings me to my point: men’s fashion is most definitely a thing.