I didn’t start out in this world with a sense of fashion. My first influences—my parents—have probably never fit Yves Saint Laurent, Coco Chanel or Giorgio Armani into any conversation. My earliest memories of my mother’s glamor involved muumuus and wigs. My father stuck to suits and standard ties with diagonal stripes. Shoe polish was important but it came with connotations of labor instead of shine. At some point in my youth, my mother took a continuing education sewing class at the local high school and that brought on a mortifying period of making matching t-shirts for my brother and me, dressing us as twins even though I was three years older. Luckily all evidence of this “trend” in our household is in my father’s slide collection which no one has ever transferred to photos or any other kind of easily viewed humiliation. Lying around somewhere is an actual photograph of my brother and me sporting Budweiser tees at Busch Gardens in Tampa, Florida, as macaws perched on our elbows. Classy stuff.
My first personal fashion choices were copycat clothes based on what my peers wore: disco shirts, a pair of platform shirts and nearly knee-high tube socks that I liked because a few horizontal stripes of color looked crisper against bright white. (I could have scripted and starred in my own Tide commercial.) “Bucking the trend” for me meant preferring Lee jeans to Levi’s. Mostly, I remained a follower. Skintight Calvin Kleins. Jordache. Velour shirts. Izods. Polos. The fashion industry needs followers. I was still my awkward self, but I was at least a geek in Calvins. No one asked me if I was Amish. That was my fashion bar.
By the time I hit eighteen—An adult? Me?!—a few more personal preferences had crept in. Wimbledon-worthy K-Swiss tennis shoes. A WilliWear shirt that felt as comfy as a pajama top. Perry Ellis spread collar dress shirts. I was a closeted gay guy in Texas who figured I might as well make that closet look nice.
Gays were into fashion, right? I bought GQ to look at the fashion ads (and unsmiling, impossibly chiseled models’ faces). International Male tracked me down—did they have gaydar?—trying to entice me into buying skimpy, colorful undies and oddly cut shirts that looked stunning on their own crop of unsmiling, impossibly chiseled models—the faces and the hairless bodies. I never got duped. I knew I couldn’t carry off those garments with my goofy smile and my non-chiseled everything.
My first year out of college, I taught at a private special education school outside of Dallas. It was my dream job, but the pay was a pittance—less than. I moonlit as a sales associate at Sanger-Harris, a higher end department store, at least the one at the recently razed Valley View Center in Dallas. I loved the shifts when I was assigned to the Guess/Generra/Claiborne collections and felt it was a personal affront whenever my manager stuck me in Ocean Pacific, Levi’s or, gross, Haggar. I began to understand a fashion hierarchy and spent my breaks zipping over to Bloomingdale’s (snootier than Sanger-Harris) to fondle Armani clothes. Yes, they felt amazing! It took me many paychecks before I could buy a coveted Armani sweater which I still have and wear once each winter.
RIP, Fred Segal, Santa Monica.
I found my own favorite brands and styles. Girbaud jeans. Paul Smith shirts. Guess watches. Cole Haan and Kenneth Cole shoes. Moving to L.A., I fell in love with Hugo Boss, a few label-subtle Tommy Hilfiger offerings and hip stores like Ron Ross, George’s on Melrose and, especially, Fred Segal in Santa Monica where I bought a pair of purple and green paisley socks and sought out an Italian shirt and shoes plus a Hugo Boss suit and tie to match them. The fact the look began with socks felt insane. I understood fashion!
When I moved to Vancouver, I landed a job in a men’s boutique on trendy Robson Street, but it was a temporary gig. I got back into teaching and there wasn’t a need to dazzle ten-year-olds, the girls having an indiscriminating affinity for pink and Hello Kitty, the boys wearing the same Pokémon sweatshirts for days on end. I’d also come to realize that the stereotype about gays having impeccable fashion taste was vastly overstated. They followed the flock, wearing tank tops, jean shorts and Doc Martens or, worse, construction boots. The misguided independents wore passé Cosby-style sweaters and, on one first date, a Batman t-shirt. ZOWIE! KLONK! My fashion sense was bound to wane.
It might have been a gradual thing, but seitan (or something like that) finally did me in. It happened when I went for dinner with Ron, my closest friend in Vancouver. We have plenty in common except for food. Picking a restaurant has been a constant challenge.
For the first decade I knew him, there always seemed to be a fight in him, needing to resist my personal choice as a vegetarian, wanting to assert the supremacy of meat eating. So often after I’d order a meal—pasta primavera is what every restaurant served the “difficult” diners back then—he’d enter a one-way debate about the absurdity, even the hypocrisy, of being vegetarian. What was sushi if it was just seaweed and rice? Why did vegetarians eat veggie “burgers”? Couldn’t they come up with their own cuisine? Kale is just roughage. “Kale chips” are NOT a thing!
The gift I couldn't ignore.
His breaking point came after my 40th birthday, when another friend gave me a vegan cookbook and, as I randomly flipped pages as a performative measure to demonstrate my excitement about the gift—So thoughtful! I LOVE it! (I hate birthdays.)—my eyes fixed on an unknown term in the glossary. A certain binding ingredient wasn’t vegan. It wasn’t even vegetarian.
Cheese suddenly became very complicated and basically a no-go at restaurants since staff were as unfamiliar with the complicating term as I had been. It meant cheese-less pizzas which continues to baffle helpful servers (as recently as last week) who assume I’m making a mistake. It unnecessarily draws out my order. It’s like a spotlight is cast on me and an alarm has been triggered. WARNING: WEIRDO DETECTED. I’m mortified. I don’t like attention. I love When Harry Met Sally, but I never want to be compared to Sally when she orders food. After the server escapes, I’m met with an oft-asked question by people at my table: “Why can’t you eat cheese?”
It's tasty, I swear. Usually, my
friends look away. The horror!
If I were smarter, I’d say I’m lactose intolerant, someone would say, “You poor thing” and we’d resume talking about the perks of working from home or movies only one person at the table has seen because everyone has different streaming channels. But I’m dutifully honest. If someone asks, I assume they are genuinely curious. (As an introvert, I abhor inane chitchat, including longwinded takes on movies only one of us has seen.) My dinner companions prod when I try to brush things off with, “It’s complicated.” I explain. Ron’s heard it all umpteen times. Nowadays, he jumps in and gives the explanation, the disdain almost disguised.
When I first had to abstain from public cheese consumption, it was a step too far for Ron. I’d become radicalized. I’d insulted pizza. I’d become a mocking sympathizer of the truly unfortunate souls who are lactose intolerant.
Ron loves food. His memories are always first about the food. I’m sure he saw the Eiffel Tower and The Louvre in Paris, but every recollection is about the baguettes. (He rhapsodizes over them!) Dallas is about a slice of pecan pie he once had. Any mention of the province of Ontario leads to a reference to a butter tart served at a particular law school cafeteria. When I went on a recent epic hike last month in Washington, his first response was, “Did you stop at the place with the sausage breakfast sandwich?”
While my cheese choice in no way kiboshed his opportunities to talk at length about gorgonzola—it comes up annually, out of the blue—he’d had enough veggie-babble. He went for the jugular. He made a show of shifting in his seat and peeking under the table before saying, “If you’re a vegetarian, why are your shoes leather?”
It had been asked before. By others seeking to find fault in vegetarianism, even by Ron. It was the Achilles’ heel in what he saw as my sanctimonious dietary nonsense. I responded as I had before, “I don’t eat shoes.” We moved on to other topics, finding common ground on something about Will & Grace or Roger Federer’s rapid rise in tennis. But I knew I had a shoe problem.
I’d never bought a leather jacket or, god forbid, leather pants. These were style statements that didn’t fit my clean, conservative look. I would never make a transformation like Olivia Newton-John’s Sandy Olsson in Grease. I would never get a leather sofa or buy a car with a leather interior. All these things involved too much (dead) cow. But I’d told myself leather was unavoidable in some contexts. Belts. Watch bands. Shoes. I could not live in flip flops and running shoes. Neither option was professional, even for teachers.
I couldn’t shrug things off anymore. My fashion would have to take a hit.
Fun but never sophisticated.
I gave away the Guess watches. (The brand was out of style anyway.) I found an online company and ordered vegan belts—not some hippie-dippy kind, woven from hemp and dried corn husks (relax…I made that up), but pleather, available in only black or one shade of brown. I bought a few pleather dress shoes as well which came off as much like the real thing as vegan cheeze. (Not that well at all.) I started my Converse shoe collection which now stands at thirty-six pair. I love ’em. They make me happy. But they don’t signalize classy like my dearly departed Cole Haans or Kenneth Coles or other treasures I must overlook at Nordstrom.
So there it is. I live a more authentic life. My values are better aligned. But there’s a reason my Instagram is all about mountain hikes and quirky urban discoveries and not my outfit du jour. My quest to be a gay fashion icon got short-circuited by marinara pizza—all tomato sauce, Kalamata olives, basil and, hopefully, a damned good crust. I don’t freak out if the sauce splatter on my clothes. It is, after all, just a shirt.
