Choosing the Day's Clothes

Hardy Amies, perhaps the first men's clothing designer and the man who had more influence on my dress than any other, wrote that a man should select his clothes with care so he can forget about them for the rest of the day.

Choosing the day's clothes starts with the suit rotation. Suits are not meant to be worn on consecutive days, and one way to ensure that is to rotate them in the closet. I hang recently worn clothing on the right of one closet bar, and take clothes that I'm going to wear from the left side. Moving them along the bar isn't much of a job - I have quite a few suits but there are no more than a dozen in my active city rotation at any particular time.

I start my selection by considering the formality of the day I expect to have. If it's got at least one serious event, I'll choose the first serious suit at the left hand side of the bar. Or, if it promises to be less formal, I'll pull a Friday suit that's less somber.

Next, I choose my shoes. I won't wear a pair that I've worn already that week, and I relate the formality of the shoe to the formality of the suit. That usually means oxfords with worsteds and bluchers or monks with flannels, linen and tweed.

The time-consuming part of the process is choosing a shirt, necktie and accessories. First comes the shirt. I usually choose light blue, yellow or light gray with a blue suit, or pink, cream or blue with a gray one. I don't have to worry too much about rotation as the laundry makes sure I can't wear any single shirt two weeks in a row.

The necktie comes next (I won't spend space on choosing a necktie since I covered that topic earlier this year). Then I choose a pocket square. That's usually white linen if I'm wearing a silk necktie. If I'm wearing a knit or a grenadine it's likely to be colored silk , in a secondary color that relates to my shirt or a color in my suit. Before going any further, I double-check the combination by putting the square in the jacket's breast pocket, holding the shirt and tie up to the jacket and making adjustments until I get a combination that I'm happy with. Sometimes that happens the first time, and once in a while it takes half a dozen tries.

With shirt, tie and square locked in, I go on to select socks that are compatible with my trousers but pick up the color of something I'm wearing above the waist. Finally, I'll choose braces and cufflinks that relate without matching in one way or another, and I'm done. Elapsed time, ten to twenty minutes to combine three (sometimes four) patterns, including socks, and at least that many colors.