Tag: fashion

Dress sharp for the pulpit with PastorFashion.com

This website has been around for a couple of months now, and I’m still fairly sure nobody knows if it’s actually a joke or not. I mean. It’s a joke. But I’m not sure if it’s intentionally a joke, or if we’re laughing at it.

PastorFashion.com is celebrity preacher Ed Young’s gift to the world. It features fashion tips to help pastors teach the Bible while being really, really, ridiculously good looking. Or at least well dressed.

The latest post is called “Skinny Jeans and testosterone” and contains this video for your edification.

Some handy fashion tips from Put This On

I’m pretty horrible when it comes to fashion, unless I’m really dressing up for something. The other day I spent about an hour and a half trying to tie a full Windsor knot while driving to a wedding (and while stopped at a beach near the venue – see Mitch’s photo blog for proof), without a mirror. I kept retying it because dammit. My tie will be equilateral not isosceles.

So, if you’re bad with fashion, like I am, these (basic) tips from fashion tumblog “Put This On” will set you straight.

A random sampling:

  1. Your tie should reach your belt line – it shouldn’t end above your belt or below it.
  2. Your tie knot should have a dimple.
  3. Only wear a tie if you’re also wearing a suit or sportcoat (or, very casually, a sweater). Shirt, tie and no jacket is the wedding uniform of a nine-year-old.
  4. The only men who should wear black suits during the day are priests, undertakers, secret agents, funerals attendees and yokels.

Fashion advice from Mr T

Yes. 80s Fashion. Mr T. Kitsch music. YouTube perfection.

“Mustard socks and a ketchup sash: she’s a real hotdog”

Wow.

Pop a tie on…

Ties are classy. But if you’re not, and you want to either passive aggressively make annoying noises in meetings, or be a scion of fashion, then you should get one of these bubble wrap ties. The bubble wrap is meant to be worn on the inside. But I reckon you could flip it easily.

How to dress good at work: A video guide

Put This On, Episode 3: Work from Put This On on Vimeo.

From the only fashion blog I occasionally browse… mostly because of things like this:

And this:

How to make the man in your life tuck his shirts in

Old advice, but good advice…

From a book of tips and tricks submitted to a radio show in ages past, found at Questionable Advice.

The man scarf

I pride myself on being a bit of a manly man. I like football, red meat, and tinkering with bits of technology until they no longer work. I don’t wear v-neck t-shirts, or pastel colours, I can barely tell which side of most clothes shops is for men, and which is for women. And don’t get me started on modern shorts… alright. It’s too late.

A shorts digression
In summer I like to wear shorts. I don’t really like wearing board shorts (except to the beach) and I have lots of denim shorts (I don’t know why) – but nothing really in between except a trusty pair of cargos. Cargos are practical. Manly men wear them. They have lots of pockets.

So I went to DFO in Brisbane. It’s factory outlet mecca. The females of the species love it. It has lots of clothes shops, bag shops, and shoe shops. I searched high, I searched low, but other than designated sportswear and outdoor workwear there was nary a pair of shorts to be found that didn’t have stovepipe type legs with a folded up hem. These are girls shorts. Even I can tell that. Popular only with practical women and effeminate males. When did it become acceptable for men to wear shorts that tapered and finished above the knee, with the excess fabric folded up and stiched into a hem shape? And why can’t I buy normal shorts? Just regular. Practical. To the knee or below (but shorter than three quarter pants). Shorts. It drove me bonkers. Luckily it’s winter now so I don’t have to worry about the situation for another three months.

Back on topic
It is winter. And having spent the last four years living in the tropics, in Townsville, where the weatherman taunts the southerners by reminding them that it’s still 27 degrees during the day, I am no longer acclimatised to cold weather. Anything below 20 degrees requires three layers. My wife, who has blue blood (she tells me it’s a broken hypothalamus) can’t leave the house in less than four.

And it’s only going to get colder.

One piece of sartorial style of women and gay men that I envy is the scarf. It’s practical. It warms the neck. But in most senses and uses these days is a fashion accessory that is the realm of the metro or the homo:


Beckham even wears a scarf in the summer:

I think real men, if they’re going to wear scarves, wear them like this:

Though, according to this article, the way men are meant to wear scarves is:

“A man’s scarf should be worn inside his overcoat and exposed an inch above the collar, with the tie on view.”

But I don’t own an overcoat.

Apparently wearing a scarf, in this style, in New Zealand:

Prompts people to question your sexuality.

Pilots can wear scarves without similar questions being raised:

When I googled “man scarf” I found this “fresh off the press” article from news.com.au suggesting that man scarves are “in” this winter, and given my conformist tendency to non-conform I now have to suffer a cold winter, or invent some sort of leg warmer for the neck… Which somebody on instructables has already done for the ladies

Or I could throw my lot in with the cowl wearers – there are worse things than dressing like Batman…


Here’s a man’s guide to knitting one

He looks manly.
The cowl is a hoodie without the jumper. Practical and fashionable. Form and function. A triumph of winter wear. Problem solved.

On for young and old

I subscribe to Dinosaur Comics. I read them most days. I find them vaguely amusing about 60% of the time and laugh out loud amusing about 2% of the time.

Today’s comic, and the associated diatribe about the way old people handle stories about young people and technology made me laugh. The story it’s responding to is this one about a young guy who used an updated Facebook status as an alibi. You can’t get that from the comic…

But the associated editorial spells it all out…

But as that article goes on, it slides deep into “oh man OLD PEOPLE STEREOTYPES” territory. Joseph Pollini, who otherwise sounds awesome because he lists “hostage negotiation” as his primary area of expertise, says that teenage HACKERS could have posted that pancake-centric Facebook update to Rodney’s profile while posing as Rodney at his home computer, while Rodney was actually out busy robbing at the time – which, you know, is possible? But it’s not very likely, and it takes some knowledge. No problem, says Joseph! Teenagers are really good at internet, because “they use it all the time”. “They [teenagers!] could develop an alibi. They watch television, the movies, there is a multitude of reasons why someone of that age would have the knowledge to do a crime like that.”

ABC Radio up here in Townsville has an amusing weekly segment with a local lady in her twilight year (how do you say “old” in a politically correct manner?). Last night she was talking about kids and their fat thumbs that come from an insatiable desire to play the latest greatest games.

I think future children are going to be playing the games their fathers give them. The old old generation miss the point that the new old generation embrace technology the same way the new new generation do. Though I suppose there’s a difference between the way even my youngest sister approaches technology and the way I do.

Mark Driscoll, when he was in Australia, made a comment about faith – one generation wholly owns it, the next accepts (or assumes) it, and the next denies it. I think technology works in reverse.

Let us, for a moment, take a look at my family as a case study…

My dad was a classic early adopter. He was an electrical engineer which put him at the front of the curve when it came to developing computer technology. So far at the front of the curve that he wrote a book about one of the first computers. This, through a variety of circumstances detailed in that link, led to a lifetime of early adopting. His generation (and to be kind, the one before it) built the computer industry.

This in turn meant that I grew up experiencing a heap of new computer products and games. I think I wrote my first assignment using the Internet (CompuServe) in 1994. It was about Rwanda. It was, on reflection, possibly the best assignment I ever wrote (except maybe for the self help guide to writing self help books).  I like technology. I use technology. I find technology incredibly useful. I think, though this hasn’t really been tested, I could function without it.

My generation benefited greatly from the work of the generation previously – and many of us (not me) are now internet millionaires and billionaires because we missed the first dot com boom and caught the second. We are also a generation of hackers and pirates who believe technology should work for us, not us for it.

Meanwhile the next generation down couldn’t really live without it. Lets take little sister number three as an example. I suspect if I stole her mobile phones (that’s right, plural) she’d go into meltdown. She can correct me if I’m wrong.

Her generation have grown up immersed in technology – some of them have one mobile phone with a bunch of different SIM cards based on who they want to call on free deals. They have adopted a new, and very stupid language where words substitute numbers for letters and acronyms and initialisms flourish.

I’m friends with some of her friends on Facebook. And they’re all like “OMG, OMG!!! I’d totally die without my phone? I totes* need to update my Facebook Status with every meaningless thought” and “where’s my pancakes?”… though that’s sans punctuation including apostrophes. Because they don’t know how to use them.

Her generation, well, they write viruses that carry popular internet pranks onto the phone handsets of many of my generation’s geeks. Those people running around with unlocked iPhones.

I don’t know if there’s a point to this diatribe. Except perhaps to highlight how silly it sounds when any generation talks about the next generation without completely understanding where they’re coming from. People older than me didn’t grow up with computers – though they design the computers and the software that I like to play with… To bring in another topic altogether, this is like music. Young people think anyone about ten years older than them must be out of touch with their music and what’s cool – and yet they’re all listening (with the exception of Jonas Brothers fans) to music made by people ten years older than them.

I think it’s sad when people my age are excited by the prospect of seeing Britney Spears (who’s two years older than me) in concert. Don’t they realise she’s just a vacuous example of our generation? Why aren’t they listening to Radiohead or someone respectable.

The other area this whole generation gap expresses itself in is fashion. I want to know if I’m going to suddenly start dressing like an old person – or if what I wear now, or what others of my generation wear now, will suddenly become old person clothing at some point. I can’t wait for vintage vintage T-Shirts to be the clothing of choice for vintage people. As someone who grew up wanting to find grandpa shirts in op-shops I sense some sort of irony in people buying the t-shirts I wear now in op-shops in twenty years. All in a bid to be cool and authentic.

That is all.

*Totes is an actual quote from several of the next generation’s statuses. It’s a dumb word. It means totally. This is the generation gap at work people.