0
In Italy it’s said that men can’t find wives because their mothers spoil them so much that no contemporary female is willing to undertake all the cosseting required to keep them happy. In Japan it’s because men expect wives to live limited lifestyles while they go out to bars and get drunk and flirt with hostesses. Around the world, the male seems to be under threat.
It’s not unusual to see men in their forties and fifties who are dressed in more or less the same clothes as a seven year old boy: T-shirt, jeans, scruffy socks and trainers. It’s as if they are demonstrating their inability to grow up through their clothing choices.
If you’re a chap, and you’re wandering around in shorts, a T-shirt emblazoned with a rock group who split up (or died) twenty years ago and mucky trainers, you are not an attractive prospect for anything but a vagrancy charge. In the office, these same men wear crumpled, stained polo-shirts, which ride up over their bellies, or hang down over their backsides, teamed with equally crumpled trousers, often with a waistband that has folded in half through age and through being worn under that low-slung belly. Not only is this unattractive to women, it’s a turn-off for recruitment and promotion. If you look like a slob, you get treated like a slob, simple as that.
So what to do?
Men could start by raising their clothing game. If you’re wearing a shirt, tuck it in. Make sure it stays tucked in. If it doesn’t, it’s the wrong size for you. Iron your polo-shirts. If you can’t manage that, put them on the washing line on a plastic coat hanger so the creases drop out. If you tumble-dry them, take them out of the machine as soon as it finishes, shake them and fold them. Don’t leave them there for days so the creases set like stone.
Throw away stained clothing. It isn’t cute.
If you’re a bit chunky, wear trousers and shirts in the same colour and depth of colour – charcoal trousers and shirt, or dark blue shirt and navy trousers. If you have to wear white shirts to work, choose a pale tie rather than a dark one, and a dark belt that is the exact depth of colour as your trousers – you want to draw the eye away from your waist (or where your waist should be) and anything that divides you in two horizontally highlights your waist, while a dark tie acts like an arrow, pointing down to where you are widest.
Make sure your clothes fit – polo-shirts can look tailored if the shoulder seam is on the shoulder and the neck doesn’t gape, but if the shoulders creep down your arms, or the neck on your shirt strains or bags, it looks like you got dressed in the dark in somebody else’s clothing.
No related posts.
Back to top
