At first, I thought it was some kind of a joke. LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers showed up for game three of their playoff series with the Indiana Pacers in Indianapolis Friday night with identical gray suits. Identical all the way down to the pants legs failing to come to the top of the shoes.
In LeBron’s case, the pants were a good four or five inches short–allowing you to see pretty much all of his dress socks. What made it look even worse, was that he was wearing some kind of high-top boot–and the pants still weren’t long enough. So I figured that it was some kind of inside joke that would make the players and coaching staff laugh and relaxed for Friday night’s game (which the Cavs still lost).
But then, my wife and I attended a “gala event” in Madison at Monona Terrace on Saturday night and what did I see but young guys wearing suits that also did not come to the top of their shoes. They decided to “accent” this ludicrous look by wearing bright colored socks so that the pants length deficiency really stood out.
This is apparently the “new look”–looking like you don’t know how to buy clothes that fit properly. It was also at the “gala event” that I noticed that the suit jackets were way too short. Gone is the cut that allowed you to just curl your fingers under the bottom of the coat. The new “hip” style is to have the coat barely go past your waist–so that your butt sticks out of the bottom. Add to that sleeves that don’t even come to your wrist and you have the look of someone that is wearing his younger brother’s suit because he doesn’t have one.
The incredible “shrinking” of men’s fashion actually started awhile ago with something called the “slim fit”. It played off of “skinny jeans” for women that somewhere, men decided would look good on them too. But when you have actual thigh muscles, “slim fit” makes you feel like you are wearing compression tights instead of dress pants. There is also the matter of “leaving nothing to the imagination” in another anatomical area that I won’t get into much detail in this forum.
Hopefully, the “short suit” as I’ve taken to call it will be as much of a fad as the leisure suit and bell-bottoms were during the fashion disaster that was the 1970’s and we can get back to looking like there isn’t a world-wide fabric shortage going on that prevents tailors from using enough cloth to properly dress guys.
