Dress Like a Man (25 page)

Care for your shoes (and other leather items) with a series of staggered steps:

• Brush shoes off briskly when you take them off. Keep a rag or a shoe brush by the door (or wherever you store your shoes) to make it easy -- if the tool's right there, you're much more likely to use it.
  
• Wipe wet shoes off when you come in. Don't leave them to air dry, especially near a heat source like a radiator. If you get salt or other sidewalk chemicals on your shoes during the winter, be sure to scrub it off with a damp cloth right away. Salt will permanently crack and stain the leather.
  
• Every few months (or when you start seeing visible scuffs), clean your shoes, dry them thoroughly, and (once they're completely dry) polish them.
  
• Once or twice a year, apply a leather conditioner. Work the conditioner into the leather, wipe off the excess and let it sit for a night. Then wipe it down again and polish over the conditioner. That seals it in and keeps the leather nice and supple.
  

The difference in lifespan really is impressive, here. If you're careful with them, well-made leather shoes should be good for a decade or more. If you're not, they could be permanently warped or stained by the end of a year.

Repairs and Other Maintenance

A single frayed cuff or missing button has the power to make your whole outfit look sloppy. Fix damaged clothing as early as possible -- it minimizes the damage, and it reduces your temptation to throw a damaged piece of clothing on because it's not
that
bad and probably no one will even notice, right?

Most things can be taken care of at a tailor's shop, or even some dry cleaners. Small repairs will only cost a few bucks. Skilled tailors, while more expensive, can give even a badly damaged piece of clothing a new lease on life.

Key places to watch for maintenance needs include:

• Buttons
  - These are almost always the first to go. Keep an eye on them, and replace them when they
  start
  getting loose -- trimming a loose button and replacing it is much less damaging to the fabric beneath it than letting it rip free on its own.
  
• Cuffs
  - Inevitably the first place to start fraying. Trouser cuffs can be hemmed slightly shorter, tucking the frayed cloth inside the cuff, until you run out of spare length in the legs. Shirt cuffs are a bit more challenging because of the buttons, but can usually be hemmed the same way at least once.
  
• Collars
  - Fraying can be an issue here, but mostly you're watching for staining and rolling. Give stained collars a long soak in some water with a splash of vinegar (or detergent) and then wash them conventionally to get rid of the stains, and iron them to keep them from curling up on themselves. Just don't mix the order up -- you never want to iron stained clothing. That'll set the stain in permanently.
  
• Linings
  - Jacket and suit linings tend to wear out before the body of the suit. That's the point, really -- it's cheaper to have a lining patched or replaced than to throw out an expensive piece of wool clothing. This is a bit more expensive than having a button or a hem fixed, and you'll need to go to a professional tailor, but it's worth the investment once your lining starts to tear or wear through. The next thing to go will be the jacket, and wouldn't you rather keep that for another decade or two?
  

These are small, somewhat tedious tasks and errands that are easy to put off.
Don't.
Your clothing will literally last for decades if you take good care of it, and the savings from that are well worth a bit of inconvenience and up-front expense in the short term.

C
HAPTER 35:
G
ROOMING

Your body is part of your look too! The best clothes flatter it, rather than hiding or disguising it, so make the job easy for your clothing by taking care of your body too.

This is pretty basic stuff, so we won't go into too much detail, but whenever you want to look your best (and you always want to look your best, right?) you should do a quick run-down of all the obvious grooming details that people will notice:

• Hair
  should be consistent. We don't say "neat," because sometimes a deliberately mussed look is the right one, but in those cases it should look
  deliberate.
  Just "mussed" is bad.
  
• Facial hair
  , similarly, should have a unified look. Go for the artfully scruffy look if you must (it comes in and out of fashion, mostly depending on what the leading men in Hollywood blockbusters are doing), but trim around the edges. There should always be a clearly-defined border to your beard, and it should always end just below the chin. No neckbeards, please.
  
• Nails
  should be short, blunt, and clean. If you tend to get build-up under them (and a lot of guys do), invest in a small nail brush. Keep it by the sink, and use it whenever you wash your hands. Toenails should be trimmed too, even when it's not sandal season, both for your health and for the occasional barefoot-around-houseguests type of situation.
  
• Scents
  of any kind -- especially cologne, but also aftershave and even your soap and shampoo -- should only be noticeable to a person you are embracing. If it can be smelled from further away that that, the scent is too strong. Obviously, that applies to body odor, too, so keep your pits clean and throw on some deodorant if you need it.
  

Try to make minor grooming maintenance a daily habit. When you really need to impress -- an interview, say, or a date -- you can take a little more time and care to make sure everything's neat and crisp, but that job will be a lot easier if neatness is your default habit.

T
HE
F
INAL
W
ORD

That was a lot of information.

You didn't sit down and read it straight through, right? (We told you not to do that.)

There are a lot of good takeaways that we could restate here. Section by section, you've read about why dressing well matters, how to build a stylish wardrobe from scratch, what to wear when, the physical properties of clothing, and detailed descriptions of all the major menswear items out there.

All of those are important. It's good information.

But at the end of the day, here's the most important question: are you happy with your look?

That is to say, do you feel as attractive as you want to? Are you getting the respect you think you deserve? Are you successfully avoiding any of the negative consequences of looking sloppy?

If you've achieved those things, congratulations! Your look is a good one. You are dressing well, for all practical purposes.

If you're
not
achieving all those things yet, there's work to be done. But don't panic. You've got a great book to help you along, right?

Happy dressing, gentlemen!

Reminder - Bonus Posters

A final reminder:

Your purchase of
A Man's Guide to Style
comes with
free
poster-sized infographics from
www.RealMenRealStyle.com
.

We've included nine illustrated posters on everything from how to wear black tie to how to fold a suit jacket and how to tie your necktie eighteen different ways.

They're our gift to you, free with the purchase of this book.

To access the bonus posters, go to
http://www.realmenrealstyle.com/dress-like-a-man-bonus/
and use the password "dresslikeaman" -- all one word and no capital letters.

Enjoy!

Table of Contents

Copyright

Bonus Posters

Section 1: Introduction

Section 2: Building a Wardrobe

Section 3: What to Wear and When to Wear It

Section 4: Physical Properties of Clothing

Section 5: Menswear, Piece by Piece

Section 6: Conclusion

Reminder - Bonus Posters