BABY...WE'RE A DYING BREED

Beginnings matter—an introduction.

I AM 42 YEARS OLD and I can say with almost absolute certainty that everything I learned about getting dressed I learned from everyone but my father.

Wait. He did teach me one thing: get dressed for church. Tie, jacket, comb your hair, the whole nine. It was a “deep respect for The Higher Power” thing. Like going down on a knee to approach a medieval king or proposing marriage. You get dressed up for such occasions. And by “you” I mean him. He got dressed up for church. Dad was a purveyor of high end vacuums that trapped dust in water (fancy speak for traveling salesman). That required a suit. No middle American was going to hand over a $1,200 check for a “home environment cleaning system” unless a suit was on the other end of it. Dad needed those clothes for work. Us kids were left to fend for ourselves. We weren’t well to-do enough to have kid size dress clothes like a tie and jacket. And if we did, my little brother would have just started a collection of permanent stains on them.

I don’t remember what kind of knot dad tied for church, but he tied it approximately 831 Sundays. He never actually showed me until the night of my high school graduation. It was performed on this intricately woven boardroom tie too fancy for anyone under 40. It was nicer than the suit I was wading in.

A girl friend's dad helped me pick out that suit. It was my first. You never forget your first suit. It was an anemic shade of beige. It was pleated. It was RALPH. No, not Ralph Lauren, sorta Ralph Lauren. It was a department store diffusion line once removed. It was $400…then marked down to $200 for a Labor Day weekend sale. I was shamelessly there for the sale. The date had been circled in Sharpie for weeks on one of those wall calendars with inspirational quotes across the bottom of a mountainscape. On especially inspiring months like January, there’d be an eagle soaring.

I bought that suit with my hard-earned pizza joint money. There was an inherent sense of pride in that milestone purchase even though it felt like cardboard and fit like my fourth grade Reebok Pumps—they didn't fit, but they “did.” My mom always bought shoes for us kids a full size too big. I’d lace up one shoe and we’d never make it to the register without her perpendicularly pressing her thumb down on the tip of the toe. “Room to grow,” she’d say in her Mandarin Chinese accent. Reebok Pumps were a double edged sword. They gave mom license to go up two sizes instead of one since you could just pump them up until your foot turned blue. They were the shoe to have but I was going to look like a hobbit in them—four foot tall, big feet. Five months later they eventually fit. But you don’t grow into a suit. And certainly not one without The Pump mechanism.

My dad grew up a hippie. He was 16 when the youth movement was born in the U.S. Cut off jean shorts and a white chain knit tank top capped with flowing blonde hair served as his uniform in every other snapshot scattered throughout early photo albums. He was free. You can still see it in his smile. With my mom under his pale sleeveless arm, they were footloose and fancy-free.

He wasn’t the smartest. He’ll be the first to tell you that. But he had an appetite for what was beyond the city limits of Weatherford, Texas. A decision to eschew college in favor of a blue collar gig on a merchant ship awarded him with a deck view of the world and a Taiwanese wife. He loves God, is suspicious of country, and serves man. He instilled those things in me and my siblings. He just didn’t teach me much about dressing. The furthest we got was that tie knot before graduation.

What I did learn about dressing I learned from my mother. She loves color and she would go a little crazy with the patterns.

BY THE AGE OF TWELVE, I was an incipient clotheshorse. I arrived for the first day of fifth grade in white jeans that looked like they’d been grown out of the year before. For the early 90s, they were glaringly short. Pee-Wee Herman short. I didn’t care. I know what you may be thinking: white jeans, how stylish at 12. No no no. And no again. The color white was the price of admission. And it was a high price to pay to get into a pair of Marithé + François Girbaud jeans.

Girbaud was a French brand that became famous in 1982’s Flashdance. It was a long decade later that they reached our modest north Texas suburb of 18,545. Every kid (that had any inkling to be "in") at Raymond E. Curtis Intermediate School wanted to wear them or be friends with someone who wore them. Girbauds weren't cheap. Only the popular kids, whose parents had money, wore them. My parents had money, just not a lot of it. Certainly not enough to be dropping $85 on prepubescent French designer jeans. I begged my mother for a pair. Incessantly.

As a dad, I said “No” a lot to my boys. And they understood that there was a big fat period at the end of it. There's no negotiations. They [at least pretend to] understand it's for their own good. With my mom, that period was more like an ellipsis. “No” was never a complete sentence with her. It was never the end of a matter. It was the beginning of a negotiation. And I was a master negotiator in matters of enrolling her into my latest juvenile pursuit. Notable negotiations include, but are not limited to, $300 Bauer aggressive inline skates during my half-pipe phase, $139 Bauer inline hockey skates for my roller hockey phase (yes, I spent a large part of my 90s in roller blades but you have my word I did trade them in upon receiving my driver license), a $450 complete wardrobe overhaul from Abercrombie & Fitch mid-semester of my sophomore year. I had a flare for the dramatic so every pitch was, “My entire future trajectory is going to be in jeopardy if I don't have [fill in the blank]!” But that's what she gets for having an Aries son.

On a tip from another thrifty mother, my mom found Girbaud jeans at a modern day equivalent of T.J.Maxx. Socially acceptable indigo blue was absolutely out of the question. Only close out styles from the previous season were on display in colors nobody wanted. That meant purple, orange, white, and other eye gouging hues Girbaud was known for at the time. I was a late bloomer as a kid but even the sizes they carried were too short on my 4’5” frame. They were sizes like 25” waist with a 21” inseam. Determined to make it work, my mother would take them home, let out the hem, and refinish it. I ended up with jeans just a half-inch longer.

WE’RE ALL JUST TRYING TO FIND OUR CREW, our coterie, our band of outsiders. It’s in our nature to belong. DYING BREED is about rallying these coterie members—the black sheep, the unruly heirs, the geeks, the freaks, the fashion kids—interested in style, art, books, music, and fashion missives from the cultural capital that is New York City.

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