A couple of years ago my wife got me a seersucker suit as a birthday present. I immediately had to display my fine acting skills, pretending like this suit was the gift I had been dreaming of for the past 364 days. I touched the fabric, smiled at my wife and said things like, “this looks sharp!” She told me that she bought it specifically for me to wear to summer weddings.
In truth, however, I wasn’t that excited. I already had two suits – navy and black – and several tried and true shirt/tie combinations to go with them. While I knew that every wardrobe should have an infusion of new clothes, there was something about the seersucker suit in particular that I disliked.
I felt like people who wore seersucker were trying too hard. They wanted to dress crazy and have all the attention on them. Alternatively, if you were wearing the suit without a hint of irony, you needed to be (a) Southern and (b) over 50. I was (and still am) neither.
But three weeks later, in mid August, my wife and I had a wedding to go to in Connecticut. Whatever my objections were to the seersucker suit, I knew I had better wear it or risk hurting my wife feelings – a scenario that could potentially make her sad (not good) or annoyed (really not good) or sad-annoyed (confusing).
Yet the minute I slipped on the suit, something magical happened. I fell in love with it, instantly.
The first, and most obvious reason, was that it was lightweight. This particular August day had a relative humidity of 253%. Okay, that’s actually meteorologically impossible, but it was definitely one of those “take three steps and change your shirt because it’s soaked in sweat” days. I was still warm in the seersucker, but as I looked around at the other guys in their navy and black suits, I felt like a genius. How they could be so foolish as to not own seersucker? Didn’t they have the foresight that I had? I had wanted a seersucker suit for years!
The second benefit of the new suit was the brotherhood of the seersucker. There were two other guys at the wedding in seersucker, and I soon learned the rule that all people wearing seersucker must congregate during cocktail hour and complement each other on their suits. You don’t have to know these other people in seersucker. Heck, you don’t even have to like them. And it’s highly likely that the minute the wedding ends you’ll never see them again. But for those precious few hours, you’re joined by an unbreakable bond.
But the real joy of the suit was the very aspect that I had been dreading. People do indeed notice the suit. Yet because it’s an acceptable form of fashion, you get a weird respect (unless you’re wearing the suit out of season, in which case you’re just committed a crime akin to treason against the crown). You’ve taken a risk by dressing just a little bit crazy, and as long as you show pride in doing so, your courage gets noticed and appreciated. And if the groom does feel a little bit upstaged, well, then, he should have dressed better.
Actually, I’m leaving out one additional reason why I loved the suit: I could finally come clean to my wife. At the end of the night, I told her that I had been skeptical of the suit at first but had since grown to love it. She smiled and said she knew that’s what would happen. She hoped the suit would teach me to be opened minded about new forms of fashion. I said that would definitely happen. And then I took off the suit and put on a t-Shirt from 1993.
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