In a room
blogSitting in a meeting the other day, my mind began to drift onto matters not strictly pertinent to the agenda. I had noticed that one of the men around the table was staring intently at the person who was speaking, who happened to be an unshaven spiky-haired Glaswegian wearing a poor quality mauve shirt. The starer wasn’t staring with the normal ‘yes I see what you mean’ nod. No, he was literally sizing him up, taking the dimensions of his being and working out what they signified.
By this stage, I was staring at the starer. I was sizing him up – noting his floppy blond fringe, his ill-fitting grey slacks, and his square jaw. I wondered whether there was anything in what he wore which would improve my own sartorial combo. No, not really. I then surveyed the room to see if there was anything I could adopt. The neat camp fellow in the pinstripe suit wore an elegant chunky watch that I liked and the manager on my right wore a well-cut shirt of obvious quality, but that was all.
The more I looked at the people around the table, the clearer it was to me that a man’s appearance (his neatness or scruffiness, his attention to detail, the quality of his clothes) tells you all you need to know about his personality and values. Suddenly, my unshaven visage felt like an admission of callousness and indifference. It didn’t work in a business environment. Put me in a meeting with people from the music industry and it would have been fine, but not here.
All our sense of appearance is relative. Dandyism combines a studied perfectionism with a sartorial esprit. The former is an acknowledgment that clothes tell the world all about who you are. The latter is a self-consciousness about your own values. The former is relative to the world, bringing improvements in the cut and quality of your cloth. The latter is all your own. Do you want to be the most interesting person in the room? The most intelligent? The most elegant? Do you want to go unnoticed in life? Do you want to differentiate yourself? What are you saying by differentiating yourself?