Author: Ben Tuthill
I’m going to buy a suit soon. I think I want an American one in soft grey but I have a friend who keeps offering me crazy deals on imported Italian labels, and I think I might have to indulge him. I just found out how high my loans are, and I’m starting to realize that maybe post-graduation life won’t be quite as glamorous as I’d hoped it would be. Thom Browne will have to wait.
This won’t be my first suit. My mother bought me one from Men’s Warehouse when I was in tenth grade. It was black and at least two sizes too big for me. The salesman told me that I might turn out to be built like a linebacker in a couple years, and that it would be better to have a jacket with shoulders that I could grow into. He also told me that if I wore it with a black shirt and an electric blue tie that I’d get “lots of ladies.” Neither of those things ever happened.
I’ve always imagined buying a suit to be a major life event. It’s like step 79 in the 100-step process of growing up, somewhere between shooting a gun and figuring out that “Arlo and Janis” is just a bunch of sex jokes. In the words of some Ralph Lauren propaganda from a couple years back: “You graduated in that suit, landed the job in that suit, got the girl in that suit…you became a man in that suit.”
Becoming a man has always been a point of anxiety for me. What does it mean to be a man? Growing up, it always meant being able to play baseball. I was never very good at that.
Maybe owning a suit makes you a man. This asshole I know once said to a friend of mine, “You don’t need to wait to become a man. You can be one right now.” My friend shared that wisdom with me a couple weeks before my twentieth birthday. I hate to give credit to assholes, but it made a big impact on my over-dramatic sophomore-year self. I was about to turn twenty; it was time to dress like an adult. I stopped wearing t-shirts and jeans and started wearing button-ups and khakis. I told myself that by the end of college, I would be at the point of wearing a coat and tie on a daily basis.
I feel like a moron now for ever believing that. I can’t imagine feeling like enough of a real person to wear a suit to anything. I’ve spent the past four years devoting most of my time to analyzing fashion blogs and arguing about the categorization of punk sub-genres. I still don’t know how to fill out a tax form. How did I ever think that I would be the kind of person who was serious enough to wear nice clothes?
I don’t know what I’ll do with a suit once I have one. I’m moving back to St. Paul. I don’t have a job lined up. No one I know is getting married anytime soon. I don’t think I’ve ever even seen a single one of my friends from home in a tucked-in shirt.
I worry about those friends sometimes; the same way I worry about all of the kids at school who still wear basketball shorts and flip flops to class every day. How are they going to know what to wear to a job interview? How are they going to transition into the real world?
I think they’ll be okay, though. I’m pretty sure the world doesn’t care about suits the way it used to. It values people with real skills who know what to do with what’s in front of them. The guy who orders strawberry smoothies from me every day at the Cooler looks like a slob in his cut-out tank top and backwards hat, but he’s probably a whole lot better at most things than I am. He’s definitely better at baseball, at least.
When I was home for Christmas my father saw me throw a snowball. He looked at me confused and said, “Where did you learn how to throw?” I didn’t really know what to tell him. I guess I just figured it out.
He wrote to me last week to tell me that he’d finally read the column that I wrote about him last September. “Please note that my interest in baseball is much like your interest in playing with clothes,” he wrote. “We discovered those interests on our own. My father is not a very good ballplayer at all. You have a much better arm anyway.”
I guess he doesn’t think I’m a complete failure. That’s good to hear. I need someone to have some confidence in me. I’m not sure how much confidence I have in myself. But my father approves of my throwing form. That’s something at least. Maybe I have grown up a little bit.
Maybe when I have a suit I’ll actually feel like I’ve made it somewhere. Maybe having something nice to wear will force order and responsibility into my life and make me into someone who actually knows how to function in society. I don’t know, though. The world is a scary place, and a suit isn’t much of a defense. But I guess it can’t hurt. It’ll be there for me to grow into, anyway. With any luck I’ll end up getting the job and getting the girl. Maybe I’ll even end up becoming a man.
I think we all will. Male or female or fashion-writing or ball-throwing or suit-wearing or shorts-wearing. We’ll get there eventually. We made it this far, at least.
Ben “The Best” Tuthill is a senior English and Comparative Literary Studies major. As a result of his graduation, he has penned his last edition of his weekly Benswear column.
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