In the beginning, it was still shirt and tie four days a week. Casual Friday was olly-olly-oxen-free, unlike at Sonat when it just meant you could leave the tie off – any sort of button-up or polo was fine, as were jeans, and I still had those Converse leather All-Stars that I recall wearing, the last time I owned basketball shoes. I still had the Elk for outerwear, the big oversized leather jacket I’d foolishly bought that first semester at Vanderbilt, and (briefly) had an actual trench coat for rain before I quickly returned it at JC Penney to have the credit applied against a MasterCard that was already straining against its credit limit.
It was sometime around the time my dad died that National Geographic went away from any sort of business attire. It wasn’t quite on the level of a dot-com but it was a lot more casual than the rest of DC. I was casting about for the right jeans, and went through several different manufacturers – Britches, Eddie Bauer. It wasn’t until California that I would settle on Levi’s 501s for a decade, followed by the addition of LC King Pointer Brand work jeans – I never owned either one in DC. Same with sunglasses – I went through maybe half a dozen pair of assorted manufacture, here some Clubmasters and there something cheap and there a Fossil or an Oakley. Never adopted amber lenses or the New Wayfarer until California.
I never wore a hat in DC that much – it was too hot in the summer and made my hair a mess, but I did have a Boston Red Sox batting practice hat for when we played softball. Not long after my future wife moved to DC, it was replaced by a Giants BP hat. I certainly owned some Redskins headgear, and there were lids from my alma maters, but they didn’t get much run. If it was hot weather, I didn’t have a hat on, and smartly so – I wouldn’t need a hat on a regular basis until I finally cut my hair down after moving west and getting married.
I wore wide-wale corduroy in the winter and flat-front khaki in the summer. I had mostly black polo shirts in cold weather and mostly untucked button-up resort-type shirts in hot weather, bought on sale from the Macy’s clearance rack at the Ballston mall. Thus my future surrogate big sister’s dig at my packing: “black shirt, black shirt, black shirt, Hawaiian shirt, black Hawaiian shirt.” Between Easter and Labor Day, I didn’t even wear socks – sometimes with fisherman sandals but more commonly with low four-eyelet Dr Martens brown oxfords with a padded collar…and no socks. I owned half a dozen pair of assorted DMs in DC but never steel toes before joining the fruit company in Cupertino. But the DMs took care of the endless search for the right brown show that had consumed my last year in Nashville.
I carried a much larger Leatherman, every day. I carried a Zippo lighter, every day. For years, I carried a pipe and a tobacco pouch. I carried a pager and a cell phone and a rolled-up magazine and a Walkman or MP3 player or iPod and sometimes a Blackberry or Palm Pilot, all of which were completely replaced by the end of summer 2007 with just an iPhone. I dreaded summer because I needed the pocket space of a jacket, and once invested in Dockers with concealed cargo pockets, zippers down the outside seam, so that I could get my smoking and technology apparatus hidden away.
So many of the things that are central to my wardrobe now – the LC King and American Giant, the Indy boots and canoe mocs and all the American-made workwear, the button-fly 501s and Ray-Ban New Wayfarers with polarized lenses, the New Era low-crown 5950 baseball caps, the endless American Apparel T-shirts in 2XL, the Harris Tweed and the Buzz Rickson and the Filson trucker jacket, the black plastic Birkenstock shower shoes – all of that has happened since I came West. Apart from the Indiana Jones leather jacket and the ubiquitous khakis from April to October, I didn’t have any one particular thing that stood out about my DC wardrobe – just a bunch of pieces in and out in search of a unified theme which wasn’t even “failed grad student gone wild” or “upscale vagrant” or “man wearing clothes so he doesn’t catch an indecent exposure bid on the Orange Line at 9:15 AM”.
Maybe I was more liminal then. Or more creative. Or the climate required flexibility. Or maybe I just had it in my head to handle the bandwidth of a little more variability in how I left the house. I’m not yet on the Steve Jobs school of simplification, but there’s a lot more commonality in what I wear out the door in the mornings now, because the climate here is basically “April in Birmingham” 12 months a year. There was certainly no time in DC when I owned five identical T-shirts, four identical pair of jeans, three different identical T-shirts, eight identical pair of black socks and a dozen different baseball caps with almost as many different pairs of shoes.
I don’t know what any of that means. I feel like it means something, or ought to, but I’m not the one to figure out what it is.