Suit Myself

Still recovering from a lifetime of suits he'd like to forget, a self-proclaimed "chronic underdresser" goes shopping for his wedding gear.

• By Hugo Lindgren
• Published 2004

I decided to wear a suit to my wedding because I am scared of tuxedos. All those ancillary parts make me nervous that something is going to fall off or pop loose, and in fact that’s what usually happens—I lose at least one stud every time out. Also, I’ve given up on learning how to tie a bow tie, and I’m too old and proud to ask someone to do it for me. There are other reasons, too. A tuxedo is the uniform of blackjack dealers and piano-bar pianists, and on your wedding day, of all days, why would you want to be mistaken for one of them?

I knew that not any suit would do. I couldn’t just yank one off some rack. Not when my future wife was pushing herself to the brink of madness in pursuit of her dress (see page 56). I would have to try harder.

So that’s how I settled on getting a suit custom-made for my wedding. I went into the process with a great deal of trepidation; I’m not a suit person. I wear them to funerals and job interviews, and sometimes not even then. I mostly wear jeans and untucked shirts. Usually I think of this as liberating and cool—being a grown-up but not having to dress like one. But a nagging sense of inadequacy comes with it.

It started, you see, when I was 7 years old and my grandparents gave me my very first suit, a leisure-style number, navy with thick orange stitching that accentuated the lapels and pockets. They gave my brother, one year younger, the exact same model. Photographs from that era tell a frightful tale. We look like freakish twins, the world’s youngest Jacuzzi salesmen.

A few years later, I was enrolled in a school that had a strict jacket-and-tie dress code. I remember the acute humiliation of my first day there, when I showed up on a sweltering September morning wearing a woolly tweed blazer with leather elbow patches. Elbow patches! Nothing destroys a ninth-grader’s reputation so thoroughly. By senior year, I had recovered, only to blunder into my next fashion apocalypse—the graduation suit, purchased for $435, which at the time seemed a monumental sum, from the old Barneys on Seventh Avenue. The nicest thing I can say about it is that it was brown. Actually, several overlapping shades of brown, like a musty old quilt. It was also form-fitting in a way that cut off the blood flow to my legs.

In college and during the young-professional years that followed, I took no chances. I suited myself conservatively. For job interviews, an olive-green gabardine number from Brooks Brothers—never mind that for the fringe-magazine-type jobs I wanted, I would’ve had better odds wearing a dress. My uncle generously gave me his old custom-made Savile Row suits, but they had to be altered in a way that made them feel slightly off-kilter. When I worked at George magazine, I received a number of hand-me-downs from John F. Kennedy Jr., whose new wife was clearing out the dated material in his old bachelor wardrobe.

Finally, I worked up the nerve to take another fashion chance: For a college friend’s wedding, I courageously bought a cream-colored wide-wale corduroy suit from Agnès B. I imagined all my ex-girlfriends from college being mightily impressed with the audacious new me. “Impressed” does not exactly describe their reaction.

Which brings me to the present day, and my own wedding—and the weighty baggage I brought with me as I walked into Seize sur Vingt on Elizabeth Street. I own a few of their excellent shirts (they look good untucked with jeans), and I knew that it was the kind of place where, despite their very high-minded approach to clothes, they would never condescend—even to a chronic under-dresser such as myself. Flipping through the swatch books—not much in the way of wide wale here—I saw the pattern I wanted, a charcoal-gray cashmere blend with thin navy pinstripes. The fitting was laborious (they measured parts of me I never dreamed had to be measured, such as the slope of my shoulders), and then they quizzed me on a series of preferences I had never considered—where did I stand on the notched lapel, for example? Did I desire a ticket pocket? I had to ask what one was. (A pocket above the right side pocket for . . . tickets.)

For the lining, I went with a satiny baby blue, and I puzzled hard over the back vents—side or center? I just could not make up my mind, and I’m not going to reveal which one I went with, because, well, I’m worried I made the wrong move. I bought a matching suit for my brother, my best man, so we’re back where we started, back to being twins. But this time, I think, I’ve gotten it right.