Do the math: Pick clothes that fit
Hop Couture
Writing this column for three years now, I must confess that it's been getting harder and harder to come up with legitimate things to write about.
So I've been asking around for ideas and that helps most of the time. But this week, I actually did not have any idea what to write about, so I decided to make things interesting: I'm going to talk about the mathematical proportionalities in fashion and clothing.
I hope reading that sentence made you laugh, because I sure did when I wrote it. What the f--- do I exactly mean by mathematical proportionality in clothing?
Well for one, take men's suiting. It's fairly easy for any bystander to differentiate within a group of suited men, who is wearing a nice suit and who is not, based simply on how the suit fits: its proportionality to the wearer's body.
Take the jacket; is it too big or too tight? You should be able to fit a fist between your stomach and jacket when it's buttoned up. Some refer to this as the Rule of Fisting.
Moreover, when wearing the jacket, you should be able to cup your fingers underneath the jacket's bottom edge with your hands straight at your side.
If you can't do it, then your jacket's too long. What about the proportionality between jacket and shirt? Standing with your hands at your side, your jacket should stop somewhere between a quarter to half of an inch above the cuff of your shirt.
What about the all-important necktie? Skinny, or moderately skinny, ties have been in style for a long time now, but how skinny is too skinny? Believe me, there is such thing as too skinny and too fat of a tie.
My best advice: your tie should be about half the width of your forehead. You may know this in its pithy equation form: T=W/2. As a general rule of thumb, your tie should never be more than three inches by today's standards. Not three and a quarter, three inches or less.
And I'm just going to go ahead and say it probably shouldn't be less than an inch in width either, unless you're an uber-fashionable rockstar.
So I've been asking around for ideas and that helps most of the time. But this week, I actually did not have any idea what to write about, so I decided to make things interesting: I'm going to talk about the mathematical proportionalities in fashion and clothing.
I hope reading that sentence made you laugh, because I sure did when I wrote it. What the f--- do I exactly mean by mathematical proportionality in clothing?
Well for one, take men's suiting. It's fairly easy for any bystander to differentiate within a group of suited men, who is wearing a nice suit and who is not, based simply on how the suit fits: its proportionality to the wearer's body.
Take the jacket; is it too big or too tight? You should be able to fit a fist between your stomach and jacket when it's buttoned up. Some refer to this as the Rule of Fisting.
Moreover, when wearing the jacket, you should be able to cup your fingers underneath the jacket's bottom edge with your hands straight at your side.
If you can't do it, then your jacket's too long. What about the proportionality between jacket and shirt? Standing with your hands at your side, your jacket should stop somewhere between a quarter to half of an inch above the cuff of your shirt.
What about the all-important necktie? Skinny, or moderately skinny, ties have been in style for a long time now, but how skinny is too skinny? Believe me, there is such thing as too skinny and too fat of a tie.
My best advice: your tie should be about half the width of your forehead. You may know this in its pithy equation form: T=W/2. As a general rule of thumb, your tie should never be more than three inches by today's standards. Not three and a quarter, three inches or less.
And I'm just going to go ahead and say it probably shouldn't be less than an inch in width either, unless you're an uber-fashionable rockstar.
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