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I like Esquire magazine, and a lot of other magazine’s as well. With Esquire, you get some of the best non-fiction writers in the country - Chuck Klosterman, Cal Fussman, Scott Raab, Tom Chiarella and especially Tom Junod and Mike Sager. Good stuff. But you also get a lot of ads, some of them interesting, a handful just funny, and a couple simply embarrassing. Are there people who actually wear some of these clothes?
Now this issue, March 2009, has a pictorial modeled by a handful of men and women at a beach house, looks like it could even be here in New England, and well, these clothes and the people wearing them could be me and my girl. Except. There’s this one picture, the three guys and a woman at a picnic table, jeans, shirts, a couple of leather jackets, a peacoat - hey, all this could have come out of my closet, I’m thinking, except one of the guys looks bummier than what my standards allow. But that’s not the exception I meant in the last paragraph.
The exception is the prices. These three guys are wearing, according to the magazine, $6,253 worth of jackets, pants, shirts and shoes, and that’s not counting the $5600 watch one of them is sporting. The guy that looks most like a slob had to pay out $1718 for the privilege, including nearly $600 for the peacoat. Okay, is it just me and the low class lowlifes that I hang with, or does anyone else find these sort of articles pretty absurd, and all the more so in this economy? How many of you out there have laid out $515 for a sweater, $560 for loafers, $2400 for a leather jacket, $240 for a pair of jeans or $350 for a cotton shirt, for christ’s sake? I understand the name brand thing, and that you can likely get these exact items for less, but even at half the price, most of these items are outrageous. And it’s not that these are cutting edge fashion - these are the jeans, t-shirts and pullovers you see a thousand times a day. The leather jackets are admittedly nice, but the $1700 one looks a lot like a motorcycle jacket I picked up at a leather consignment shop last summer. The leather is beautifully aged and supple, it fits me like a glove, and it cost me $40. Does anyone else wonder who actually pays those sort of prices for bang around clothes? Is a $350 cotton button-up shirt 10-times the quality of one that looks exactly like it for $35? How does a $42 pair of jeans stack up against a $240 pair? I remember a few years ago that they did a blind quality test on shirts, including the super high priced ones and ones you can buy at JC Penny’s or Target for a fraction of the price. The best quality shirt you could buy? Yep, came from one of the department stores. RFS.
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