Re: Rant Men's Clothes

On Sat, 29 Jun 2024 23:19:46 -0000 (UTC)
"Adam H. Kerman" <ahk@chinet.com> wrote:

I am going to rant. I went to a national department store to buy
button down shirts, which I really needed. A year ago, I'd bought
several shirts. They were driving me nuts because only one of the
shirts had a pocket.
 
I went through all of the shirts for sale in my size. Not a single
shirt had a pocket. Who decreed that men's shirts no longer have
pockets?
 

Some "fashion" guru has apparently decreed that shirts with pockets are
unfashionable and the manufacturers have apparently kowtowed to this
dictat. I'd say I was surprised but I'm not. It's how they've rolled
for years. I've been trying to find a plain T-shirt with a chest pocket
for at least a couple of years but anytime I go to a store, there are
none to be had. Mind you, I haven't checked every store or catalogue so
maybe I'm just looking in the wrong places....

Then the matter of shoes. I need another pair of gym shoes/running
shoes that fit. I wear them as my regular walking shoe. I have a
weird shoe size, very long and very narrow.
 
We have the men's shoe comspiracy in which manufacturers inflate the
shoe size and ignore the shoe size standard.
 
I saw a large number of shoes offered in my nominal size, so I knew it
was pointless to try them on. They'd be too small.
 
I bought a pair that was nominally a half size larger. It was too
short.
 
The pair I bought that was 2 1/2 sizes larger than my nominal shoe
size wasn't too short.
 

Shoes are another peeve for me. That started years ago when I tried to
replace a pair of slippers that had worn out. I couldn't find a single
pair in the mall store I visited and asked one of the staff about it.
He told me they only carried slippers at Christmas time because that
was the only time they sold (or maybe only sold in significant numbers).
I still find that baffling because I used to wear them year round and
wouldn't want to wait until Christmas to replace a worn-out pair.

As for size, I finally found a  good shoe store a few years back, the
kind that actually measured your feet and made sure you got into shoes
that fit; the places I'd been going to for many previous years were all
basically self-serve places where you tried things on and settled for
whatever you found satisfactory, then took it to the cashier to ring it
up. So I bought two very good pairs of shoes at this newly-discovered
store, dress shoes and a pair of sneakers. I paid more than I was used
to but both were on the sale table at significant discounts so I could
have done much worse. Both have been excellent shoes. I don't wear
dress shoes often so those will probably last the rest of my life. I
wear the sneakers all the time and expect they'll last a few more years
yet.

I think you need to find a shoe store that still measures your feet and
where the staff still knows more about shoes than how to operate the
cash register. I think those places are increasingly rare but I have to
imagine a city as big as Chicago still has one or two. (Unfortunately,
the one I found has since closed down because the owner retired.)

This is more evidence that the world has moved on from me and I
literally do not fit in. I should just walk to the horizon and fall
off the edge.

That's probably a bit drastic ;-) Try finding different stores to buy
shirts and shoes!


--
Rhino