Tuxedo Dreams

I spent the first two weeks of September in Europe – first, for the wedding of a friend from college at an estate the southwest of Scotland and, after that, I took myself to Paris for a week.

The wedding, in particular, had been a long time coming. We first heard of the possibility of a Scotland wedding some time in late 2022 and since then received a steady stream of communications around accommodations, travel, cost, and activities.

I tried very hard not to over-invest in this trip, in this event. I wanted to keep things in perspective to avoid unnecessary disappointment. I thought it would be easy to build it up too much, to make it some kind of compensation for everything bad that’s happened in the past few years.

At the same time, it seemed prudent to go all in, to take as much joy from it as possible. After all, it has been a difficult few years and the short- and medium-term outlook is bleak. (Though, frankly, not as bad as it was nine months ago.)

I also feel like I’ve been not exactly struggling but curious about how I should dress in this post-pandemic era. It’s not like I’ve woken up and am five years older, but it also isn’t not that. I have gotten older. My life has changed. My body, to an extent, has changed. The world has changed, and continues to change, quite dramatically.

In a way, you do wake up one day and finally feel the weight of five years that have passed. And what is one supposed to wear, in this new era? How should one mark the change? I’m still figuring it out.

When I went off to grad school in 2012, I was deep in an extended dandy-esque period, one that happened to harmonize seamlessly with larger trends in fashion and retail, coinciding, as it did, almost exactly with Jenna Lyon’s tenure at J.Crew and the emergence of Everlane in its original, much more interesting form. From one of Everlane’s very early, limited collections, I bought a dark blue bowtie with tiny little flowers and a plaid flannel necktie. I’m not sure anything they’ve made since has delighted me as much. (Boring is kind of their thing now. And, like, respect.) I paired the flannel tie with a perfectly relaxed grey corduroy blazer from a then-nascent J.Crew Factory. This was back when Brooks Brothers was still making those good non-iron button-ups for women. (I can’t help it: I am a product of my upbringing.) I think I also tried ones from the boys section of Ralph Lauren, and they fit to an extent. In hindsight, I didn’t appreciate the riches I had at my disposal merely from a retail perspective: it was an era of truly abundant schoolboy blazers.

This was obviously the peak of Tumblr and menswear was having a moment there among queers, though that moment would turn out to be quite fleeting. Many of the creators I liked the most – and who were not subtly reactionary – eventually transitioned and deleted their accounts. I stopped wearing a lot of that stuff because of the natural progression of my aesthetic and also because I couldn’t help but notice that a lot of my little looks were awfully similar to Tucker Carlson’s. I moved to Maine, where I would look out of place, in a way that I hadn’t in Cambridge, MA or even Columbus, OH – both college towns with large queer populations.

I spent most of the pandemic rotating through the same five pairs of Uniqlo sweatpants with my trademark button-up on top to look slightly professional on Teams calls. Even once we started going out to restaurants and back into the office, I struggled to get back to the level of trying that I had once managed so easily and with joy. I work in a tech-adjacent, vaguely start-up-y (but not really) office, and some of our engineers wear cargo shorts. I wear jeans, usually, as does our CEO.

This wedding in Scotland, with its cute little dress codes for every event, felt like an opportunity for reinvention, or even for a return to a previous version of myself. Like, if I was going to go at all, I might as well look how I wanted, or as close to how I wanted as it was possible to get. It also happened that my little sister’s (also formal) wedding was happening a month later and I was going to be in the bridal party. We were free to choose our own outfits so long as they were formal and black.

I decided I wanted a tux.

But, how, exactly, I would get one remained an open question. For most gender non-conforming people, one is always making compromising and settling for the approximation of what you really want to wear because what you really want does not exist. Or it exists once, at one retailer for one season and then is gone. The larger culture moves on and the schoolboy blazers disappear or get some weird new collar that doesn’t work for you at all. And the one item that really worked – like, say, that perfectly relaxed corduroy blazer from J.Crew Factory – eventually wears out and can’t be mended because that’s just not how we make garments anymore. (And you lack the most basic sewing skills.) And once it’s gone, your whole “slightly harried newspaper editor from the 1970s” look disintegrates along with it. And maybe a little bit of your identity goes with it.

There is a lot of freedom in existing between these little gendered boxes, but you are often free to choose between a paltry range of unsatisfactory choices. Some explicitly queer-focused retailers have emerged since the mainstream left menswear-for-AFAB-people behind, but their wares are a real mixed bag, quality wise, and the aesthetics are often not to my taste.

So I wanted to wear a tux. A lot of people, when they hear about the tux, are like “Oh, so you own your tux?” And I must say that I am aware that renting tuxes is a thing people do, but I have no idea how it works and I never looked into it. It seemed like it would be disappointing and frustrating. I have this tendency to make (in hindsight) large(ish) life decisions on nothing more than pure instinct (like, yeah, I should do that) and I can’t say I’ve ever regretted one, but occasionally they do cause temporary stress.

I went through Suitsupply, on the recommendation of a colleague, who said her husband had enormous shoulders and they were able to fit him appropriately. (I was like, “Cool, seems that would work.”) I didn’t expect it to be a perfect fit just because Suitsupply does not explicitly service my demographic. I had considered doing a more AFAB-focused tailor or suit service — something like Bindle & Keep — that would have been more expensive and required multiple trips to NYC or some other large city. And the reviews of the results (and the customer service) were pretty mixed. These types of suits have jackets that tend to be on the shorter side, somewhat shrunken. (I often find them too shrunken). They do this because of the existence of hips. I figured the Suitsupply one, with its full length, would probably emphasize mine a little, and I was prepared for it.

Aside from fighting my way through Boston traffic, the initial fitting was extremely easy. I made an appointment at their store on Newbury Street with a stylist named Shay. We chatted for a few minutes (I probably could’ve chatted more — I do have a tendency to let anxiety push me through a process when I should slow down and deliberate, see above), she brought out pants and a jacket near my size, I put them on, she quickly made small adjustments (bringing in the shoulders 2cm, letting out the chest and waist a bit, making the legs narrower) and entered it all into an app on her phone. I picked my style (went with classic lapels rather than the shawl collar), the color of the lining, and my monogram, and it was done. Probably took 20 minutes total. It was all about fitting the clothes to me, rather than the other way around. It was the second day of my period and I was not feeling great (one of those days in May when Boston is legit 20 degrees warmer than Maine and I found myself unseasonably dressed and sweaty), and it was still some of the least stressful clothes shopping I have done.

I went very classic, which is also pretty much the only choice when you go to Suitsupply. I initially balked — and by that, I mean I looked mildly skeptical for a moment — at the high collar on the shirt (another stylist I worked with, Giovanni, told me that all of Suitsupply’s tuxedo collars are very European and the suits themselves are specifically pretty Italian), but I eventually came around to it. (There was no choice.) When I was browsing Reddit for ideas, I’d often see similarly situated people talk about how they didn’t want to look “too mainstream” or something similar, and I had no such qualms. If anyone had ever asked me, I would have told them that I wanted to look, to the extent possible, like Cary Grant. Why else bother?

She said it’d probably take about three weeks to arrive at the store, where we’d do a final fitting. I got notifications that it was being made, and then that it was shipped.

And then it got held up at customs for a month or more. The tracking page just stopped updating. A search on Reddit suggested this was a common issue. I finally emailed them in late June (I had been fitted in mid-May) and someone informed me that the suit was, in fact, at the store. It must not have scanned. Finding a convenient time to come down for my final fitting proved a struggle and I ended up making a down-and-back trip on a Wednesday, which I don’t really recommend, but did allow me to pop into my friend’s bachelorette party. My fears were that the measurements would have been totally off and that it wouldn’t fit at all. I was already scheming in my head for what I would do if it just wasn’t at all suitable.

My fears were totally unfounded. “Shay did a really great job,” Giovanni told me. It fit well but there was a slight...poof, if you will, around my hips. Rather than just swallow my dissatisfaction, I mentioned it to Giovanni, who didn’t seem to notice it as much, but who made a few adjustments so the jacket would curve a little bit more.

During my first visit, I had been so focused on the task at hand that I didn’t really take in anything that was happening around me, but on this day, I did notice a 30- or 40-something dude eyeing me the whole time I was being fitted, his girlfriend or wife loitering alongside of him. Whether it was resentment for taking up space or time that he wanted (the store was busy) or confusion about what I was even doing there, I can’t say. I didn’t really care. I have developed in the past few years a considerable tolerance for just being mildly to moderately to severely uncomfortable. Like, did I want to be doing all this stuff smack-dab in the middle of the Suitsupply store? No. But that was where it all happened, apparently. Giovanni complimented my choice of shoes (a cap-toe Balmoral) and seemed approving of my decision to go with the classic, pleated shirt front.

The shirt — which I had waited to order, for really no reason at all — was straightforward and delivered on time. I got the bow tie from General Knot & Co., which is a retailer I loved in my more dandy-esque days and whose inventory has sadly not changed much since 2018. I ordered some Highland sheep cuff links for Scotland and, later, ones made from vintage typewriter keys – with my little sister and brother-in-law’s initials – for the wedding in Kentucky.

The tux is not perfect. I think the lapels are a bit too wide, something only accentuated by my comparatively narrow chest and shoulders. At certain angles, and in certain photos, I do look hippier than I’d like, but that is unavoidable. The shirt really only works under the jacket (again, because of the hips). I considered bringing a different white shirt to change into as things got late and I wanted to be more comfortable, but I didn’t get around to it for either wedding, which was fine. The disappointments were very expected and thus not really disappointing at all.

Aside from a few brief frustrations – I struggled to adjust the length of my bow tie in Scotland and eventually had to break a thread to free the little hook thing, but I told myself that my bow tie was literally the least essential part of the occasion, which was very soothing – everything pretty much went as close to perfectly as it could have, which is not something one gets to say very often.