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.
What other proportionalities can I possibly think of? What about V-necks? It's a well-documented fact that your level of douche is directly proportional to how low your V-neck drops, the "V-neck-Douche Phenomena" as it's known in the primary literature. Keep your V-necks relatively subdued and high-cut. What about sleeve length? Too often I see guys with sleeves that dip below elbow length, and it really just does not look good.
Sleeves, especially those on polo shirts, should reach to where your deltoid muscle meets your bicep and triceps. Any lower and you look unkempt. Any higher and you're being risky.
Keep in mind that the likelihood of you being a tool increases to infinity as the length of your sleeve approaches zero. The limit to your tool-ness does not exist, if you may.
What about pants? Sitting in my living room, writing this article right now, the weather is beautiful outside and a lot of people will be wearing shorts. I've been noticing the trend of younger men wearing higher-cut shorts, and I love it. Shorts cut to just above the knee are orders of magnitude more sophisticated than shorts that reach your shins.
But then again, shorts cut ridiculously higher are just that, very ridiculous when worn by men. The proportionality a very fine one, but once you cross the threshold, you'll understand where I'm coming from.
Same goes with pants, how tight and baggy should they be? I generally err on the side of relatively skinny jeans, because they make me look taller and more refined. Baggy is a teenage lifestyle. Try applying the Rule of Fisting here: if you can fit about a fist between your ankle and pant leg, then you're in a good zone. Cuff your jeans about an inch or less so they don't break over your legs when you stand up straight.
These are just a couple things I could think of when it comes to getting the right fit or proportionality.
Obviously, I've had a little too much fun with this article, probably because I've spent a little too much time taking classes in the math department, but I'm not complaining.
No one can say that fashion is an esoteric culture; I literally just applied basic mathematical concepts to simplify fashion for you.
After all, isn't that why we're all here at Hopkins? To learn the basics of our chosen fields of study, so we can then apply them in the real world?
