Put This On is a men's clothing blog and video series by Jesse Thorn and Adam Lisagor on dressing well and buying quality clothes.
HN commenters recommend it to developers who want to dress better without spending much or studying fashion.
From Tom Ford's five lessons:
> You should put on the best version of yourself when you go out in the world because that is a show of respect to the other people around you.
I try to dress well (note that there is a difference between dressing well and dressing formally) because I want to show respect to those around me. I find poorly dressed people almost as off-putting as catching a scent of someone who didn't put deodorant on seeing too much of someone who doesn't have the decency to wear a belt. Again, it's not about level of formality: someone wearing an ill-fitting suit isn't dressed as well as someone wearing properly fitting jeans and a polo.
Developers value elegant code as an indication of programming skill, so why not value elegant dress as an indication of interpersonal skills? (The answer is that a lot of developers don't value interpersonal skills at all).
"Why This Matters" from Jesse at Put This On is a good read: http://putthison.com/post/665640307/why-this-matters
We absolutely still have dress codes, they're just more ambiguous now:
http://putthison.com/post/144964888828/the-end-of-office-dress-codes-the-new-york-times
>Unless you work in a creative industry and live in a big city (read: basically NYC), you probably can’t wear anything too fashionable or avant-garde to work. We’re not talking about Rick Owens, but even somewhat tame designers such as Robert Geller and Stephan Schneider. And if everyone is wearing shorts and t-shirts, the sharpest you can look is in chinos. New, open office spaces still have dress codes – they’re just softly coded as social norms, not hard written into rulebooks.
>Dressing now follows subtle, in-group views – those who understand them know how to navigate the corporate world; those who don’t pay a price.
- Start with the philosophy of having a few clothes of high quality rather than a lot of clothes of low quality.
- Fit is the most important thing. Get a few shirts and a basic suit made to measure. You can do this fairly inexpensively via sites like https://www.indochino.com/. I charcoal grey suit, a white shirt, and a light blue shirt are a great way to start.
- Understand the differences between style and fashion. Fashion is a never ending treadmill of mindless consumerism, constantly prompting you to buy new clothes. Style is about dressing timelessly.
- It's hard or go wrong with a nice pair of brown, leather soles shoes. I like Allen Edmunds: http://www.allenedmonds.com/.
- Read PutThisOn: http://putthison.com/tagged/Best_Of
Lisagor (@lonelysandwich) was a video editor for commercials before striking out on his own; he also does "Put This On" (http://putthison.com/), a blog and video series about men's fashion with Jesse Thorn, who does The Sound Of Young America on NPR, and you can hear about all of this at Colin Marshall's "Marketplace of Ideas" Internet radio show (http://colinmarshall.libsyn.com/personal_aesthetics_and_internet_culture_put_this_on_creators_jesse_thorn_and_adam_lisagor); Rands manages people at Apple and wrote the genuinely excellent _Managing People_ and also a blog series on strip club etiquette and see I just did a whole little thing there.
Watch this video, it is awesome.
Jesse Thorn on why how you dress matters:
When you dress, you are making a statement; not a fashion statement, but a statement of identity. If you put on a jacket and tie, for example, you are signifying to others that you take the occasion seriously, whatever that occasion may be. If someone looks at you and interprets how you dress, they are not being superficial. They are reading the message that you wrote. [...] Can one earn respect in other ways? Certainly, and one should. But that’s no reason to open a conversation with someone by saying, without words, “this is not important to me.”
http://putthison.com/post/665640307/why-this-matters
This is a promising market if other outfits like http://www.trunkclub.com/ and http://manpacks.com/ are any indication.
I think the trick, though, is making sure that you can align style with your customer. When i first saw trunkclub i thought "netflix for clothes" which is a pretty novel concept if you figure that reselling overstock, late season purchases ala http://gilt.com/ is a pretty solid concept but if you also add-in the whole "personalized wardrobe" aspect, then it's really something exciting for folks that want nice wardrobe standards similar to what jesse at http://putthison.com/ advocates but don't need it this season.