Shortly after Eroticon, the otherwise brilliant and lovely @DomSigns tweeted something about men in suits:
“Men that wear suits are so very seldom at the top of the food chain… it is the people that dress like they have only £10 in their pockets that are the people with the real power… to me a suit is a sign of submission to the corporate world”
There’s a certain nobility to the sentiment behind the first part of that, but the last bit, addressed in a separate reply to @sexblogofsorts, had me itching to jump in and join the argument. I bit my tongue at the time, but that tweet floated back into my head this morning, as I was settling down in my seat for the flight back to London. I disagree with his point-of-view, but that’s neither interesting nor uncommon: I disagree with lots of people over lots of things, and life would be very dull if that wasn’t the case. It was when I started trying to figure out why I disagree with it, and what that says about me, that I decided to write something.
When I was a teenager, I didn’t care about clothes at all. Even when I reached 16, and no longer had to wear a school uniform, I was always happiest in an old t-shirt and jeans or cords, or even tracksuit trousers. Between April and September, the latter were switched most days for shorts, regardless of how ridiculous my skinny white legs looked in the corridor or around town: I prioritised comfort over appearance, basically, at all times.
The thing is, that’s still true now – it’s just that as I’ve changed, my notion of comfort has changed too, and become more complex. If something looks great but feels restrictive, or unpleasant against my skin, I won’t wear it. Equally, I have plenty of clothes that other people find hideous, but which feel good on my body, or make me think of a particular place or person. I can go for months at a time without buying new clothes, because I’m generally happy with what I’ve got. I value comfort and familiarity over fashion. Or maybe I’m just lazy: for years now, I’ve worn Burberry Touch aftershave, put Pantene shampoo on my hair, cleaned my teeth with Sensodyne Pronamel, and sprayed unscented Right Guard under my arms – I have no emotional attachment to the brands, but there’s a limit to the number of things I can think about in any one day, and I’d rather not have to squeeze ‘choosing toiletries’ into the mix, so once I find something I like, I stick with it. Makes shopping much easier.
It does have to be something that I like though. In a way that was never the case in my teens, comfort now also means being happy with the way I look, feel and smell. That’s a personal thing: I was quite unhappy and insecure for a while in my mid-20s, partly because I’d started to worry far too much about how other people saw me; it’s only more recently that I’ve learned to focus on how I see myself, and on what I think looks good.
Clothing is a part of that. I have a favourite shirt. It’s got very thin blue and white vertical stripes, and my Dad bought it in the Far East six or seven years ago – it was too small for him, so he gave it to me. I couldn’t tell you who made it, nor do I have any idea what it cost, but I know that I can wear it with jeans, chinos or a suit, and every time I put it on I feel happy. The same is true of my Tintin socks, and my black-and-white Calvin Klein boxers, and my t-shirt with a picture of the Vitruvian Man on the front, and…well, and so on. It’s not that I would feel anxious if I lost them, but having them clean and ready in my drawer is comforting, in a way that an endless stream of new clothes wouldn’t be.
When I feel relaxed and comfortable, I also feel sexy. It’s why I no longer go on dates wearing something that I think the other person will like – I dress in a way that makes me feel good about my body. It kind of goes back to something I wrote about lingerie a couple of months ago – as far as I’m concerned the aesthetic value of clothing lies in how it makes us feel about ourselves, not in what other people think of it. When I look in the mirror and like what I see, I feel better about life in general.
I don’t wear a suit to fit in, or to mask my insecurities. I don’t wear it as a way of swinging my dick around, but I also don’t feel like a corporate stooge when I take it off the hanger. I wear a suit because it looks and feels really good. It’s the one thing in my wardrobe that was made specifically to fit my body. The jacket neither hangs loose around my shoulders nor pulls tight across them. I don’t have to tug at the sleeves to stop them riding up my arms, nor do I have to keep fishing my shirt cuffs out from under them. The trousers feel soft, both under my fingers when I rest a hand on my thigh, and against my skin as I walk around. If I wear them without underwear, I end up in a constant state of arousal, just from the way the silky smooth lining hugs and caresses my dick.
I’ll always be a t-shirt and jeans man at heart, and I’ll never stop exposing the world to my pasty white calves whenever the sun is shining. I wouldn’t want to put my suit on every day, because then it wouldn’t feel special. I’m sure I’d still enjoy the way it fits me, but I wouldn’t get that little jolt of energy – the tingle that runs straight to my cock when I pull the jacket across my chest.
For the first time in my adult life, I’m truly comfortable in my own skin, and part of that comes from being happy with the clothes I use to cover it. My suit is only one piece of that puzzle, but it’s an important one, and when I get off the plane today and walk through the terminal, I’ll have an extra spring in my step as a result of wearing it.
