Heaneyland!

The Tie Project, days 164-173

When the closet's running down, you wear the shirts that are still around. (Sorry, that's the sort of intro you write when you're listening to a recording of the Police playing Live Earth.) Outfits after the jump, as usual.

Day 164. Both the shirt and tie were gifts from Rose, bought on the same day, although she didn't realize when she was buying them that they would match, and thus had the same experience I often do -- she was unpacking the bag of stuff she'd come home with to show me what she'd found, and she said, well, here's this shirt and this tie and...oh, huh. I agreed that they were a great match. The shirt, amusingly, is a Marlboro shirt. Apparently Marlboro used to make shirts! The clerk said, when Rose bought it, "Oh, all those old Marlboro shirts are great." Is my ongoing quest for Rooster ties going to be joined by a new obsession? We shall see.

Day 165. Not perfect -- the tie has a bit too much white in it -- but I like the matching curlicues (on the white part of the tie and on the shirt pocket) and the similarity of the blue accents in mostly brown color schemes.

Day 166. One of my oldest outfits. I'm pretty sure I've had the tie since high school, though I don't think I acquired the shirt until after college...but in college, I was more about suit jackets or cardigans. So this is probably one of the outfits that started me on my current stylistic path.

Day 167. Now, see, today I learned something new about one of my shirts. I took a picture of the outfit, looked at the photo, and thought, "Oh, hmm, the shirt's at a weird angle. Let me take another one." I straightened the shirt and tie, took another photo, and it still looked crooked. So I went and looked in the mirror -- and discovered that the pattern on this shirt isn't actually vertical! It's on a slight diagonal, which is pretty easy to see once you're looking for it, but which I had completely failed to notice over the years I've owned this shirt. Go figure.

Day 168. Both of these are recent-ish, but neither is especially recent. They haven't gotten worn because they're hard to match. Today I decided they actually kinda went with each other.

Day 169. You take some pink, some blue, some brown, you put them in a food processor, and voila.

Day 170. Another patchwork tie. This shirt does have a collar, I swear, but it's kind of small.

Day 171. Rose made this shirt for me from fabric we picked out together. It's actually been very very very nearly finished for a long time -- just needed the front hemmed and buttons sewn on. I had picked out some swanky blue buttons for it, but Rose made standard size buttonholes (as one would) and it turned out that the buttons I'd bought were too big to fit through them...a fact that, sadly, I did not notice until I'd sewn on four of the buttons and was trying to button the ones I'd sewn on so it would be easier to align the other ones.

The button-sewing incident was last Halloween (I thought I would wear an improvised "aquarium" costume), and it frustrated me enough that the shirt went back in the closet for a while. But today was the Mermaid Parade, and I damn well wanted to wear this shirt, so I decided to try again. I went through a pile of shirts I was getting rid of and cannibalized the buttons from one of them (they're red and semi-transparent -- they match the shirt really well, in fact) and lo and behold, a new shirt! (The front still needs to be hemmed, but that's pretty minor, and I thiiiink the fabric might be busy enough to distract most people from even noticing.)

The tie was a present from my friend Charles, who found it in the hallway of his apartment building. I've worn it once before (on day 29), but the moment he gave it to me, I knew that it was meant to be with this shirt. And at last, its time came.

Day 172. The tie was another gift from Rose. I don't remember where I got the shirt -- it's actually been stuck in the pile of "shirts I might get rid of since I've had them for ages and apparently I never wear them". But I spotted it when I was looking for something to wear with this tie, and thus the shirt was rescued from oblivion. The lesson? Never throw anything away. Sadly, given the state of my apartment, this may not be the best lesson for me to learn.

(You may recognize this outfit from my special crossover episode with the Comics Curmudgeon.)

Day 173. A newish tie with a shirt I've had for ages (and which has previously appeared in the Tie Project, on day 81). I liked this outfit so much that I wore it again, at the recent National Puzzlers' League convention in Ann Arbor, where it figured in an anecdote involving regular commenter Rubrick and our mutual friend NeilFred, a.k.a. Renfield in the NPL. (Here is a visual aid of the three of us.) Renfield and I were chatting, and he remarked that this combination didn't seem quite up to my usual standards. I took mock offense and explained that the busy tie/busy shirt thing isn't the only kind of outfit I like, but still, clearly he thought I had gone a little too conservative today.

Then, about an hour later, a group of us were getting a quick lunch at the mall near the hotel before we all went off to catch our planes, and I was sitting across from Rubrick, who was sitting next to Renfield. Rubrick paused at some point and said, "You know, I've been looking at your shirt and tie, and they're really just amazing together. All the colors match perfectly, and the dots in the tie echo the tiny dots in the stripes on the shirt -- it's a great combination." And I said, "Why, thank you!" very sweetly, as I flipped Renfield off with my right hand. (He then recanted his earlier statement, explaining that Rubrick's praise had helped him see the light. If only all my critics were as willing to listen to reason!)

Next time: I continue, against all logic, to not run out of outfits.

Posted by Francis at 05:00 PM in Ties