Editor’s note: The following “Best of Boston” column was originally published Aug. 11, 2023. I am probably the absolute last person to write an essay on dressing up.
Except for a gorilla suit and my cherished Wilt Chamberlain No. 13 wife-beater basketball jersey, I could easily go the rest of my life with three pairs of denim ranch jeans, matching three snap-button blue denim Western shirts and a red T-shirt underneath for pizzazz. Oh.
Throw in underwear, socks, $1,200 cowboy hat, boots and a barn coat. A cultural alarm ding-a-linged for me years ago. That’s when men started donning clown shorts that weren’t really shorts, per se.
They ended mid-calf, giving the wearer a most comical suntan line. These mini-pants were adopted from the inner-city gang look, which came from those serving 15-to-life in the pokey. In a blink, CPAs and corporate attorneys were wearing the ghetto-strut pants-ette that oft exposed hairy butt cracks.
(Band name.) Did it make the wearer look like Clown No. 4 or room-temperature IQ 11-year-old lookout on a Stingray bicycle in a drug deal? Yes.
Did it stop brain surgeons from wearing this idiotic fashion statement? No. When did we guys start dressing like extras in a Mad Max movie? I’m guessing it was in the 1960s and it probably started quite innocently with the baseball cap. Prior to the ’60s, men wore fedoras or snappy, small-brimmed straw hats in the summer.
In the late 19th century, men wore hats to shade themselves from the sun and a.