Ivy Memorandum Season 1 Episode 1

Sorry, I just can’t abide another “round up.”  In no particular order:

Mr. Graham Marsh has done a number of illustrations which are remarkable over at Kamakura Shirts in a piece he also wrote entitled: A to Z of the Ivy Look.  There is some revisionist history in here, but I think you will enjoy the artwork and his attention to Ivy details is special.    Here’s a sample: (many thanks, Old School).

 

Or some of that detail I was talking about:

In the midst of my post-booster fever, I was gifted 5 incredible ties by an Ivy friend, one of which I am wearing today.  Bounty is not without it’s own baggage, and as the collection expands it shines truth and light on my reptilian-brain challenge of not being able to remember what I have unless it is in front of me.   I am not one who lays his outfit out the night before.  There are a number of legit reasons:

1. I have a dairy allergy, not lactose, dairy, the way dogs are allergic to chocolate.  There is compelling attraction, passionate consumption which may not result in death, but in no way can chocolate be considered a good idea for a dog and in now way can dairy be considered a good idea for me.   I quit lithium twice cold turkey, quite drinking cold turkey, and can’t stay away from dairy for more than a week.  There are, well, “dairy pants.”  And no one knows til the morning of whether the bell tolls for dairy pants or not.
2. I’m busy, man.

So I conceive my outfit in the morning, in the shower.  I am not one of those guys who has a trillion of anything and I start my outfit with tie selection (I don’t have to worry about shirts, I only wear white OCBD’s).  Hold on, let me look.  Ok, I have in my winter rotation 41 regular ties and 4 bow ties (I do not include seasonal novelty in my tie count, because I barely include it in my tie collection).  Is that a lot or a little?  It is not a labyrinthian archive for sure.  Still, if you don’t remember it unless you are looking at it, every morning is this:

I refuse to get a motorized tie rack.  You know me, it isn’t that I am judging those who do.  But the whirring.  And the replacing the batteries.  You know that the battery compartment would be in the farthest northeast corner of the closet.  Who needs this in the morning:  “I had a great time last night but I need to stop home before work… John, are you there?”  “Oh, sorry, yes, great time, sorry, changing the batteries in my tie rack.”

Nobody needs that.

I’ve had them on hangers, and they slide.  So do yours.  No amount of rubber anything stops a good tie from sliding down a hanger.  If your ties aren’t sliding they aren’t good ties.  Test my theory.  Take a hanger next time you are tie shopping (except in the Danbury Connecticut Brooks Brothers, more on that in a minute) and just slide a tie down.  You’ll see what I mean.  What happens then, because my house and closet are not perfectly balance on the fulcrum of the earth is that the ties slide and all I see is the last tie I hung on the top of a one inch thick pile of other ties I am never going to wear because… correct, I can’t see them.

I rolled them in a dresser drawer.  Well, I do roll them in a dresser drawer.  I can see them, but I don’t have infinite dresser drawer real estate either, so apologies to my gym clothes.  Sorry.  Something had to give.

After the tie, the shirt is a gimme.  Well, not really.  I wear a tie every day to work even when sitting here in the home office with no zooms to speak of, still  a tie because

1. I think better dressed
2. I am not a barn animal
3. It lessens the guilt on days I don’t go back to work after picking up my daughter
4. I am besodden by twenty-somethings hitting on me and this is a great generational differentiator.

One of those is not true.

Then the diary pants v no dairy pants call.  Not as easy as you would think.  Why?  Because the pants are the driver for the vest.  All winter long, I wear a vest.  A number of good reasons:

1. I like full cut shirts because there are times during the day when I either eat or raise my hands above my waistline.   A vest cleans up the tuck in.
2. I wear vintage ties sometimes, and they don’t always hang low enough.  Vest solves that problem too.
3. It’s become a signature thing and gives the functionality of one of those fleece vests without the finance-bro stigma.
4. I rarely wear suits but that is gonna change.  But it hasn’t yet, and if you wear a vest and a jacket, you don’t need a coat most days here.
5. People think I run a Glee Club.

We were going to get together on the 29th in town but I had to cancel with the most recent outbreak.  It wasn’t even a judgement call really but it is sad that we are going into another break having to still consider these things.  The hand-wringing-world-has-changed commentary, yes we all know that, who is going to go first and figure out the glass half full aspect of all of this?  Ok, I will.

1. I am sure that I am not the only one who has seasonal obligations about which there are mixed feelings.  I am not saying this is an excuse to ghost them, but I am saying that it is at least a cloak under which to start a conversation.  “You know I love your parents, so much that I don’t want to infect them.”

Ok, maybe that’s the only good part.

JB