It’s been a bit since our last newsletter. I would like to blame it mostly on the first icy chills of spooky season hitting the air. Fall is my favorite season of them all. I get to tuck into a long coat or a heavier wool blazer. I can light various candles (my personal favorite is “Portable Fireplace” by DS&Durga). I’ve been habitually making pasta once or twice a week, just to really fill out my voluminous fall wardrobe.
But really, I have been absent from the newsletter because the WGA strike is over. The strike allowed me to almost fully abandon the various projects I’ve been trying to see to fruition and flitter around with other things. I highly recommend flittering more often, if you can. Everyone should flitter periodically, as it is an excellent means of exposing yourself to new pursuits. Self-help gurus are constantly telling you to have a plan, to journal, to set goals. Wrong. Just flitter and you might find your next passion.
I flittered away half a year waiting for the strike to be over, and now it’s here. I have to catch up on all the tasks I said could wait. I have to call my manager and explain why said tasks have not been completed. Then, I have to convince myself not to give up on them. It’s quicksand I willfully walked right into. As much as I enjoy writing about style, clothes, and culture, movies are always foremost on my mind. It’s the primary reason I chose LA over New York after college. My literary ambitions paled in comparison to my cinematic ones.
Sometimes, like this week, those ambitions intersect. A couple years ago, I found myself agreeing (with very little need for convincing) to spend a day on the set of Taika Waititi’s newest film, Next Goal Wins.
My friend Iain Morris co-wrote the film and asked me to come out for a day of reshoots. Taika wanted people of color and friends of the production to play US soccer executives. I have no lines and I’m only in the master shot, but I am in the movie. I’m also in the trailer above.
Why am I mentioning this in a style newsletter? Well, besides shamelessly bragging and name-dropping, I found the day to be sartorially traumatic. I do not have to explain to you, dear reader, that the clothes people wear in movies are not theirs. In fact, someone gets paid to tell you what to wear! Because you are pretending to be someone you are not! It’s a crazy business.
The process of doing a job as small as “mute featured extra” is time consuming. They couldn’t just throw me in anything, since I would be prominently positioned in-frame. I was in a scene with only six other people. Four of them being actual principal actors. If I looked odd, an audience would notice.
So, I drove up to Burbank to a costume warehouse and met with the designers working on the reshoots. I was asked to bring my own clothes, something that a soccer executive would wear. I brought my double-breasted Stoffa suit and a double-breasted vintage navy blue Christian Dior Monsieur blazer. The Stoffa was immediately discarded for being too modern and cool looking. My shoes, a pair of Blackstock & Weber loafers, were an immediate hit with the team and made it into the film. The Dior piece was a maybe, but we were at a costume warehouse, so why not try some things on?
After rummaging through various options, we arrived at the below:
As I said at the time, I look like my dad. The suit is boxy and loose in the weirdest places. I have no form or shape other than “tube.” I look like I wandered out of a business park in Thousand Oaks, in desperate need of a TGI Fridays.
But isn’t that the point? This is not how I dress. I’m not me. I’m someone else. Why should I care how I look?
Sadly, vanity is a thing that most human beings experience at some point in their lives. I have no reason to be vain other than personal pride. I’m not famous, or even “well-known” in any legitimate sense. But as a person who writes about and considers style, I do care about my appearance. And this was not how I wanted to appear in my motion picture debut:
OK, I lied. I’ve been in a movie before this. I’m sure you all saw the 2009 comedy Bob Funk. Oh, you didn’t? Well, give it a watch and let me know what you thought about my costume (which was just my normal clothes because the movie only cost a million dollars). This is the first movie where I received my own trailer, though:
And my own broken toilet!
I can’t count all the times I considered taking an illicit pee in there while we waited to be called to set. But I know IATSE guys talk and someone would forever label me the “Broken Toilet Pisser” and my career in Hollywood would be over.
I hate to say this, because it makes me sound depressing, but I did think about wanting to be dressed well around movie stars. I wore a seersucker Stussy suit to set and wished I was wearing that for the movie. I would have been deeply conspicuous in such an outfit and potentially would have caused a riot in theaters around the country. My vanity, my need to peacock or show off, had to be secondary to the actual task I was required to perform: sit at a conference table, look professional, and pretend to take notes as Michael Fassbender gets fired.
It took me a minute to accept that I’m not supposed to look good — a feeling I hate. This is why I can’t stand dressing up for Halloween. Oh, you want me to purposefully look UGLY?! I’ve cultivated an entire identity and career around try to look my best. My self-esteem is tied up in my appearance and the way I dress. I’ve never thought of myself as particularly handsome, but I can compensate for that by dressing up. My sense of style is my “one true beauty,” like Jo’s hair in Little Women. Without it, I’m just a guy who’s getting older and thicker every year.
In short, thank God I’m not an actor.
Next week (and I MEAN next week — I promise to get back to a weekly cadence for this thing), by popular demand we’ll talk more about neckerchiefs. Also, please don’t forget to ask me MORE questions in our chat.
And remember to share this newsletter, tell your friends, and consider becoming a paid subscriber so I can afford to write here more often. I will never go behind a paywall for this newsletter. I might start offering subscriber benefits like extra posts, AMAs, and maybe even a subscriber-only podcast. But every subscription helps.