Clothes, Style and Fashion

Story · all 20 words

Nine Black T-Shirts

Two days before my first real job interview my sister came to my flat, opened my wardrobe, looked inside it for about four seconds, and closed it again without saying anything.

“You own nine black T-shirts,” she said eventually. “That is not a style. That is a uniform for a man who has stopped trying.”

She is not wrong about clothes and she has never once been gentle about them. She works in fashion, which in her case means she can tell you what year a coat was made from the other side of a room, and she holds genuine opinions about a zip being on the wrong side of a jacket.

So we went shopping, and it took five hours. I learned two words that afternoon that I had been using wrongly for my entire adult life. A jacket fits you if it is the right size. A jacket suits you if it looks good on you. These are not remotely the same thing, and the first jacket I tried on did the first and absolutely not the second.

The one we bought in the end was plain dark grey. My own instinct had been something striped; my sister said one word and we moved on with our afternoon. She held the jacket against three different shirts until she found one that matched properly, and then made me roll each sleeve up and down twice while she watched from across the shop.

Her rules, which I now repeat to other people as though they were my own: nothing too tight and nothing too loose; when you are not sure, choose plain over patterned; never put anything at all in a jacket pocket; and check every button before you leave the house rather than in the lift on the way up.

On the morning itself I looked genuinely smart for the first time in roughly six years. I left the sunglasses in the car under strict instruction, and I wore proper shoes instead of the trainers I had been planning to wear, which my sister described as “a decision, not a preference”.

I got the job. The office turned out to be entirely casual – the man who interviewed me was wearing a hooded top and had been for eleven years – and I have worn that outfit exactly twice since that day.

I would still do the whole thing again. It is not that clothes are important. It is that I walked into that room believing I looked like somebody who ought to be in it, and on that particular morning that was worth considerably more than being fashionable has ever been worth to me since.