The Pocket Square

I adore this Mad Men avatar generator. Here’s the Sterling Cooper version of me, replete with bowtie and classy briefcase!

While I was in Los Angeles last week for the very fun, very successful Dwell on Design Conference, I met up with Brendan F. Newnam, a friend of a friend and guy I’d been trying to hang out with either here in San Francisco or down in LA for some time. We finally got the chance at Lamill in Silver Lake and he, Drew and I had a fine breakfast and first rate coffee in the somewhat over-designed cafe that Brendan likened to “stepping inside a giant purse.”

After our breakfast, whose conversation touched on the former Yugoslavia, the works of Alan Furst, foraging for food and how the best minds of our generation have gone into stealth advertising, Brendan and I retreated to his car so that he could record me telling a joke.

Brendan’s day job is as a producer for the public radio show Marketplace, which I catch at least a couple times a week, and on the side he has a witty, short show called The Dinner Party Download. Each episode starts with a joke and here’s the one I told, or better yet, listen to the whole 15 mintue episode for free here and learn about the assassination of James Garfield, and the merits of really expensive charcoal. Brendan and his co-host Rico are smart, funny guys, and once you’re hooked you can check out the rest of the episodes on iTunes for the price of zero dollars.

One of my favorite style blogs, All Plaidout by Max Wastler, asked me to contribute a Father’s Day tribute to my pop. The week before Father’s Day Max ran guest posts from writers across the men’s style spectrum in a series called What I Learned from My Father. Have a look at mine, and be sure to check them all out. Good ones all around.

The photo above was taken of me and my dad at my wedding in October of 2007. The photo is by Alexis Tjian.

Here’s what I had to say about my dad:

If we accept the notion, and teams of advertisers are hoping we do, that our clothes are some direct representation of who we are, then my father is a man unfettered. Bolo ties, multi-hued batiked shorts, a plumed fedora, and of late, even a warm, woolen beret have found their way into his wardrobe. He runs around the Northern California town in which I grew up in clothes I would never wear, stalking the garden in Keens, a tasseled fleece jester hat flapping behind him while snowboarding, the suspenders and 20s-inspired garb he sported at his wedding two years ago.

He didn’t always dress with such abandon, and in the main he still doesn’t. Most of his clothes are those of a small-town carpenter: work boots, dirty jeans, fleece jackets and t-shirts bearing his company’s logo. Growing up, working clothes defined my father’s style of dress—not the work wear now so voraciously embraced by the urban fashion set, work clothes in which you paint a house or set forms, work clothes you mar, then quickly destroy. Anything that was initially to be kept apart from the jobsite—corduroy pants or button-down shirt—invariably came home with flecks of dried concrete or marked with spray paint. He seemed to me a man largely defined by his work, and was at times reluctant to extend beyond that, and he dressed accordingly. Fashion was not his concern. He kept his head down. Little suggested an inconsequential person more than undue flash.

But since my parents’ divorce nearly seven years ago, this inward man has expanded. Suddenly free to break from old routines, root out what was inessential and honestly reckon with what he wanted from the rest of his life, the burdens of a long marriage and a glimpse of what might lay in store invigorated him. Bouts of sullenness, or ill-temper, things that I had taken to be essential elements of his personality were revealed as little more than entrenched habit, and were cast off. He became lighter, more open, more accepting and more fun. He had always been a very kind, generous and loving father, and I saw these qualities, those which I take to be his core, renewed. Like many things in his life, his sense of style was in for renaissance.

Now let me reiterate, I’m not terribly sanguine with all his choices, but to see him embrace so many new aspects of his life has been a joy for me. From his wild hats to his Jack Nicholson glasses to his bright yellow shirts, dressing is now one of his pleasures. He’s given himself license to play, to dress for pleasure, and for all the snappy patter in the media about what’s in, what’s out and what’s next, let us–men who give it a second thought when we put on our clothes in the morning–never forget to dress for the sheer fun of it. Perish vanity, perish self-consciousness, perish trends.

For years my dad didn’t allow himself to dress for any reason save keeping out the cold. But of late his whole outlook has changed, and though he remains uninterested in what’s cool or what’s in, he has started asking himself, “What do I like?” In dressing to please only himself, in coming to see his clothes at as another avenue for expression and delight, my father has immensely pleased me. May I one day pass on that idea, that a man can do a thing to please himself without becoming inauthentic or solipsistic, to a son of my own.

- Aaron Britt