FashBlog.com

Let me get one thing straight right from the beginning: I love my boyfriend. I REALLY DO. But he is the inspiration for this blog entry, and if he has anything to say about that I will probably just give him some long-winded speech about how writers have to draw inspiration from somewhere, and he should really just be honored. Or something like that.

When we first met, my boyfriend had what is commonly referred to as style. As a matter of fact, that was one of the main reasons I was attracted to him in the first place. He has a tendency to shop in thrift stores (which is a whole different blog entry) and he buys lots of vintage clothing. The thing is, he wears it well. Bell bottom jeans, combat boots, and tailored 1970s shirts with soft textures and geometric patterns in oranges and browns. Yum, right?

Absolutely. As a matter of fact, there was more than one time when we were going on a date and I felt out-dressed by him. The boy knows how to dress. The operative phrase there is "knows how." Not "the boy always dresses just right."

Because, honestly? We are three years into a committed relationship now, and my honey's style pretty much reflects that. When we walk down the street together, I get the feeling that people look at us and say "Their three year anniversary has already come and gone."

It's not all his fault. I'm sure I've gotten sloppier too. But my sloppiness is (mostly) confined to not shaving my legs when I'm not going to be wearing skirts. Mea culpa; I'm a working writer! I don't have time for such mundane things!

But back to the point. What I'm saying is, about a year after we met, my boyfriend went to a garage sale. He came home with a very large box. Inside the box were thirty tee shirts that had apparently been printed up to advertise a local dinner theater. The dinner theater flopped, the building went up for rent, and the people who held this garage sale were apparently left with all of these tee shirts. They put them out for sale in a large box, no doubt waiting for someone like my boyfriend to come along.

Ladies, do you know what it's like to live with a guy who has thirty identical tee shirts advertising a defunct dinner theater? If not, dig deep... you can probably find a similar horror story in your own past that will help you to sympathize. Maybe something along the lines of trying to raise a thirteen year-old boy.

I got really tired of those tee shirts. For some reason, they never got rotated, with the end result being that there were fifteen perfectly acceptable tee shirts still in the box, and fifteen in constant rotation that were full of holes and covered in paint stains. And after awhile they developed that certain smell that doesn't wash out. You know what I'm talking about.

Luckily, in recent years he has put on a few pounds and gotten a job in construction, which means that he developed some new muscles in new places and the old tee shirts no longer fit. I still see them in rotation once in awhile, but for the most part they're relegated to a big pile in the laundry room that I never bother to wash. I'm afraid that if I wash them and put them away in his dresser, he'll remember that he has them.

Then again, this is a man who owns one particular tee shirt that looks like it has been attacked by moths- it is absolutely covered in hole. It has a cartoon cat on the front and looks very, um, 1980s. Once I made the mistake of asking him about it, and he informed me proudly that he got it as a gift. When he was eleven years old. Yes, it still fits; I chalk that up to a miraculous stretching of twenty-year-old cotton. And all the holes add some extra room for growth, too.

I don't mean to say that my boyfriend doesn't ever look good. In fact, he could wear the darned kitty tee shirt every day and I would still think he looked fantastic. But let me put it this way: We recently moved into a new house, and in the process of unpacking and hanging up clothes I found one of those old 1970s button-down shirts of his. It's white, with a soft dotted pattern in blue and brown, and it's slightly silky to the touch. I hung it on the doorknob and dropped a few hints, and he wound up wearing it as pajamas a few nights later. I totally won that round.
-by bjp