Let’s talk about Dwayne Wade. Everybody loves Dwayne, right?
Part of Dwayne’s appeal is the way he’s mastered public appearances. He’s always the best-dressed guy in the room, and that’s because he combines his personal tastes with classic men’s style.
Good menswear helps the viewer’s eye move up toward your face and frames your body rather than hiding it.
If only everyone could do this well, right? We try to make allowances for professional sports, where body types can be tough to fit properly and, let’s be honest, egos run pretty wild. But once in a while a sports personality comes along who’s done such a terrible job of dressing himself that we just have to use him as a “Do Not Do This” example. Ladies and gentlemen, for your enlightenment and edification:
Michael Irvin’s Red Suit
11,904 yards in the NFL only gets you so far, apparently. Let’s talk about Michael Irvin’s red suit here.
First off we’ve got eight buttons. Four or six is traditional, and tailors usually just space them a bit further out for a tall man rather than adding an extra row. It makes him look a little too stuffed into the suit, and it’s distracting for anyone who knows clothes.
It’s also a notched lapel jacket. The double-breasted jacket is known for being dressier and more formal than the single-breasted jacket. With that in mind, wearing a double-breasted suit with notched lapels is a very noticeable contradiction. Notched lapels are not as formal as peaked lapels, and double-breasted suit jackets should always have peaked lapels to maintain the formal appearance of the jacket.
But really the issue here — and you all noticed it as soon as you looked at the picture — is the colors. Michael Irvin would be considered a “low contrast man,” because of his dark skin and dark hair (learn about men of different contrasts). Low contrast men should lean more towards a monochromatic attire.
Here, we see Irvin with a very deliberate contrast between the red and black. This takes attention away from the face – and remember, the whole point of a suit is to bring attention to the face! – and makes a distraction. The viewer’s eye goes straight to the suit and stays there instead of traveling up the body. It doesn’t help that the red’s a vivid hue, either — outfits that lean heavily toward a single color do better in dark, muted shades.
What to learn from Michael Irvin
- The difference between style and fashion.
- Understanding contrast and color
John Daly’s Golf Pants
All right — we get it — golf pants can break the rules. Scotland gave us traditional plaids, and the idle rich don’t care what people think about their pants. Eventually a tradition of wacky pattern combinations became part of the golf culture.
But seriously? There’s such a thing as too much. Your trousers — even your noteworthy one — should still help the eye move on up the body, not stop it dead on your lower half.
Happy mediums do exist. You can get good golf trousers in chino, corduroy, cotton, flannel or tweed trousers. Many of these have a texture of their own that makes them look relaxed and separates them from strict business wear. And you can always throw a stately plaid or some microstriping in there to busy the look up a little.
What to learn from John Daly
- The goal of an outfit is to draw attention to the face!
- Patterned trousers are ok, but exercise some limits.
- Patters work best in muted colors. If you want to wear bright colors, wear them as monochromes!
Coach Bruce Pearl’s Orange Blazers and Ties
Presumably we’re done seeing these, right?
The problem with Bruce’s undeniably school-spirited outfits isn’t so much the bright orange — that’s startling, but he was always careful to keep from clashing it with other bright colors a la John Daley — as it is the frequent matching of one orange with another.
When the only color in your outfit is a single bright one (the rest of the outfit in this photo, for example, is either white or black) you need to make sure all the pieces are in the same color.
A slightly off-tone orange tie, as above, paired with a vibrant orange jacket makes an awkward match. The tie either needs to come up a couple notches to match the jacket, or be a more significantly different color that looks like deliberate contrast instead of a failed attempt at matching.
Understanding color coordination is extremely important when dressing. We’ll actually kind of miss Coach Pearl’s crazy Tennessee blazers, but it’s a relief to see those not-quite-matches vanish from the college basketball season.
What to learn from Coach Pearl
- Color can make or break an outfit.
- Color coordination
Dieon Sanders’s Monochrome Outfit
Here we see “Prime Time” with a monochromatic look. He’s a low contrast man, so the problem doesn’t lie in his coordination abilities, but the color of his suit is fighting with the color of his skin here.
A darker color that stands out a little more from his skin would go a long way to making Dieon’s style work here. And we’re just not sure what to do with that shirt collar — it’s some kind of fashion statement, with the little bars of color matching his suit, but who knows what it’s trying to say.
What we can learn from “Prime Time”
- Strategies for low contrast men – the idea of the outfit’s not bad, just the execution.
- Monochromatic can work…as long as you pick the right color!
- Develop a sense for which colors work for you and which colors don’t.
- Avoid style details that deviate from classic menswear just for the sake of being different. There should be a clearly-apparent purpose.
Gilbert Arenas’s Black and White Spectacular
One of the more important parts of any ensemble is to have a solid “core color.” The core color is usually the color of the suit jacket, and its function is to set the tone of the suit. “Accent colors” then come in to complement the core color.
Accent colors are normally displayed through a dress shirt and/or tie. Here, Arenas doesn’t seem to have one definitive core color, but rather a random mixture of accent colors. The core color would be white, but his black lapels largely contrast the white. One color replaces the other fairly arbitrarily, and the whole outfit just looks like a mess.
Another issue with Arenas’ wardrobe is his contrast. Arenas is a low contrast man, and low contrast men should strive for a monochromatic look. We’ve already talked about this idea here, but he’s a good example of why it matters.
What to learn from Gilbert Arenas
- The importance of core and accent colors
- Contrast
Don Cherry’s Broadcast Blazers
Don Cherry, for those who don’t follow hockey, is a much-beloved broadcaster from “Hockey Night in Canada” (and, more recently, ESPN in America as well).
The blazers are his thing. We get that. They’re not going away and he likes them. If you’re a TV personality you can sort of get away with that kind of defining quirk, though it doesn’t make him any easier to look at. Most of us can take a look at Don and realize why suits need a solid, usually dark, core color with only light, symmetric patterning on top of it.
Another problem with the outfit we see here is the style collar he tends to wear. He has a point collar but there is nearly no room in-between points, and the knots of his ties can barely be seen.
Very narrow collar spreads like this can actually guide the viewer’s eye back downward, away from the face. They also tend to make your neck look uncomfortably pinched (even if the fit’s actually fine), which gives a stuffy impression.
What to learn from Don Cherry
- Core and accent colors
- Learning to balance classic and individual style
- The right collar
Conclusion (with help from Dwayne Wade)
By looking at the previous pictures, it becomes evident that all of the previous, poorly-dressed men had a couple things in common:
- They wanted to display some sort of personal style.
- They displayed that personal style, but in loud and distracting ways.
Many men are confronted by the problem of wanting to express their individual style while staying within the suggested guidelines of good men’s style. Though it may take some experimentation, the ability to display your own style is very possible. Just look at how someone like Dwayne Wade dresses.
Wade has the ability to effectively dress stylishly while expressing his own sense of style. His color coordination is spot on — low-contrast within the outfit but sufficiently contrasted with his skin tone — and he wears accessories very well.
With this in mind, take some time to recognize what your style is. Look at colors, patterns, and accessories to determine whether they compliment your complexion. Understand the guidelines of men’s style, but make sure to incorporate your own style into these guidelines!
