Week Ten: Sports Jackets vs. Suit Jackets

Compared to the sheer vastness of a woman's wardrobe, your average guy's is, uh, relatively basic, limited to the bare essentials and staples like a good suit, a few shirts, a couple of pairs of jeans, shoes etc. for mixing and matching, so it's hardly surprising to see something worn repeatedly within a short period of time. Here's that 11-ounce navy corduroy jacket that you saw on Kumar a few posts back - I'm not too sure what comes as more of a surprise: the fact that it is actually the other half of a suit - corduroy being a less conventional choice of fabric for one - or that he actually wore it before with jeans like a sports jacket. Purists might insist that a suit jacket must only be worn with its matching pants, but I think it's a question of tasteful execution and its propriety in relation to the occasion and place you're wearing it to. Granted, this corduroy number is very easy to dress down, inherently characteristic of a sports jacket with its heavier material albeit lacking some of the other identifying marks of one e.g. horn/gold buttons, elbow patches, etc. Nevertheless, I think more wiggle room - figuratively speaking, that is - should be allowed when it comes to pairing suit jackets with bottoms other than their matching pants - let's face it - the "seat" always takes the brunt of daily wear and tear and it's all too easy to "orphan" a suit jacket (and a perfectly good one at that!) especially if you're like an overzealous (metro) friend of ours who got literally "addicted" to altering his pants and had his favorite pair taken in progressively tighter and tighter until they were "within an inch of its life" - again, literally! - right before they ripped. Whether they so did discreetly or otherwise, I might never know, but I won't dare laugh - as he wasn't - while his obviously amused wife, related the story!!! Just take care to make the ensemble work and not appear slovenly and needlessly incongruous, sticking to the stricter rules like of matching belts with shoes, etc. A pressed shirt kinda goes without saying.



Worn together though, Kumar's corduroy suit is absolutely wicked, for lack of a better qualifier (lol). I especially liked the way he dressed it up the other day with a slim-fit, powder blue fine gingham check, single-cuff Eton shirt, Tateossian cufflinks, skinny knitted burgundy tie from Milan, silk Ermenigildo Zegna pocket square also in burgundy, pants tapered and hemmed short enough to give a fetching peak-show of Savile Row Robert Graham red socks, brown Cole Haan brogues. BTW, who is that, who got cropped out of the picture???