Return of the Texas Tuxedo

Though I didn't really start caring about how I was dressed until I was 16 years old, I was always clothes-conscious. Even as a small child I took particular pleasure in certain articles of clothing; I distinctly remember a white t-shirt with a green skull and crossbones which said "Bad to the Bone" in orange lettering that I loved to wear in Mrs. Tzizik's first grade class. As I reached the ripe old age of ten I decided that it was time to step things up a bit, so I took to wearing jeans, denim shirts, and bolo ties. Yes, there was a time when I would proudly rock a full-blown Texas Tuxedo, complete with appropriate neckwear.

The gentleman in this picture, however, was not ten years old.

To be fair, he wasn't wearing a bolo tie, or any kind of neckwear for that matter. The Texas Tux that he was wearing, though, is something against which I've previously railed, and you can read about it here.

Long story short, don't wear denim shirts with jeans. One element of good style is the ability to successfully pull off good levels of contrast in your outfits; this is why you wear a light blue shirt with a navy suit, not a dark blue one. The same logic applies to this gentleman's outfit. There is no contrast in material and almost no contrast in color whatsoever. When coupled with the tent-like fit of the shirt, this man looks like an amorphous blob of denim.

The solution: lose one piece of denim to achieve contrast between material and color. If you switch out the not-super-well-fitting-but-reasonably-acceptable-in-this-case Dad jeans for khakis, you're doing better, so long as you take that shirt to a tailor and get some darts put in it. Also, you can keep the jeans (or even better, upgrade them to something a little better-fitted and cooler), but substitute the denim shirt for a white button-down or perhaps a sweater. Either choice gives you instant improvement.