Like many women, my husband owns more t-shirts than Imelda Marcos owns shoes. Unfortunately, it’s not only t-shirts that he owns in abundant supply, but an entire array of clothing that falls under the category of “I don’t want to be seen out in public with my husband wearing this.” I am talking about sweatshirts, including one with a built in front pouch for a beer can, like a kangaroo carrying its joey, sweatpants from every team he’s ever played on or coached, and some seriously color blind sport coat selections. While I have weathered the storm of the Goodwill t-shirts with holes in the armpits ready to disintegrate at the touch, and my husband has graduated to single-handedly keeping the Under Armor company in business, I still don’t feel as though we’ve made a whole lot of attire advancement in our seven years together.
Let me preface this article with the fact that I grew up in a household where you weren’t allowed to wear anything less than khakis on an airplane. While I did admire from afar those comfortable travelers in pajama bottoms, I felt a bit of dignity that I was dressed to a higher standard. This is not to say that my husband was not raised with similar standards, but there were just certain fashion expectations ingrained into me at an early age for various events and as a result I have developed some hang ups in this area that he did not. Convincing my husband about these unwritten clothing codes has not been so easy though. Comfort reigns supreme in his world and anything with buttons or zippers is usually shunned at all costs. If I’m lucky, a fancy night on the town might call for a hooded sweatshirt not turned inside out or a solid colored t-shirt.
Over the years, I have discovered that my husband has developed his own theories and principals about bedecking his body. Apparently once you become a college athletic coach, you are expected to look like one at every waking minute. Heaven forbid the man at the post office or the server at the nice Italian restaurant should coincidentally have a child seeking a scholarship to your college in your particular sport and you are caught unaware. He can’t take a chance at letting that one game changing recruit pass him by.
While the mafia might have a uniform of nylon tracksuits, pasta, and cannolis, my husband has matching colored sweat ensembles, a bottle of Gatorade, and a baseball cap. Never mind the fact that most people over the age of six have dismissed the practice of wearing the same color sweatpants and sweatshirt for fear of looking like a large bruise in blue or a gigantic grape in purple; my husband is clearly a man dedicated to his work and has thrown fashion sense to the wind in support of his cause.
My husband and I have also debated continuously over the years about the colors olive green and brown. While I believe I am able to discern between the two fairly accurately, there remains virtually no difference between the hues in my husband’s eyes and I’m pretty sure that he would fight me with his dying breath on this issue. As a result, when forced to wear adult clothes, he has concocted some rather unique outfits based on his inability to tell the two colors apart. While I might make my sentiments known about the eyesore that these garish garments create, I usually lose and am forced to ask for a table in the back, darkest part of a restaurant or walk a few steps ahead to avoid looking as if being stalked by someone from the asylum.
Then there is the issue of the outlet mall. For someone who throws money around on concert tickets and anything related to the Black Crowes like my husband does, that man loves a sale. I am a complete proponent of clearance items and am known for my miserly tendencies. However, I am of the ideology that just because it’s on sale, does not mean you have to buy it. Some clothing makes it to the sale rack for a legitimate reason: no one else will pay to wear it. My husband however is an outlet store’s dream as he is more than happy to take those less than hot ticket items off of their hands. Take the incident of the Christmas shorts, which I was too late to stop him from purchasing. If only I’d arrived at the Polo outlet five minutes sooner, I could have prevented the abomination that were the elf green and cardinal red khaki shorts. As I made rude comments about these hideous items, the less than perky salesman ringing up my husband glowered at me from behind the counter as if to say, “Please let him take these out of our store. We can’t give these shorts away.” Nevertheless, my husband vehemently extolled the many virtues of these garments and the myriad of uses they would fulfill. Needless to say, the first outing of the green shorts, the mildly less grotesque of the two pairs, drew far from rave reviews from others. On the plus side, the cherry red shorts have yet to have their public debut. Whether this resulted from the prior panning of the green shorts or simply his own realization that nothing he owned could possibly compliment this appalling acquisition, I am incredibly grateful.
To be fair, I realize my husband is a man, and according to him, a very macho one at that. While I heap on the praise when he puts on a nice pair of jeans and sweater, or better yet a suit, I am not unrealistic about his limitations. He is never going to be a metrosexual and that is fine with me, as I don’t think I could be with someone who spent that much time on his appearance or did that weird gel thing with his hair like those men in the picture books at the hair salon. My husband is a coach so there is really no need for him to ever wear anything other than a sweatsuit to work or beg for lacrosse socks in an array of colors at Christmas, no matter how pathetic I think it might be. Yet, if I could just keep the grandfather hats that make him look like an overgrown extra from Newsies and the sport coats with the arm felt or awful plaid out of his hands and off his body, I think I would be satisfied.
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