I wore my wedding shoes again this week. I got married almost 15 years ago, and these boots carried me through a very long day of the marriage ceremony and the party. After getting back from our honeymoon, I continued wearing these boots all throughout my time on my then-job; then I wore them on the next job; and the next job; and the next. I’ve been chewed out by my bosses in them, and I’ve been promoted in them.

This is a bad picture of a good pair of boots.

They were close to being my only pair of shoes for a little while, when money was tight. The other pair I had were “undead” Chuck Taylors which were so worn out that I had to glue the soles back on every other week.

As life became a bit more stable and my expendable income grew, I bought more shoes. At times these boots were stuck in the back of the wardrobe, and there’s definitely been years where they saw the light of day maybe once every six months. Then I’d somehow reconnect with them and end up wearing the crap out of them for several months in a row again.

I like this shot because you can see how easily they take a shine still. They’ve had so much beeswax-based conditioner applied over the last 15 years that all it takes is a quick brush to get them nice and glossy. Also, look at the wear on the toes for the left boot…

They’ve been resoled twice and reheeled several more times. The elastic has been replaced, but it’s shot again. As Chelsea boots are easy to slip in, they were my footwear of choice whenever I had to fly and get through airport security. As such, they’ve traveled half the world with me, often spending months on end with no conditioner and not a horsehair brush in sight.

Believe it or not, that’s the fourth pair of heels on them. I know that I always wear out heels aggressively, but that’s an unfortunate consequence of my Ehlers-Danlos - my gait is severely affected by my hip and knee pain.

When men talk about their shoes or their clothes, the conversation often turns towards a near-apologetic “oh yeah I spent 500 euros on these shoes but man, these will last me for-e-ver - I can just get them resoled and if you think about the cost per wear (…)” - something that I’ve certainly been guilty of, especially in my earlier years as a clotheshorse. There’s a reason that that famous “the secret vice” article keeps doing the rounds over the decades: men are taught that it’s not cool to care about your kit. So when we do care about it, the reflex is to make it into a utilitarian conversation - sure, this gear was expensive, but it’s because I need this to keep up with my hard living lifestyle.

That’s not at all the case for me. I ride a desk for a living, and I don’t spend my weekends diving for wrecks, wrestling bears or charting the deepest unknown territories of the Amazon. The reason I spend a lot of money on gear is always that I hope that it’s gear that will look better with age, where the wear becomes something that enhances its beauty - in much the same way that I find a 30 year old tattoos more beautiful than a fresh one.

These shoes have definitely passed that test. Now that they are close to the end of their life, they look better than ever. How many of us can say that, as time ravages us all?

Beginnings are hard. The first suit I bought, in a fabric that I describe below as “somewhere between grey slate and a denim tweed”. I do, however, still really enjoy the look of those beat-up chukkas.

A while back I made a post on getting heavily tattooed (to the point of wearing a “bodysuit”) and how that made me feel like I reclaimed part of my self after having developed severe chronic pain due to a genetic disorder.

Wrapping up my bodysuit (meaning getting covered neck to toes) was a strange sensation. On the one hand I was tremendously glad to not constantly be focused on healing yet another swathe of skin, and I certainly did enjoy the “recovered” monthly salary - good tattoos aren’t cheap. There was also a bright & pleasant sense of having “completed something” - though in hindsight that feeling did not stay with me nearly as long as I thought it would. Yet I was also somehow a bit sorry to be stepping out of the sense of community that I’d found in tattoo parlours & shops. Regardless of where I got tattooed, be it in a shop or at a convention, in my home town or after a few days of travelling just to get tattooed, there was always some form of “shop banter”. It’s that weird mix of juvenile humour, utter nonsense, the flotsam and jetsam of life, and genuine connection - all thrown into a blender set to max speed. I’ll tell people that some of the best conversations in my life were had while I was shaky, shivering wreck, leaking plasma everywhere. There’s a reason that the meme-text about “reaching out to my tattooer and my therapist and whoever texts back first gets my money” gained so much traction.

Exhibit 1 of the unfortunate meme-ification of tattooing.

(Said meme usually pops up on my feed with people getting a 15 minute lines-only little banger, which doesn’t quite have the same effect on the body as a solid 7 hours of shading on the spine or ribs - anyway, gatekeeping is lame and I didn’t intend for this to become a tangent.)

A lot of my reluctance to step away from the tattoo shop banter had to do with how much I’d gotten comfortable with that crowd over the years. When you first step into that world, as a client, you get a bit giddy - it can feel like you’re back in school and you’re hanging out with “the cool kids”. Tattooers are pirates on the seven seas; a good tattoo shop makes you feel like you’ve stepped out of the framework of daily life and found a little secret back alley where the rules don’t apply.

A proper shop hits you with an attack on the senses: there’s that mixed scent of soap, tobacco, weed, maybe a bit of incense, sour anxiety sweat punching through excessively applied deodorant (by the seasoned vet knowing that today’s session of drilling his sternum is going to drench him in sweat within the first fifteen minutes of the sesh). There’s designs and artwork everywhere, from the classics (swallows, ships, tigers, daggers, roses) to Japanese inspired design (warriors, mythical animals, esoteric deities) to heavy blackwork (swathes of black set hard against the paper); maybe the ceiling has a bunch of Tibetan prayer flags on it or some script painted. Then there’s the buzz of real machines (death to Chinese rotary vibrators; praise the coil!) at ear piercing volumes, which almost shield you from the rest of the shop even though the floor plan is open - you and your tattooer are in a self-contained cocoon of noise, pain and bodily fluids. Sometimes the machine barely punches over the music; other times it’s the other way around (if you’ve ever had the top of your spine tattooed, you know that all ceases to exist - except for the 120 decibels of angry machine rattling through your bones).

Pinky Yun’s shop in the 70s - Wan Chai, Hong Kong.

Swallow among (some) of his flash. The entire place was covered in flash, from what I understand having spoken to some people who were there at the time. Unfortunately I’m old enough to have arthritic knees but not old enough to have been to Hong Kong in the 70s.

Over time you start acclimating to the shop and its pirates. The “cool kids” become human beings again, and you start to recognise “a type” among tattooers and regular clients. It’s an amalgamation of similar preference in music (typically a combination of hardcore, punk, metal - though to be fair, I’ve also been tattooed a lot with Action Bronson, MF Doom and Tupac blasting), banter on the same topics (skateboarding, boxing, BJJ, weightlifting), and a similar dress code (jeans & Carhartt, band & tattoo shop t-shirts, Red Wing boots & Vans/Converse). I ticked a lot of the same boxes at the time myself: I used to spend a lot (too much) time playing guitar in crappy bands when I was young; boxed for a good number of years before my body started falling; spent a lot of time (again: too much) on the SuperFuture forums, riding the new wave of raw denim and work boots (late 2000s to early 2010s was a golden era for that place). I didn’t feel too out of place in tattoo shops after a bit, because the environment reflected what I felt my trajectory could’ve been if I’d stuck to my teenage guns & kept on track with my juvenile interests.

The author as a young(er) man - getting ready to get my feet tattooed traditional style, tebori (ie without the use of a tattoo machine) by Horihiro. Pretty typical for how I’d dress back then: raw denim, black tattoo shop t-shirt, and a very well-worn pair of Converse All Stars just outside the shot. Pro tip: don’t be that guy at the convention who gets his feet tattooed and then jams them back into engineer boots before limping back to the hotel.

However, by the time I’d gotten fully assimilated into the tattoo-shop-subculture I’d given a different spin to said juvenile trajectory: I moved from a very lab-bench-work-oriented PhD position at university (which felt like a continuation of life as an undergrad, a never-ending stage of young adulthood), into the private industry.

This initially felt like defeat. I’d worked my share of “punch a time clock” jobs as young adult/a student (hell, we all have), and I never minded working those because it felt like a temporary thing. Loading trucks on the weekend because it pays for drinking money at uni feels very different from loading trucks every working day because it’s your job. In the same way, moving from what a friend once called “the life of the mind” (a PhD) to “the life of CapEx & OpEx” (a commercial org) felt like stepping away from vague, unclear promises of a different kind of adulthood than my parents had.

The first two years of working in the industry coincided with me working through the completion of my bodysuit. Although this is purely hindsight speaking - and I by no means felt like this at the time - I now feel like those two years were me settling into my life. By the midway point of my third year in the industry, the feeling of disappointment on how my life trajectory had evolved had faded. I’d done the bodysuit bit. I’d been diagnosed with a degenerative chronic pain condition. I’d found a career. I was (and am) happily married. I had, in a word, become aware of (and - mostly - at peace with) the multitudes inside me. When I was in a tattoo shop, I looked like a tattoo dork. When I was at work, I looked like a desk dork. Together with my better half we’d set up a pretty good yearly travel cadence: usually 2 trips to Asia per year, with a little “side travel” sprinkled throughout the remaining months (European little hops). By no means a bad life, and whatever introspection the chronic pain occasionally triggered, it didn’t really lead me to believe I’d be looking at a midlife crisis any time soon.

I was terribly, terribly wrong about evading that midlife crisis.

Because right after I’d finished up my bodysuit and just as I settled into my career, COVID hit, and I would spend the next 2 years working from home.

I was lucky: I kept my job. Let’s rephrase that: I was incredibly lucky to keep my job. That said, I work in an industry that went completely berserk during the entire pandemic run, meaning that I was working insane hours - and for a man whose primary methods of decompressing had previously consisted of hanging out at tattoo shops and travelling, the experience of spending 365 days a year at home while working a soul-crushing amount of overtime was somewhat less than stellar.

The observation that we “aged 15 years over those 2 years in quarantine” is now a cliché, but I still find it to be the best way to describe what those years felt like. Too much time spent inside meant a lot of time spent inside my own head as well. With how little I had going on in life, the time spent inside my own head also came with a disproportionate focus on myself. Having to admit to navel-gazing is unpleasant, but in those particular circumstances I reckon that it was somewhat unsurprising. What was surprising however was that I stumbled onto a frequently recurring thought, i.e. a sense of needing to commit myself to a change, once all of this viral madness went away again. The root cause for that desire to commit to change was simple and was expressed by my generational peers across the globe: the pandemic had bumped my entire generation firmly into the “middle-aged” territory.

I’ve already mentioned this in the above, but it bears repeating: there was a near-perfect coinciding of three major events in my life: I finished my bodysuit, I settled into the career, and the pandemic hit. All of that hit me over the course of about 6 months. As nobody thought that we’d work from home for any real length of time - in the early months of the pandemic this very much felt like a “we’ll get it over with by end of summer” kind of thing - I’d started growing out my beard and shaving my head in those first few months of quarantine. With no hairdressers or barbers being open, shaving my head seemed like a straightforward thing to do. It also took me back to my younger days as a hardcore punk/metal fanatic: I’d spent a significant chunk of those years with a buzzcut or clean scalp. Revisiting the shaved scalp now, at the midpoint of my life, gave me some of that same excitement that I felt when I had first started my bodysuit. Likewise, the gearhead in me loved experimenting with razors to get the cleanest scalp shave known to man, as well as learning how to go from stubble to a well-maintained short beard, and then to a much longer beard - in other words, slowly learning how to make “this” into my new normal exterior.

A new veneer for the old body.

All of those changes were done with a feeling of real intention behind them: they felt like small but pretty radical changes. After about a year into quarantine though, the shaved head and longer beard no longer felt like anything except “this is what I look like now”. The whole thing leaned a little too heavily into the aforementioned “tattoo shop look” as well (no shortage of skins in tattoo shops, SHARPs or otherwise), and the lack of tension started bugging me. In order to put some tension back into the whole ordeal, you need to start looking for elements that are diametrically opposed to each other - and what could be more diametrically opposed to denim & Converse than classic menswear & Aldens?

I don’t remember how, in those early days, I came across Dieworkwear and Put This On. All I know is that I read both sites’ entire archive - going through it first by picking an article here & an article there; then working my way from the eldest to the newest post; and then going through it a third time while saving pictures to put together inspo albums on my phone. This, by the way, struck me as a very strange thing to do, and I had a touch of shame about the whole thing - I’d really not be too pleased if someone was to unlock my phone and saw a couple of thousands of pictures of classic menswear on there. In hindsight the albums helped tremendously in putting together a list of what-goes-together, as well as giving me sort of an “essentials” shopping list. At the time though it just seemed tremendously geeky (which it is - but now I’m rather comfortable with being a clothes geek).

My wardrobe rework started by ordering two suits from a local MTM suits company, Café Costume. I know there’s a tendency nowadays to say that getting into classic menswear with suits is a bad idea, given how suits are more of a “special occasion” thing for most men these days, and that separates are easier for most men to work with. I don’t regret starting with suits whatsoever though, for two reasons.

Firstly, it took the effort of coordinating trousers and jacket out of the equation entirely. I know that sounds obvious, but to someone new to the classic menswear thing, thinking about colour coordination genuinely was a scary thing. So suits were an easy way to have something in my wardrobe that I could “grab and go” when the opportunity to get a lil’ fancy came up. After all, they come pre-coordinated.

The second thing that stepping into suiting helped with tremendously was that shopping for a suit - for any occasion - is most men’s (including myself) first experience with Made-To-Measure (MTM) anyway. If I think back on those early days of thinking about menswear, the thought of having something made specifically to fit my body seemed very, very strange to me. But with suits it’s a little different: it’s the one bit of clothing where almost everyone - past the early stages of adulthood - has had something modified or tailored for themselves. Getting married, for example, is still probably the number one reason men get something tailored. So sitting there in my home office, peak pandemic, trying to fit the garden hose of clothing information shoved into my mouth without choking on it, that thought of going to a suit company and have them take over the decision making on how something should fit “correctly” - yeah, that felt like it would be an easy way to get started.

Those first suits were really safe in some ways and really dumb in some other ways.

I bought two blue suits - same as every one who “gets dressed by the internet” starts off with, I believe. That was nice and safe, except that I picked one blue that was closer to royal blue than navy (see picture below - yeah, growing pains), and the other blue was what’s shown at the top of this post - a thin tweed with lots of white coming through, to the point that it looked somewhere between grey slate and a denim tweed. (I just wrote “denim tweed” and shivered at the horror I unleashed into the world). I picked side-adjusters on the royal blue one (solid choice) and Daks-style elastic adjusters on the “denim tweed” (great choice actually, love these). The trousers were medium-to-high waisted (solid choice) but heavily tapered (and skinny enough to the point that a year or two of serious gym time blew up my thighs so much that I couldn’t fit the trousers anymore. Given the nature of the trousers, that’s... probably a good thing.) Jetted pockets (not bad), half-canvassed (alright), contrast lining (mother forgive me).

Almost navy blue. Almost - if you do a bit of photo post-processing and then squint at it just right. But it ain’t. I’ve come a long way, alright?

But you know what? Those suits arrived, I put them on in the dressing room, and I didn’t see any of the elements that I would now consider as errors. I saw clothes that fit me well, and that made me look the way I felt: like a mishmash of low brow and high brow; a layered creature, at the same time being overly considered and considerate, to the point of unnecessarily complicating simple matters; but also relatively free in my decision not to stick to one path and one path only, as free as Cohen’s bird on the wire.

And man, when your trousers evoke reverie about the layered nature of human existence - they’re good trousers.

In the last post in this series I’ll write a bit on discovering my now-go-to-tailor (Schaap); how MTM tailoring is seen as the “veneer” option compared to bespoke “solid oak” tailoring (and why that’s neither completely right nor as much as a “bad thing” as it’s perceived to be at times); and why I am very happy to be a MTM-kinda-guy.

See you in about a month, and as always: thanks for reading!

-M.

Health conditions, particularly ones that are untreatable and/or involve chronic pain, are generally not great conversational topics. If you’re the one dealing with the condition, you’re likely more interested in a bit of banter that takes your mind off your condition, more so than talking about the thing that’s already front and centre to your brain 24/7. On the other hand, if you’re the conversational partner, you might very well feel that you don’t know how to navigate the minefield that health-related conversations can be.

I had a strange realisation about 15 years ago, which is when I first had to start facing the reality that my chronic pain condition genuinely affected my day-to-day. At the time I was (and to this day continue to be) a firm believer in the idea that there should be no taboos as to what two adults can discuss between them. I also try quite hard to make myself believe that any hardship in life is best dealt with through connecting with others - no man is an island and all that. That last point certainly is a belief that gets challenged frequently (it is easy to love others from a safe distance; genuine connection leaves one open to disappointment and conflict), and as I grow older it has become much (much, much) harder not to become deeply cynical. Still, I maintain that talking things out is generally the better option when compared with internalising our challenges.

For someone who had worked hard at becoming better at connecting with people, it was unpleasant to discover, all that many years ago, that even in a dialogue between two patients of the same condition, the best one can hope for usually is that what is not said is recognised in a way that connects you.

In neuroscience and philosophy of mind, subjective experiences are referred to as “qualia”. The phrase often used to define qualia is “what it feels like to X” - “what it feels like to see the colour blue”; or, “what it feels like to taste red wine”. As adults, we typically do not find much value or joy in debating what seemed, to our teenage selves, like a particularly deep question (asked in high schools across the world) - i.e. if your perception of the colour red is the same as my perception of it (”like, woah, dude”). So, too, pain and its negative effects on our lives are not very satisfying topics to talk about between chronic pain patients.

I hope that this serves as enough context to explain why in the remainder of this post I am not going to focus on my subjective experience of my chronic pain: I simply don’t find any joy in writing about that.

In a previous post I mentioned that I enjoy the tension created by putting two seemingly unrelated things together. I am of course not the first person to talk about this, and particularly in the context of clothing I’ve noticed that people refer to “high-low dressing” a lot these days (for example, Simon Crompton at Permanent Style ).

Before I started dealing with chronic pain, I already tremendously enjoyed playing with the tension or contrast between being a genuine short-ass (also a side effects of my genetic condition) and being a bit of a hard-ass. I was very physical, boxed for a good number of years, and just generally enjoyed what, in hindsight, was probably a bit too much machismo. There was some overcompensation there for sure: it’s not uncommon for the shortest guy in a group of friends to feel the need to prove his physicality a bit too much, as juvenile as that is. The net likes to refer to it as “short man syndrome”, which I think undersells a little the amount of hazing short boys go through at school and the long-term apprehensiveness that that instills. In any case: by my late teens and early twenties I was in really good shape and just generally felt like I was on top of the world. I felt capable and in control.

By my late twenties however, I was starting to fall apart.

A combination of accelerated wear & tear, repeat injuries (often working out through those injuries, encouraged by a father who was fond of saying “pain is just pain”) and general aging did a number on me. My condition - Ehlers-Danlos - frequently goes under-diagnosed in young men as well. As difficult as it can be to get a diagnosis for EDS, and as much as women suffer from under or late diagnosis as well, it is still the case that women are more likely to get diagnosed earlier because of a number of reasons. Besides the fact that men are less likely to visit doctors, women with EDS generally represent at the GP with more severe pain and generally a worse quality of life than their male counterparts. The two parameters every single physician I’ve talked to (and over the years that’s been a lot of physicians) have pointed at to explain that difference in disease representation between men & women is that firstly, oestrogen increases joint laxity, and secondly, women on average carry less muscle than men. As increased muscle mass stabilises the joints more, men are less likely to present with severe repeat dislocations than women.

There’s certainly an element of this in my own experience. I’d started working out less as the result of having started a PhD, and it wasn’t uncommon to be working 70+ hours a week in the lab. That doesn’t leave much energy in the tank to get to the gym. And as you’d expect, I’d started noticing a sharp uptick in how often I ended up subluxing and dislocating joints after I’d stopped working out, as my decreased muscle mass couldn’t compensate for my lax joints anymore. At the same time simple accelerated aging also caught up with me: I started having non-joint-related ailments, becoming newly diagnosed with celiac disease (whereas I’d never had food sensitivities whatsoever), had a few gnarly bouts of gastroparesis (gnarly as in, “I ended up at the ER”-gnarly), and I had several episodes where upon getting up from a chair my blood pressure tanked to the point of me blacking out.

So the experience of being an embodied person changed really quickly.

At the exact same time as my body started revolting against me, I started developing a deep fascination with large scale tattooing. I had been fascinated with them as a boy, which is not atypical for kids & teenagers of course. In my mid twenties I’d gotten two small scale tattoos, but nothing that represented much coverage. But when my body started falling apart, I very quickly became deeply fascinated by the idea that I could get a so-called bodysuit: tattooing that is tied into one cohesive design, from the neck down to the wrists and ankles. Bodysuits come in a lot of variations, but the one I was instantly attracted to was the Japanese style (”irezumi”, “horimono”, “wabori” - whatever you like to call it), with its thick black backgrounds pushing the images forward. The fascination went beyond an interest in the “pretty pictures” aspect of tattooing: although I never would have been able to put it into words back then, in hindsight much of the interest was born out of that primal desire to mark oneself. Ed Hardy had that statement that the tattoo everyone is looking for is the one that transformed the donkey into the zebra. As my body alienated me through its decay and the pain, I wanted to reclaim part of it by subjecting myself to the mark.

Taki’s book on the Horiyoshi family was a massive influence on me in the early days. I never thought about it until just now, but I ended up wearing the same design on my back as the cover of the book, Fudo-Myoo.

I got heavily tattooed over the course of the next 5 years, all in the Japanese style. Tattooing is not particularly pleasant, especially if you go for large scale coverage: it stings, and the healing takes something out of you. Healing large swathes of tattooed skin is a bit like healing a very large scrape, or a minor burn wound: it saps you of energy for several days. And getting tattooed twice a month for five years meant that I was in a perpetual state of healing & peeling (ahem). Those marathon years were pretty heavy - but they oddly enough brought me back into my body, back into my skin. Whereas before there was the body with its pain and its act of revolting from “me”, the body-less mind inhabiting the flesh; there was now a “me” that consisted of both flesh and mind. I’ve heard tattooers tell clients - usually the ones that are struggling and trying not to tap out - that they should try and ignore the pain, take their mind off of it. That never worked for me - what worked was accepting and sitting with the pain.

At the end of those five years I was “done”: I wore a complete suit, fully bespoke you could say. Drawn directly on the body and working with its anatomy, a collaboration between the tailor-annex-tattooer who works the design, and the customer-annex-client whose main input is the choice of the cut/design and the occasional choice of colour. And this fully bespoke suit you’ll wear as it falls apart; as the colours fade and the lines blur; in health and in sickness; right down to the final station of life and into the cremation incinerator.

(At this point I’ve gone back and forth as to whether I should post my bodysuit on here, having uploaded and deleted the picture several times now. I’ve decided against it - I also wouldn’t post my face on social media, and while only a handful of people have seen my tattoos it feels weirdly inappropriate to post it.)

Tattooing is in a sense a true veneer: pigmented is deposited in a thin layer of skin, the dermis. Go too deep and the lines blow out, don’t go deep enough and the pigment drops out. You’re talking millimetres here, a 1-2 millimetre veneer near the surface to the skin that we put between “ourselves” and the outer world. It’s interesting how the word “veneer” is often assumed automatically to be a pejorative: in furniture there’s a lot of discussion about there no longer being any “real” solid wood furniture anymore, with veneers being used to make an otherwise unremarkable bit of cheap furniture look a little nicer. Solid wood is more prone to warping though, while the cheap furniture with the veneer top that has been with me over 20 years of moving is still functional.

When I think about my own body I also don’t see it as the equivalent of a solid oak dining table: I am prone to falling apart, after all. Not everyone can have everything, nor can we be everything we’d want to be. So for the person that I am, a veneer is a pleasant way to make the exterior a little nicer-looking than what the interior is capable of. That’s not a bad thing.

If you spend a lot of time in a tattoo shop, you start seeing the dress code of the tribe. Both customers and tattooers lean towards a rather narrow range of workwear: indigo and black jeans; Carhartt double knees; black t-shirts or band/tattoo shop t-shirts; layered with flannel shirts or hoodies. Lots of boots; lots of Vans and Converse. Very on the nose, and very much coded for coherence.

As I got more heavily tattooed I sometimes started being read as part of the tribe - to the point where it wasn’t unusual for tattooers who didn’t know me (e.g. who were visiting the shop while I was getting tattooed) to automatically assume that I was a tattooer myself. That loss of tension started bugging me: when everything’s coherent and connected, separate layers are lost. Now that I’d completed the suit that would accompany me into the morgue, I wanted to put something between that suit and the world again. I wanted a second veneer to put over my tribal markings.

The next part of this post will talk about getting into classic menswear; buying a new wardrobe at the peak of WFH in the pandemic; and how MTM tailoring is seen as the “veneer” option compared to bespoke “solid oak” tailoring - and why I’m a happy MTM man.

Thank you for reading!

-M.

In Europe it’s somewhat uncommon to assign the novel in high school, say for an English course: as non-native speakers, the early-twentieth-century English and the lack of known historical context combined make for most teachers considering it as too much of a hurdle for students. Instead, I read Kim during my first year at uni - and not for a course (I was pursuing a science degree instead), but simply because I was money-poor but time-rich, and there was a ridiculously cheap second hand book store near where I was living at the time.

When I mentioned to a friend - who, incidentally, was pursuing a degree in English - that I’d started reading Kim the night before, said friend immediately mentioned that he’d always remembered “the shell game” in the novel. The way my friend referred to it made me think of the con game found in all touristy city-centres across the globe, a bit of sleight of hand combined with a desire to cheat a tourist out of a bit of currency. Only upon reading the novel, I realised that that’s not at all what Kim’s game is referred to in the book: it’s “the Jewel Game” or “Play of the Jewels” instead. (Both terms, incidentally, only appear once each in the text.) And, in fact, there’s quite the difference between the point of the game Lurgan has Kim play (i.e. spy craft) on the one hand, and the point of the tourist trap shell game (i.e. a con) on the other.

Now - did I write that intro just because I wanted to make an overly belaboured bridge between the short-con game and Alden’s shell cordovan game? Of course I did. So now that I’ve dug myself into this hole, let me try and make it worth your time by pivoting to my own example of the internet’s unanimously agreed - but largely disregarded - advice on why perhaps Alden should not be at the top of your list anymore even if, like me, you’ve been cursed with the genetic inability to exist without a healthy collection of shell cordovan shoes.

Much like I came to Kipling late, I also showed up rather late in the shell cordovan game. The aforementioned science degree didn’t immediately work out all that well for me. It took a hell of a lot of years before I’d somewhat managed to accomplish much of anything on the post-graduate employment scene. The 2007-2008 recession coincided with my early career, which meant that by the time I had “a shell budget” I was already in my late thirties, and a happy M&M: Married with a Mortgage.

Far removed from the Hype Beast/SuperFuture fiend of yore, I bought my first pair of shells not on the net, but in an actual brick & mortar store in Paris, at Upper Shoes. (Part of why I wanted to go through the Upper Shoes brick & mortar was that when the time came for a resole, I could just send them back to Upper Shoes and I wouldn’t have to bother trying to send Aldens across the pond - which, for fairly obvious reasons that require no further explanation, has become increasingly difficult.) That first pair was a pair of Alden 975C derbies - pictured below.

Alden 975C bought from Upper Shoes in Paris. Lovely people, lovely shop - highly recommended.

These shoes were (and continue to be) incredible. They weren’t my first Aldens: by the time I bought the 975 I’d already been wearing Indy 403 boots - the brown chromexcel ones - for a good while, courtesy of too much time spent on StyleForum and the aforementioned SuperFuture boards in the late 2000s/early 2010s. However, the 975s were a lot better constructed than my 403s. My Indy boots are noticeable sloppy in terms of stitching, in addition to both boots being incredibly asymmetric. The below shots show just how wonky they look:

(On shot they’re not shoe-treed as I’d just taken them off in an attempt to catch the first twenty seconds of sunshine we’ve had in half a year - they’re usually stored with Alden trees in them. This isn’t user error; they really are rather wonky.)

None of the wonkiness ended up having an effect on the Indy’s comfort nor on their durability, but I must say that I was well pleased when I saw how much better the 975s were in terms of finish. At this point I pretty much assumed (incorrectly, as it would turn out) that with shell being a costly material, Alden’s QC would be better on anything made in shell cordovan.

Both in terms of finish and comfort, the 975s set a new high benchmark for me. Not only does the Barrie last in E width (C/E) feel like it was made on a bespoke template for my gnarly feet, the shell ticked all of my boxes - and if you’re this deep into reading a post on the bizarre niche that is menswear, chances are you’ve heard all of these boxes before: how Alden shell is surface treated/covered through a proprietary process that transforms the standard Colour 8 Horween look into something that is even deeper; how Colour 8 seems to shift from eggplant, to deep purple, to red, to black; and, of course, how it’s that rarest of white elephants, i.e. a derby that works as well with beat up jeans as with dark grey flannel trousers - and everything in between.

Hard to find another pair of shoes that effortlessly goes between black flannel dress trousers & a lazy Saturday double knee fit.

As for the “C” in 975C, I was mostly attracted to the commando sole because my gait is very weird.

As previously mentioned on my first post, I have Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (EDS - hence the name of this substack), which unfortunately has resulted in my fair share of foot and ankle injuries over the years. I wear out the toes of leather soles extremely quickly, to the point where I start wearing into the welt already when the rest of the sole is barely worn in even. Rubber has proven significantly more durable under my wonky feet than leather, particularly as Europe isn’t exactly flush with cobblers anymore (which is a generous way of saying that I have zero confidence that there will be anyone left who can resole GYW shoes in 5-10 years from now). So whenever I can, I go for Dainite or some other rubber sole solution - which in case of my Aldens usually means a commando sole.

About a year after buying my 975s I bought a pair of #8 Tankers, also on a commando sole. I got these from Skomaker Dagestad in Norway, (see link here) a shop I can wholeheartedly recommend. (Anecdotally: I put in an order for my Tankers on a Saturday afternoon & received an e-mail not more than a few hours after, with the shop owner asking for confirmation on my sizing & whether I was familiar with the Barrie last/combination lasts used by Alden).

When these came in I spent the better part of half an hour giddily telling my better half to “just look at these - look at how good these look!”

Tankers in #8 on a commando sole - bought from Skomaker Dagestad, which I highly recommend as well.

Similar thinking again: I’d rather buy Aldens through a store that also does their own resoles, as I’ve little interest in sending my shoes off to the US each time I wear through my toes or heels. Skomaker Dagestad came highly recommended for their repair and resole jobs, so I bought the Tankers full of confidence that these would be with me for the long run. The first few times I wore them I pretty much thought the same thing: these things are awesome, and built like a tank (pun unintended) - these will be on my feet when they push me into that big oven at the mortuary.

Unfortunately, mixing my remains with some sweet shell ashes seems incredible unlikely at this point - the glue at the front commando sole is already coming loose. If I wanted to, I could probably slide my fingernail right between the sole & the leather and peel it right off - and while I don’t know just how much life I’ve got in me, it does seem unlikely that I’ll have run my race before these soles give up on me. You can sort of see the soft, hollowed out spot at the front in the picture below, slightly under & to the left of the split toe seam:

At this point I figured that, like with any lottery, I had gotten lucky once (975C) and unlucky once (Tankers) - so clearly the answer was to play the lottery again. Like the absolute stubborn eejit that I am, I bought another set of Tankers (in black shell this time - something about black shell just makes the otherwise too “boot-like” tanker model semi-suitable for the office somehow), also on commando soles and...

Yeah, they have the same issue. The glue Alden uses for this commando topy is just not very good, it seems, because this model has exactly the same issue as my colour 8 pair. The glue is slowly letting loose, and I could slide my fingernail right into/under the topy.

So here we are then - back at the shell game mentioned in the opening paragraph, i.e. a clever con game played in every big city across the planet. Like the tourist with the “I heart Paris” baseball cap getting caught up by the shell men, eager to bleed some money, I’ve willingly engaged with Alden on their own con. That initial pair of 975Cs was a hell of an apéritif, the first fix that led me to chasing the dragon. To this day, those 975Cs are exactly what I feel a shoe at that price range should represent: a great-looking, well-made product, with QC tight enough to ensure that no major points of failure are evident. In other words: it’s a very wearable luxury product, the type of luxury that comes with being completely carefree about its use - insouciant, as my southern neighbours would put it.

The right attitude to wear your “luxury” kit with. If you can’t wear it, what good is owning it? It just becomes a very expensive dust collector.

I’m actually pretty forgiving for QC issues these days anyway: as is the case with many aging SuFu fiends who have more disposable income now in our 30s and 40s, I’ve acquired enough “buy it for life” kit to genuinely last me however many cycles around the sun I’ve got left.

“Can’t Wait To See How This Breaks In,” Says Man Who Buys New Clothes Every Week"

So I’m well past the time where wonky stitching or a visible blemish on the leather or sole right off the shelf would bother me - scrapes, scars, mild discolouration, hell, even a bit of loose grain: all of these are fine with me at this price range. As expensive as brands like Alden have gotten, it’s still a far cry from high-end bespoke shoemaking (where I do think a customer could reasonably expect a near-perfection final product), so I don’t expect a pair of off-the-shelf shoes to be immaculate.

What I do think is fair to expect is that in the 850-1150 euro price range, the shoes that you buy don’t have the soles come apart in under 3 months. Unfortunately, this appears to be where Alden’s QC department differs of opinion with me.

So will I continue buying Alden shell, given that the aforementioned lottery has not particularly worked out in my favour? Much as it pains me to admit it, my Alden addiction is both irrational and terribly difficult to overcome.

“My name’s Michael, and I’m a recovering Aldenoholic.”

I’ve dabbled in a couple of other maker’s shell offerings. By far my favourite is Crockett & Jones. My Pembrokes in dark brown shell are built like proper tanks, and I can say hand on heart that I’ve never encountered even the smallest QC issue with any of the half dozen or so C&J’s that I wear on the regular. My better half also regularly wears some C&J’s, and every time she does I can’t help but compliment her on her taste again - they’re just such wonderful kicks.

However, C&J’s treatment of the Horween shell is distinctly different from what Alden puts on top of theirs, and as a result even C&J’s burgundy (which is also Horween colour 8) doesn’t quite scratch that Alden #8 itch, as it just doesn’t get the same depth and “layered” look over time. Below shot shows how different C&J shell “prend la lumière” - reflects the light and shows its depth.

Somewhat oversaturated shot on account of the sun being exactly at zenith here, but even then the difference in depth between Alden Horween in #8 and C&J Horween in dark brown shell shows.

I’ve also worn a pair of black shell Carmina tassels for a couple of years (which I’ve beaten the absolute crap out of, and which has largely cured me of my fear of wearing shell in the rain). Those Carmina’s have been absolutely solid daily drivers - but with Carmina’s recent pricing increases I will probably have to cancel my plans to do a custom/MTO colour 8 Norwegian Split Toe derby. Even during their twice-annual-MTO-weekend sales, a pair of Carmina shell NSTs now cost as much/more than shell boots from C&J or Alden - and that’s despite Alden being significantly more expensive here in Europe than States-side. And while Carmina’s material is great, and their build quality is somewhere between Alden and the (superior) C&J make, I’ve seen too much Carmina shell being delivered with cuts, rips, or discoloured streaks in the shell. For a pair ordered off the rack and easily exchanged that’s fine, but putting in a MTO and spending 6-9 months fretting about what the final product’s going to show up like is - well, not my idea of a good time.

Now - I’d hate for me to end one of my earliest posts on this blog-thing on an overly sour note (though I’m self-confessed proper curmudgeon, and with years passing I only seem to become grumpier). Let me try and turned this into a more positive take on all of the above: I’ve found a shoe last, i.e. Barrie, which fits me incredibly well. Shoes on that last are relatively easily available in my size (remarkably so, even, given my small feet). In addition to being tremendously comfortable, the shoes look damn good. And all that I’ve got to do to enjoy these shoes for the rest of my life, is to find a competent cobbler to give ‘em a good resole.

On that note: if anyone’s knows of a European cobbler that takes mail-in orders and who does a good job resoling Aldens - do drop me line. (Please - I’m begging here.)

Wear your kit in good health, and may the shell gods smile down upon us all.

Thanks for reading!

-M.

Above: the inimitable Mr. Gene Krell; master at adding a bit of subversion to the day.

The title of this blog is a lie - or, if you’re feeling generous, a pun. Friends, colleagues and acquaintances will tell you that I am many things, but elegant is not one of them.

One of the reasons that elegance eludes me is that I am both tremendously clumsy and very likely to hurt myself in every day life. Both characteristics, the lack of manual dexterity as well as the fragility of this bodily vessel I inhabit, are the result of a genetic disorder called Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, abbreviated EDS. Hence - the blog name. What EDS means for me is that my connective tissue is fragile, leading to obvious symptoms - dislocations, torn tendons, joint pain - and less obvious ones (digestive issues, heart problems, dental crowding, sinus issues).

I wasn’t always aware of the fault in my genes, and I spent the first 25 years or so of my life throwing myself at a series of endeavours that in hindsight had two things in common: firstly, they were spectacularly bad pursuits for a person with fragile connective tissues. Secondly, each endeavour stood out from the others as being completely at odds with each other. Early in life I enjoyed reading, theatre, classical piano - as well as boxing and hardcore punk/metal shows. Later in life I somehow, despite coming from a distinctly working class background (and thanks to continued education being very affordable in Belgium), landed in a buttoned up, white collar middle management career. Along with needing to wear the occasional suits at work, I simultaneously got rather heavily tattooed (i.e. neck to toes covered - a different kind of suit indeed, as bespoke as it gets I suppose).

I’m older and more settled now, but I still love a bit of tension, the push-pull of putting two seemingly conflicting things together & seeing what discordant creation you’ve come up with. The right dose of tension leads to subverting expectations, and subversion leads to depth: the more contradictions you wrap yourself in, the more layers one acquires.

Clothes, these days, are a great way for me to bring that sort of tension into every day life, I find. Not quite the same level of excitement as getting punched in the mouth, admittedly. But if you want to add a little tension to your life and not deal with a concussion every six months, or if you’re just not super keen on getting your armpits tattooed, then adding a little tension to your day can be as small a move as putting some tropical wool trousers on while popping a very beaten up vintage Lee jeans jacket on top. Below are a couple of examples of that exact move, ripped from the net. (Where known, I credit authors/profiles. In case I am using your media and you wish me to add credit or to take the image down, drop me a line and I’m happy to do so.)

Yukio Akamine - but then again, you knew that already.

Source: dieworkwear at https://dieworkwear.com/2023/04/19/living-legend-an-interview-with-yukio-akamine/

One of my personal favourite dressers of the 21st century has to be Bent Van Looy: writer, painter, radio maker, artist, musician - in short, another example of a modern-day uomo universale, a polymath who pays attention to adding attention. Despite sharing a country (Belgium) and a tailor (Schaap - future blog post coming, for now check https://www.schaaptailors.be already), I’ve not had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Van Looy - though I’d like to add a hopefully yet to the end of that sentence. And while I don’t presume to speak for him, to me his influences appear to be worn on his sleeve - the boldness of a David Hockney, or the ivy look of army chinos and tweed blazers. What sets him apart, to me, from the dressed-by-the-internet-ivy-crowd is his willingness to just add more contradictions, more subversive elements, and more persona to his deck of cards. All of it stays authentically his, which allows him to go from a rather “straight” ivy look:

(That’s a goddamn excellent combination between the wide chino’s and that rugby-tweed-combo, mind. A touch of tension added by the devil-may-care attitude of the white socks and tweed coat among the paint detritus & the rumpled rugby.)

…to something that’s clearly ivy-inspired but quite a bit louder:

(Source: https://www.permanentstyle.com/2025/01/reader-profile-bent.html - suit by Schaap Tailors and photo credit Permanent Style/Simon Crompton)

…or right into a much more muted, urban palette:

(source Bent for De Bonne Facture photographed by Charlie de Keersmaeker. The colour palette here is as straight as it gets, but then the tension gets sprinkled right back in through the silhouette and the chunky tucked in knit.)

My own pendulum is currently swinging back to being a bit more experimental and less careful with what I wear. Post-Covid I’ve acquired quite a bit of nice kit, most of it tailored. I’ve been wearing that good stuff too infrequently - I’ll put it on for a fancy dinner with my better half, or for the big work/customer meetings. But I haven’t quite lived in that part of my wardrobe yet, and you can’t subvert something unless you’ve played it straight first. So here’s to my 40s, and to hoping that in my midlife I come back to my irreverent and subversive teenage self (albeit with less hair and more responsibilities).

I’ll leave you with the below images - may they serve as inspiration for all of us who need to hang a little looser.

Thanks for reading!

-M.