CP Men's: The Good Lift

On the Tibi pants that enlivened my wardrobe. I'm already looking for my next pair.

Much as I appreciate classic menswear, I don’t wear suits, not in public. I’ve only tried on the one recently passed down to me, and the Tommy Hilfiger number I bought from D for Dapper’s Derandon Davis last year—this after some ten years of unabashed suitlessness.

In fact, if memory serves, the only suit I had before that (other than my church clothes, I think) was the one I wore to JCPenney’s corporate offices as an undergrad who’d joined their “Leadership Lab.” Lunches, etiquette sessions (how to pack and travel as a professional!), workshops, store visits, executive roundtables (I’ll spare you the half-blurred spec’d up selfie with the company’s then CEO, Marvin Ellison), the whole nine. And they gave us all an allowance—I want to say around $100—to buy clothes for the two-day event. I used mine to purchase a faint navy suit with pick-stitched notch lapels, and a pair of tan Oxford dress shoes. Which I paired with a light-blue button-down shirt and a red-white-and-blue gingham check tie and matching pocket square. (From the pictures, where the other guy curiously wore a bright red blazer and bright red bow tie, and the women wore bright red shirts under black blazers, I gather we were told to somehow incorporate Penney Red into our clothes. A directive I likely detested).

In the picture with Mr. Ellison, I’m wearing a beige blazer over a white button-up shirt. By this point, day two, I’d probably eased into the workshops enough to forego the tie and wanted to feel more comfortable than I did in the suit. I felt stiff… professional, of course, so correct. But confined and hardly pleased in it. Maybe that’s why I’ve avoided suits all these years; why the mere suggestion from an older person that I need one in all the neutrals and navy offends me slightly. And still, the rather dignified pleasure of formal clothing is irresistible.

Unabashed is a bit of an overstatement. I’ve felt some shame in not owning a suit, comforted by the fact that I can tell a good one from a bad one, and that, as Graydon Carter remarked on David Duchovny’s Fail Better podcast, “there’s no reason to wear a suit in New York these days.” (You might say that about several other American cities.) Earlier in the interview, Graydon mentioned that he’d given away most of his bespoke Anderson & Sheppard suits from his days as Vanity Fair’s editor-in-chief. All except two: “both of them basically for weddings, funerals, and memorials at this point,” he shared.

Suits connote a sense of occasion for both men and women. Yet, for sociohistorical reasons—namely that they’ve always marked us as powerful and therefore attractive and trustworthy, or credible—men, by comparison, haven’t enjoyed the same ease in them as women, particularly for pants. But I just wonder, really, if Graydon would’ve been so quick to get rid of his if they fit/felt/looked the way my Tibi Marits do. The “Thomas Menswear Check Marit Pullon Pants,” that is. They’re the most unstuffy, unsuit-y tailoring I’ve got. Breezily refined. Ease without compromise. Chill, modern, classic to the bone. And also—as all style considered good and interesting and attention-worthy ought to be!—spinnable. Always spinnable.

So you can see why I doubled up with the tweed mustard check blazer I thrifted in Antwerp in 2023, at a store just doors down from the Dries Van Noten flagship, Het Modepaleis. And because I keep my inner child near, and especially because irony is stimulating, you might see how a Winnie the Pooh t-shirt pulls the whole thing together and throws the whole thing off. And where did I first see a suit jacket tied around the waist? Who was that? What collection? It actually might’ve been Amy. In any case, it instantly resonated with the part of my dress philosophy that maintains we ought not be overly precious about clothes.

…Isn’t it something that the suit-jacketed waist only works with your best ones?

I have a pair of olive green trousers in fine wool from Another Aspect that are perfect but don’t always meet the moment. Those moments when simply looking pleasant won’t cut it. Do you want people to feel the need to sit upright when they talk to you or to feel unwound enough to sit back? I guess I’m always after this high-end happy hour feeling. The point is—I get more mileage out of my Stellas, which I bought back in June. They look relaxed with my tailoring, and with it! The gloss against the nautical is less prescriptive than the crisp perfection of the other ones. Not that I’m against on-the-nose preppiness…no; it’s just that it can only take you so far.

This cream knit is a Fred Perry cricket sweater I picked up at HIP Manchester on the way home from breakfast, and the Stellas give it a similar effect. I like cricket sweaters because of the border that surrounds the neckline—I find borders stately and refined and charming. I also like them because of the neckline itself (not to be lumped in with V-neck t-shirts). In the popular sense of WASP dress, a cricket sweater is pretty high on the list. But pairing it with the Winslow pant, sculpted in Italian sporty nylon, evokes a more nonchalant mood. A fresher, sportier one.

To make good use of the V: a boho necklace, maybe several. Or anything Carlyne Cerf de Dudzeele, Diana Vreeland, Pharrell Williams, or Teyana Taylor would do. Pragmatically: Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen, Zoë Kravitz, Matty Matheson.

I tend to agree with the camp that believes the best way to wear something is just to wear it. How-tos, for the most part, are helpful so long as they encourage or propose some form of individual expression in one’s dress. Of course, I’m thinking about how polished Tonne Goodman looks in her signature white pants when I wear mine, the same when styling my Winslow sweatpants. But Tonne is in a league of her own, as are you, as am I. So if I can lay a few ground rules: avoid clashing them with loud, bright colors; and certainly not those colors with a red or blue striped shirt, for fear you’ll be mistaken for a snappy yachtsman.

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Julian Randall is a writer and style consultant from Dallas, Texas. His work treats dress as an arts and cultural subject, as well as a form of personal expression. Julian’s essays, reviews, and other writings have been published in ESSENCE, GQ, Family Style, The Business of Fashion, and Critical Studies in Men’s Fashion. You can read more about him at julianrandall.com.