The biggest lesson in dressing that I got from my dad is this: If you really like a piece of clothing, you should wear it until it completely falls apart. Hanging in my parents’ garage is a duck canvas Carhartt onesie that’s probably seen about two miles worth of snowfall in its lifespan. It doesn’t even snow where my parents live now, but it’s so perfectly broken in at this point that it would be a crime to get rid of it. —Gabriel Thomas Conte, senior web producer
Find Peace in Uniform Dressing
There’s this great photo of my dad, Matt, and his younger brother, Chris, outside of my dad’s freshman dorm at Wesleyan University in the fall of 1972. My dad’s wearing this tan safari jacket, dark-rimmed glasses, and dark blue jeans; my uncle’s in a bright checkered plaid flannel and brown cords. Both of them have more hair than I’ve ever seen them have in my lifetime. This week, I FaceTimed the two of them to talk about the photo and how their sense of style has (or hasn’t) changed.
My dad and his brother grew up camping, hiking, rock climbing, and canoeing, and, as my dad put it, “My approach to style was to create a sense of being outdoors.” When they started their careers, they had to adopt new uniforms: My dad, a physician working in public health, had a working wardrobe of Oxford shirts, sweater vests, ties (when necessary), and Lands’ End trousers; when he got home from the office in the evenings, he’d swiftly change into an earth-toned T-shirt, cargo pants, and hiking shoes. My uncle Chris, who founded a web-based company during the ’90s dot-com era, was an early adopter to the “tech disruptor” uniform and only ever wore jeans (“nice-looking jeans, no holes!”) to investor meetings. “It’s the only time in my life I’ve actually been conscious about image,” he said. “I needed to portray that, ‘I’m not one of you, and if the company wants to do anything on the internet, this is what it looks like.’”
