Complaints That I Don't Dress Like A Slob
The annual picnic of the Ann Arbor Science Fiction Association, of which I am a board member, was as much fun as ever. I took registrations for ConVersation (Only a month left! Preregister now to choose your own honorary ConCom title! Bribe us $5 to be a guest of honor!) and distributed flyers for Penguicon and Youmacon. We got to meet a newcomer named Alex Duncan, who is very cool, and whom you will be seeing more of because we immediately invited him to the ConFusion programming meeting which took place last night, and got him involved in helping to run conventions. We have no shame.
Several people asked me yesterday why I attended the picnic dressed in black. I bought a collarless long-sleeve button-down shirt, dark-dark-grey with faint speckles, at a thrift store for $6. It wasn't hot, because it was very lightweight material. People almost seem to complain when I don't dress like a slob. But as I said in one of my first LJ entries, what's wrong with looking good? I own some t-shirts, but the fabric on which most of them are printed is... black. I wear black because black is the new black.
Comments
blastedbill on Jun. 26, 2006 2:01 AM
we who like our t shirts and jeans find collard and/or long sleeve button shirts and dockers very uncomfortable. so when we see you wearing cloths that we find uncomfortable, we assume you are uncomfortable and it bothers us.
rmeidaking on Jun. 26, 2006 12:00 PM
Don't worry about it. They're just teasing you, because they know you're making an effort, and they aren't. It's a picnic; most of us look at this as an excuse to not really wear any sort of structured clothing at all. Okay, some of us never wear structured clothing at all if we can get away with it.
I suppose the real comment should have been phrased, "That outfit doesn't look like the Official Picnic Costume to me." I spend a part of every day discussing what the correct 'costume' my kids should wear; clothing becomes more understandable if you think of it in terms of "Costuming for a Particular Event."
stormgren on Jun. 26, 2006 11:13 AM
They fail to appreciate that a good shirt and slacks is often more comfortable than jeans in hot weather.
As a fan of collarless shirts, I do have to ask, WHERE DID YOU GET IT? It's been really hard to for me to find them in a decent fabric lately.
Frankly, I'd appreciate it if more people in hackerdom and fandom dressed a bit better. Or at least wore clothes that didn't have holes in them or were appropriately sized.
*grin*
rmeidaking on Jun. 26, 2006 11:54 AM
You need to search for "Banded collar" shirts. That's what catalogs call them. I get my husband's from Blair.com. He prefers a heavy-weight shirt; they have a canvas version, and he now has all of them. They sometimes have a washable silk version, but S didn't like them as well (too much static or something).
rachelann1977 on Jun. 26, 2006 12:47 PM
Dare to be different! It's interesting that such a crew as one finds in fandom would not appreciate the value of uniqueness. Everyone has their own comfort zone, I suppose. On a side note, it's hard to tell if a fabric is comfortable just by looking. I myself may have commented on a long-sleeve shirt in warm weather. My own thought would have been, "I wonder if he's too tired or busy to gety his laundry done," because that's the only reason I would have for wearing warm clothing in warm weather. On the other hand, I do have a particularly filmy long sleeve shirt I sometimes wear in summer, so I guess it just all depends.....
netmouse on Jun. 26, 2006 7:31 PM
One possible disconnect is that at picnics, people are somewhat expected to engage in activities that might rumple or ruin nice clothes, such as the summersaults Neil was doing, or canoeing, or sitting in the grass, or volleyball, or water fights. The clothing you had on pretty much declared that you were not prepared to do any of those things and probably wouldn't, which is probably true I think. You didn't look like you had come ready to play, but you had - just to play table-top games and video games, not outdoor games.
In any group of people a declaration that you won't follow their modes of dress or participate in activies typical for the group/event context is sometimes interpreted as looking down on everyone else. This is perhaps a misinterpretation and, in fandom, especially likely to be one. Though your choice of phrasing suggests you might view how everyone else was dressed as slovenly (re: the depiction of how everyone expected you to dress as "like a slob"), in which case perhaps you really did think everyone else was poorly dressed, and their reaction to your implied judgement was in fact accurate.
I suspect however that your title reflects merely that you feel you are dressed like a slob when *you* wear clothes you would use as an approximation of how someone is expected to dress on such occassions. Either that or you're just being purposefully provocative and exaggerating. ;)
thatguychuck on Jun. 26, 2006 10:18 PM
I for one have always quietly liked your choice of dress. You dress nicely.
Speaking of which, I think some of your clothing ended up with mine in the wash. Regretfully, I'm betting you want them back. < grin >
matt-arnold on Jun. 26, 2006 10:37 PM
Well there's one mystery solved.
thatguychuck on Jun. 27, 2006 5:51 PM — Commando in another soldiers fatigues.
I for one have always quietly liked your choice of dress. You dress nicely.
And apparently I've liked it so much I've stolen your clothes. :)
I'll sort them out this evening when I get home. Sorry for the confusion. Look on the bright side - now you have plenty of socks!
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