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Clothes = Fonts

…she’s no longer able to clearly pigeon-hole guys as rich or poor, graphic designer or laborer, straight or gay even.

I read somewhere that fonts are the clothes your words wear.

Writers, bloggers, editors, and publishers agonize over which font is appropriate for the work in question. Wordsmiths want to send the right message and give the impression they’re after.

The reverse is true too. Clothes are the fonts for people. Clothes can make a statement and men especially don’t usually get the subtle points of dressing. Many men  tend to be frozen in the sartorial period that they thought was happening the year that they graduated from college. And here in Mexico, there are guys living on the coast who get dressed up like rodeo participants even though they usually don’t know how to ride a horse; since I never see them on horseback.

Clothes and fashion can send conscious and unconscious signals and messages to viewers. Men traditionally haven’t been overly concerned with their clothes, but the situation seems to be changing, at least in the north-eastern US.

In her article “All Dudes Learned How to Dress and It Sucks” Mary HK Choi jokingly bemoans the sudden and seemingly widespread good taste displayed by men in New York City. Choi says she’s no longer able to clearly pigeon-hole guys as rich or poor, graphic designer or laborer, straight or gay even.

The rise, at least in NYC, of tasteful and trendy dressing for men has erased her ability to read men the way she used to. She’s now unable to gauge how old a guy is. And even drawn out on a limb to chat up a guy on a train because he was so well put together. He turned out to be engaged as well as someone she wouldn’t have approached before all this widespread fashion sense set in.

It will be interesting to see if this fashion sense trend that’s now in parts of  the tri state area will spread to men in other locals causing confusion for people who thought men were easy to read.