Outfit Of The Week 8/25/24 – 8/31/24
After a brief one-week hiatus, we are back with this week’s edition of “OOTW”, which marks FS’s 200th article!
To celebrate this milestone, I am featuring an outfit I wore on a recent date with my wife.
As I wrote about last week, the combination and overall impression shouldn’t really be a surprise. I wore the same khaki pants, burgundy loafers, and navy blazer as my last “OOTW” entry. The differences here are the shirt, which was a light blue, spread collar shirt from Charles Tyrwhitt, the tie (also from CT), which was a red and blue stripe, and the pocket square, which was a white and blue paisley from Men’s Wearhouse.
What this outfit shows, when compared with my previous entry, is that you can get away with wearing very similar outfits over and over again provided you change up little things here and there.
In this case, the largest swaths of my body were covered by the exact same garments as before, but the outfit looks markedly different from only swapping out the shirt, tie, and pocket square. It proves you don’t actually NEED lots of clothes to put together a wide array of outfits.
Also, I was going back and forth between the tie I chose and my navy grenadine tie. While I absolutely love my navy grenadine and think that a navy grenadine can pretty much go with anything in your wardrobe, I decided against it, in favor of this red/blue striped tie. I felt that the addition of the red in the tie went better with the khaki color of the pants. The navy tie combined with the navy jacket would have been a little too monochromatic up top, so the red in the tie helped pull everything together. Also, the navy grenadine leans a bit more formal than the striped tie (which is a bit sportier) and would have been better paired with maybe some grey trousers.
These are all things that you’ll begin to see immediately in your own outfits once you’ve gotten sufficient practice with classic menswear.
How was our date night, you ask?
It was lovely! We had tickets for a local production of a favorite play of ours and decided to pop into a little hotel bar for some food and cocktails beforehand. We had never been to this particular bar, but my wife follows them on Instagram and thought their food looked good, so we decided to give it a try.
I had some deviled eggs and some sort of shrimp dish. My wife had a salad and some amazing fried eggplant. After our delicious food and a few drinks, we were ready for curtain!
After a thoroughly enjoyable performance, we wrapped up the evening at a different bar we had never tried before getting back to the house around 11pm.
We are very lucky that my in-laws graciously offer to watch our boys while we have a night for ourselves.
Not only is having dates with your wife important, but it’s also important to try new things with each other. Novel experiences strengthen your bond and create new, fun memories.
Have a wonderful weekend!