3 Style Lessons I Learned This Summer

With summer coming to a close, I wanted to reflect a bit on a few new things I’ve learned over the past few months.

Even for an old salt like myself, there are always opportunities to learn and grow, sartorially, if you are perceptive enough to recognize them.

Lesson #1 – Stop worrying about ironing your linen.

Linen shirts are one of my favorite summer go-tos. My summer uniform basically consists of a short-sleeve, button-down collar, linen shirt with jeans or khaki chinos. Because I wear linen shirts so much in the summer, I found I was constantly ironing them.

I would wear them and hang them up… and then iron them again before I wore them a second time. Or I would wash them… and then iron them since they were wrinkled from the dryer.

As the summer wore on, I realized that this was getting to be a little too much.

More importantly, what dawned on me was that I didn’t NEED to iron them all the time because I didn’t care about the appearance of the wrinkles.

I was wearing the shirts casually. I wore them while sitting in my home office or running errands or out at the playground with the kids. Sure, I would make sure the shirt was crisp if I was going out to lunch with my wife or if I had a virtual work presentation, but for the most part, I just didn’t feel like I needed that level of polish.

That made it a lot easier to keep a rotation of linen shirts at the ready, since I didn’t feel like I had to obsessively iron them all the time to keep them presentable. Paradoxically, not ironing my linen shirts made me MORE stylish because I could wear my linen shirts more often.

Now, would I have looked better if my linen shirts were perfectly pressed every time I put them on? Yes. But if I felt like I needed to iron them every time I wore them, I probably wouldn’t have worn them as often since I’m always busy with work and family obligations.

If you’re considering adding some linen shirts to your warm-weather rotation, don’t let the prospect of having to iron them scare you away. You don’t have to iron them as much as you think you do in order to look good.

Lesson #2 – Show some skin.

Summer is hot. It’s ok to show a little skin.

I know that sounds a little weird for us guys. Usually it’s the women who are doing that during the summer. But I think we can learn from them in this case.

I wear a lot of short-sleeve sport shirts in the summer (see Lesson #1). This year, I found I was rolling up the sleeves in order to have more freedom of movement. My shirts are, more often than not, classically cut and the sleeves often fell to my elbows. Because of that, they would sometimes get caught on my upper arms. Rolling them up was more comfortable and I liked the way it looked. It also meant I didn’t get as quite a pronounced farmer’s tan this year.

I was also leaving the top few front buttons undone to get more air flow.

Initially, I thought I’d be a bit self-conscious showing all this skin! After all, I was always under the impression that a gentleman stays covered up as much as possible! But… then I looked around and remembered that people wear tank tops and shorts, so my relatively scant amount of visible skin really wasn’t as scandalous as I originally thought.

I think it was mostly about confidence. At this age, I feel comfortable and confident, so I increasingly feel that my clothes are enhancing the way I look rather than hiding my perceived flaws.

Lesson #3 – Sunglasses make a HUGE difference.

I know I’m a little late to the party on this one, but I never really thought sunglasses were all that important.

I think my change of heart occurred when I bought my cheap, drug-store sunglasses and proceeded to wear them all over the place this summer, and in doing so, significantly prolonged the life of my regular eyeglasses.

My sunglasses took a real beating over the past few months, especially at the beach when they were constantly battered by salty, sandy wind. They essentially served as safety goggles on those blustery days and they allowed me to keep my regular (and much more expensive prescription glasses) FAR away from danger!

None of these lessons is all that ground-breaking or mind-blowing. But if we can learn a handful of even tiny lessons each season, think of how much we’ll grow as the years progress!