Doin’ my little turn on the catwalk: Putting fashion in perspective [Unscripted column]

Can we talk about fashion?

Unscripted columns are supposed to stick to topics under the broad umbrella of entertainment. But fashion?

If you think of entertainment as how we spend our time and money, then fashion certainly fits the bill. Try to find a serious garment stalker or accessorizer who doesn’t relish the hunt, who doesn’t shop for fun and the thrill of discovery. Fashion, from the initial pursuit to the final sartorial display, can be highly entertaining.

So, yes, fashion.

First, let’s get real about the luxuries that perpetuate fashion — the aforementioned time (the most precious commodity) and money. The less you have of those, the more likely you are to wear just clothes.

At their most basic, clothes follow function, not form. When the Bible exhorts us to clothe the naked, it doesn’t specify ethically sourced, on-trend athleisurewear. No, clothing simply protects the body, where fashion adorns it.

Across cultures, humans enjoy cultivating their individual aesthetics in big and small ways, but it would be difficult to construe fashion as a fundamental need. On the face of it, fashion registers more like a privilege, and developing a personal sense of style requires extra: more time and often more money.

Time and money exist on a sliding scale when it comes to fashion. Spending less money means investing more time in searching for the piece that completes the look without breaking the bank; likewise, for those who prefer to save time, not money, even the rarest items today can be quickly pinpointed and ordered online and rushed to the doorstep of anyone willing and able to pay the price.

A certain class of people spend a whole lot of both time and money on fashion. These are the folks who next month will line runways in New York, London, Paris and Milan. They are the power brokers whose vision and whimsy eventually filters down in often imperceptible ways to the cheaper clothing carried by chain retailers that populate shopping malls and outlet centers, where the hoi polloi like me get to pick through the scraps.

I’m OK with that. Straight up, I’m a middle-aged dad with a son in college and another son headed that way. I have neither the time nor the money to invest heavily in fashion, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have the inclination.

We all have a flamboyant fashionista buried somewhere deep inside us just aching to take the reins, and the credit card. Don’t we?

Perhaps not all of us. But I do.

And his name is Esteban.

The first time Esteban woke up inside me, I was 17 and casing the racks in a thrift store. A few artsy friends who were much cooler than me suggested we go thrift shopping, which I had never done, and there we were obnoxiously picking through clothing in a damp-smelling basement of a Salvation Army in downtown Erie when I came across a red button-down J. Crew shirt that I thought was denim but now know to be chambray.

Esteban fell in love with that $5 shirt (he was young and uniformed, and it was 1990; don’t judge), and he has been with me ever since, guiding my personal sense of style, such as it is, and pushing me toward ever more daring fashion choices.

My senior year of high school, Esteban convinced me to wear a plaid bathrobe to school, repeatedly. He was still learning.

His eye has since refined. Esteban knows fashion, but doesn’t follow it. He pays attention to cut, feel, color, pattern and texture, but not labels, subscribing instead to the Duke Ellington school of fashion: If it looks and feels good, it is good, labels be damned.

He was absolutely no help when my wife, having returned from an excursion to Paris, bestowed upon me an Hermes necktie. I looked at the label and asked quizzically, “Her-meez?” (Cringe.)

Esteban dismisses out of hand self-aggrandizing designers who, either for reasons of insecurity or greed or both, announce their presence by emblazoning initials or other branded graphics into their clothing and wares. He can’t listen to Jason Derulo for the same reason.

Esteban is his own man.

The other day my wife asked me what ever happened to Esteban, and I assured her he was still alive and well if, for reasons of practicality, dormant.

Esteban occasionally fights his way to the light when a head-turning collection of put-togetherness swaggers by us on the sidewalk, but the last time he really came out to play was in the summer of 2019, when my gorgeous, eminently stylish cousin rang up to ask whether I would preside over her wedding in Puerto Rico.

Before I had even hung up the phone, Esteban was piecing together our fit: something suitable for officiating an intimate subtropical gathering in Old San Juan atop a 16th-century Spanish fort overlooking the sea; something understated and sleek, reverently authoritative yet breezy.

He settled on an long-cut white shirt with a Nehru collar and straight hem, untucked over a sand-colored, flat-front linen blend pant, set off by rope sandals and a rope stole. He found the shirt at Zara (fast fashion, like H&M, but moderately higher-end) at the King of Prussia mall, but what he really wanted to buy from Zara, and suffered over for far too long without purchasing, was a long-sleeve creamy silk club shirt with a quasi-impressionistic indigo floral print.

Did I mention Esteban is forever 28, weighs 15 pounds less than I do and maintains a delicious set of six-pack abs over which designer clothes perfectly drape?

Esteban’s impeccable frame is fabulous, whereas mine is more flabulous.

That’s OK, though, because right now I’m in control, and a T-shirt and jeans suits this dad bod just fine. I know Esteban can appreciate the comfort and ease of dressing down.

Esteban and I both know how to keep fashion in perspective. We understand and embrace the frivolity of flair and don’t take ourselves too seriously in that regard.

And we agree that the most amazing, priceless items hanging in our packed-to-suffocation walk-in closet cost us nothing and came to us in their own time: my late father’s dark green paint-stained chamois work shirt and his navy blue Penryn Area Churches softball league cotton T-shirt.

When we wear those, we feel like a million bucks.

Michael Long is the deputy editor of LNP | LancasterOnline’s Investigations & Enterprise team. “Unscripted” is a weekly entertainment column produced by a rotating team of writers.