Do you need a bow tie to go with your navy pants?

Has it come to be that when a man wears a dark pant and tucks in his shirt that he constitutes “dressed up”? Every time I wear navy chinos or a pair of dark denim, people comment, “You’re all dressed up!” No, I have on the same pants from yesterday, but rather than being a shade of faded beige, they are dark blue. While dark colors in general, your blacks and your blues, tend to be used most in “dressed up” clothes, can we not wear them with the same attitude and feeling one wears the, apparently, more relaxed browns? Or have we become so used to seeing khaki that the only reason one would wear blue or black pants would be because they are “dressed up”?

I went to this thing last night for school. It was my department’s welcoming/beginning of the school year party. I wore a purple plaid oxford, a pair of raw denim jeans, and my Wallabees (my go-to shoe for F/W). This kind of outfit was not out of the ordinary for what I might wear to school or to any other kind of outing. But I got many comments on my clothes. I admit, the shirt was kind of fly. I’d like to think I could thank Chris Bailey over there at Burberry, but I have a feeling he had very little to do with this exact shirt I had on. Maybe it was the whole outfit, dark pants included, that tipped everyone off that I was, indeed, “dressed up”. Perhaps it was that my clothes provided a sharp contrast to the t-shirts and shorts that many of the grad students, and even professors, were wearing. Yes, I did intend to look good, and to have people notice. For me, I’m just as comfortable in dark denim as I am in khaki pants—at the end of the day, they’re both pants. But this happens every time I wear dark pants. And it is to the pants that I attribute part of this thing that happens.

Oddly enough, very few to no one says anything when my outfit includes a pant in a shade of brown. It could be the same top I’ve worn with dark pants, but now with lighter ones, and no one says anything about being dressed up. Have we become so addicted to the khakis and honey browns that when we see a man wearing navy, or even black, pants we assume they’re dressed up? Is there something that got twisted along the way that now uses a tucked in shirt as an indicator of someone who is dressed up? In September’s Vogue, there is a series of articles about the fact that many of today’s women are either scared of “dressing up” or are so confused as to what it means that they end up not “dressing up”. I think the problem extends beyond women, and into the realm of man.

The same month’s Details includes an essay about men wearing “mom jeans”—the ones that are of a light blue and may or may not be tapered at the end. Many a man will put those bad boys on, throw on a button-down and say they’re ready to go to dinner. Maybe it is about the color, then, that differentiates dressed up and dressed down. The color of many of these men’s mom jeans are in fact one that is lighter. But maybe it’s about the less than little to no thought people want to use when deciding what to wear—the mom jeans are comfortable, and they’re right there, you don’t have to search for anything else because the jeans are right where you left them when you took them off yesterday. Let’s face it, sometimes it only requires a little bit of thought, like say grabbing the chocolate brown chinos instead of the beige ones that keeps you out of mom territory and in the male gender column.

Even if your pants are not in fact dark, the simple act of tucking the shirt tail in moves you out of the generic. All of this takes the same amount of time you would use when figuring out which flip-flops to wear with your cargos (ugh). Or just put on some navy pants.

Photos: RalphLauren.com, Burberry.com