Notes on matched sets
You never see anyone wearing both at once, do you? And yet there they are, shirt & pants, cut from the same fabric. Theoretically this is what a suit is, but suit jackets-as-blazers hit different, due to our preconceived notions of what is appropriate there. This is a whole other dynamic. It simplifies the collection. It is easier, and probably cheaper, to make two things from the same cloth than two things from two different bits of cloth. Every designer offers both a shirt and pants, after all.
The idea feels like more people should have been doing it before, but post-Bad Times® it’s now everywhere. Still, imagine wearing both. It gives athleisure, no? We already have “elastic pants” popping off. More broadly, one wishes to telegraph as capable of owning fancy clothes without going through all of the patriarchal trappings of a suit & tie. “Ties are dead,” the Spyplane says, correctly:
Partly what I’m recoiling from is the way neckties became a cursed Ob*ma-era workplace cliché among dudes who used them to render a stock uniform of blue gingham shirts, selvage jeans, desert boots, and waxed-canvas laptop bags “formal enough” for the office — dressing, in other words, to pass muster with a SWAGLESS 9-to-5 PANOPTICON dominated by the REPRESSIVE GAZE of THE BOSS-MAN !!
But lapels aren’t out. Collars aren’t, either. And you can still wear hard pants with a belt, even though tight pants were a zero interest rate thing that has since very much died.
On the same page, Spyplane parses wearing all of one designer as “brand simping.” In Paris recently, I saw someone doing this. Hat, shirt, shoes, jacket, pants, and tote bag were all from the same designer. A moment later, I realized they were the designer. I think it’s okay to do this if and only if you are the designer. You are not the designer. And matched pairs toe the line here. You look luxe; it gives uniform. But really, you can only wear one a week, tops. Imagine it being an everyday thing. Trick question! You can’t. It is inconceivable.
There are many things coming together at once for the matched set. It tends to happen with smaller designers. We came out of a time when showing off involves a new way of swimming. And we sometimes just like the fabric, so why not both?