The Curious Case of Fatherly Fashion

This is a fashion piece. Particularly, fatherly fashion.

Let nobody be confused. I am the last person who should write about fashion. If you meet me one year, and then again ten years later, you might be left with a question: Wasn’t he wearing that same shirt ten years ago?

So, I have no qualifications to write this, except one: being human. And, right now, my human eye is in the airport looking at a father with his three daughters. I can’t help but note that his attire is similar to many fathers.

I am not married, nor do I have kids, so when I look at this man and his “outfit”, I am left with some simple questions. If I get married and have kids:

1. Will I have to wear tennis shoes with my shorts?
2. Will I have to add tube socks to the mix and pull them up?
3. Will I have to tuck my shirt into my shorts?
4. Will it be mandatory to have a gut?

These questions don’t necessarily put me off marriage and fatherhood, but they merit an answer and I don’t have one. What happens to guys when they get married? Do they lose all sense of style?

So, I am in the airline terminal and I see this dad with his 3 daughters. The daughters are all beautiful so I must assume that their mother–his wife–is also very attractive. As kids often do at a certain age, they seek distance so they are not sitting right next to their father. They sit two rows away.

Which just leaves the father, who I am looking and thinking why? Why do you have your shirt tucked into your shorts? Nobody does that. Nobody, except for your group of fathers. And, you are wearing tennis shoes (with pulled-up tube socks no less) on such a warm day when flip-flops would be so much cooler, both literally and figuratively.

On top of this, as happens to many fathers, you have a rather protrusive gut. This, you should know, makes the tucking in of your shirt all the more obscene. In case you did not know, fat people were baggy clothes to hide their fat. At least this strategy keeps people guessing, no?

Thin people wear tight clothes because they have nothing to hide.

I know that you knew this at one point in your life and I just wonder when you forgot. Does getting married and supporting a family just knock you out so much that you just do not care any longer?

Men are not alone. We certainly hear the same of married women. When, after marriage, she quickly went from lingerie to large sweatpants and withdrew many of the pleasures that may have led you to marry her in the first place.

I wonder which came first: her sweats or your new fatherly fashion?

And then I wonder: what happens if one changes and the other doesn’t? What happens if you convert to your tucked-in-shirt-tube-sock-gut look and she maintained her lingerie loving ways?

Wait, where’s your wife?