What Not to Wear (in Vancouver)

This is what to wear…

Pam has become a real fan of the Learn­ing Chan­nel pro­gram ‘What Not to Wear’. It’s a show in the mold of ‘Queer Eye for the Straight Guy’, only this time it’s Fash­ion-Eye for the Clue­less Girl. Sta­cy Lon­don and Clin­ton Kel­ly take some woman who has no fash­ion sense and maybe a lot of poten­tial, give them a $5,000 cred­it card shop­ping spree in NYC, and throw away all of their old clothes (while tak­ing them to task in all man­ner of zingers as they do so). After a new hair­do and make­up ses­sion, the trans­formed vic­tim arrives to cheers of friends, cowork­ers and fam­i­ly (this part is the most staged and feels very much like the show is a rip-off of Queer Eye). Unlike the oth­er show, it does not seem to me to have quite as much of a ‘good heart’, but Pam feels she is learn­ing lots of good tips and rules of thumb along the way.
Fast for­ward to dress­ing here. All of the rules are back­wards. In the world of fash­ion, Van­cou­ver is Bizarro World (for the non-Super­man or Sein­feld-savvy, Biz­zaro world is the inven­tion of the afore­men­tioned comics, a place where up is down, good-bye is hel­lo, and wrong is right. You get the idea.

Dress­ing up in Van­cou­ver is wear­ing some­thing that isn’t falling apart. As a friend of Mat­t’s exclaimed dur­ing a recent vis­it, “Every­one looks like they’re about an hour away from snow­board­ing.” (Which tech­ni­cal­ly we are, if you fac­tor in the dri­ve to Grouse and line for lift tick­ets). When I go into work, which is in Gas­town (a slight­ly seedy and touristy area that has many pan­han­dlers) and hap­pened to be dressed a lit­tle nicer, I stand out, in a way that’s prob­a­bly not so good (i.e. , I’m approached by more pan­han­dlers, who assume I’m a rich tourist). We’re talk­ing kha­ki pants, but­ton down shirt and leather jack­et here; that’s overdressed.

In prac­ti­cal terms, a leather jack­et is fair­ly use­less around here, any­way. When it’s dry and the leather jack­et would be safe to wear, it’s too warm. When it’s cold enough for the leather jack­et, it’s usu­al­ly too wet.

The stan­dard jack­et here is a wind­break­er or alpine jack­et, , made of GORE-TEX. usu­al­ly with a hood, (see above pic­ture) obtained at a Moun­taineer­ing or Sports store (The MEC is renowned here.) As for pants, it’s den­im, or per­haps car­go pants. The shirt? Long-sleeved or short-sleeved T, sweat­shirt (prefer­ably also hood­ed). To top it all off, if it’s cold out­side, fin­ish the whole ensem­ble with a Toque (the Cana­di­an term for knit­ted cap, often, but now always with a lit­tle pom-pom at the top). Colours can match, but don’t have to. Shoes are Doc Martens, jog­ging shoes, or those bowl­ing shoes that went in style a few years ago (which I wish I could wear, but can nev­er get in a width that is nar­row enough).

So my dif­fi­cul­ty here is that much of my Boston­ian-cen­tric wardrobe, includ­ing half a dozen white but­ton-down shirts, some fan­cy wool trousers and assort­ed cardi­gans and cash­mere sweaters is what the fish out of water is wear­ing here. Today I went out in some old jeans, a grey t‑shirt topped with a choco­late brown shirt that has no col­lar, and wore a hood­ed fleece sweat­shirt. Walk­ing back from the local caf�, I said to Pam “Today, I final­ly feel like I look like the every­one else.”