Geriatric fashionista

I’m not one who would take issue with a man’s fashion sense (or non-sense). If I see a man wear socks over his Birkenstocks, I tend to rationalize. It could be fungus. In which case I would feel a little sorry that he is unable to resolve whether to air out his toenails or keep them under wraps. But I would just as soon get back to minding my own personal conflicts. (They’re not about fashion, but they are many, and they’re a pain.)

I might have quarreled with appropriateness in the past. My general position on dressing has been about wearing a proper dress for a proper occasion. This attitude was largely shaped by my experience of my grandfather on my mother’s side.

Lolo, even in his late 70’s, was a very sharp dresser. He had a lot of decent clothes, suits and formal barongs that were remnants of his past social life. In the mornings he would emerge from upstairs all dressed up and looking spiffy (yes, often in a suit, necktie and all), and he would put on his short fit, pick up his cane, and walk out the door like a don. He was a good-looking man, and he carried his clothes very well. But at his age and circumstances, he had nowhere to go. It would have been nice, or less strange, if he went to church – but no. He insinuated his formal dress into the heat and chaos of the Pasig wet market, where I have no doubt he was a major fashion anomaly. I was in my early teens then, and he embarrassed me to death.

I can remember being somewhat of a fashion Mussolini almost 15 years ago, at my cousin’s wedding. It was a grand affair, very formal, and I had a new piña barong made for my then-husband. At the reception, when we were posing for pictures, I realized he was wearing his topsiders – brown and ratty beyond belief! – under his black dress pants. I felt my face turn red, then white, then red again as I forced a smile to the cameras. I knew I had laid out his black wingtips for him that afternoon. So when we got into the car going home, I attacked him with proper ferocity. "You pull that stunt on me again, and I’ll shoot you."

Now I’m more of a liberal when it comes to dress. I guess when you’re older (and you’ve done five years of graduate school in UP Diliman) you get more tolerant. You learn to leave other people’s fashion alone. As long as one decently covers all that needs covering, I am not about to mind.

Nabby, one of my two best friends, will agree with me on this. She and I, we don’t much care what a man wears as long as we never have to walk with him in a mall. Anna, the other best friend, feels differently– she takes other people’s fashion bloopers personally, like an affront. There is a man we know who wears nothing but Elvis couture (and coiffure). Anna takes one look at him and she wants to cry. I would tell her it might do her good to go up to him and compliment his belt buckle. She could eat a breakfast of fried egg and sinangag off of it – sure, it’s a bit too large – but hey, it’s stainless steel.

Conversations like this can turn outright goofy, and the hilarity distracts Anna, but ultimately she is little pacified. All three of us have a fine-enough style sense, but Anna is an interior designer, and the pursuit of aesthetic correctness is her business. Nabby and I both have unused psychology degrees, so while Anna grieves over a wrong belt, we speculate on the wearer’s unconscious instead.

You want to know a man’s history, his hang-ups, his conceits and neuroses, his hopes, his dreams and – oh God – his delusions? Watch his fashion.

Take my 70-year-old uncle who has lived in Canada for more than 20 years. I’ve visited with him in Toronto, where I found nothing the matter – very regular, nothing fancy – about the clothes he wore where he lived. But when he attended the funeral of his eldest brother in Nueva Ecija some years ago, he looked as if he had come from a rodeo, and he took my attention away from the dead and the grieving. Uncle D was wearing a black long-sleeved silk shirt, black slim pants, black Stetson hat with matching cord around the chin. And with all that, a pair of brown cowboy boots. I turned to my mother and asked, "What’s the name of the Lone Ranger’s sidekick – is it Tonto?" My mother just kept fanning herself (it was high noon, very hot). She wouldn’t look at her brother-in-law.

I’m not sure I have described this scene to my best friends. But next time we have dinner, I will. One has to possess a lot of flash to steal the show from the dead. There’s something there – why steal the show from the dead, duh? – for us to analyze.

On the other hand, we long ago figured out my Lolo, the geriatric fashionista, God bless his soul.

On one of his trips to the market (he walked, crossing two busy streets to get from San Nicolas to Kapasigan) he was sideswiped by a speeding motorcycle. He landed on his butt first and then he hit his head. Someone took him home with his head in a bandage. His bones were not broken, but he was pretty shaken up.

He went downhill from there. He was slow to recover, and when he did, he could not walk to the market anymore, and so his suits, to my relief, just hung uselessly in his closet. Every day he would stand in front of the gate, waiting for someone to chat up. It was always a girl, and it was usually the teenaged Nabby. He would fish an old picture from his pocket and show it to her. In it, he was looking dapper in a dark suit. He told Nabby it was a big ceremony at the Luneta. He was presented a national award for his achievements in music; he was the best cornet player who ever lived.

The whole family was there that night with him. I was eight, and didn’t know what a cornet was, but there was popcorn. I suppose Lolo’s children were all sufficiently proud of him, but these things, no matter how grand, have a way of fading from memory. People forgot about it (I certainly did). But not him. And all the preening he did at the market, I realized much later, was to relive and reassert the glory of that night and let everyone know he had a big life. He wouldn’t let his star fade, and he did what he could. And if I knew then what I know now, I would have put him into a car and driven him to the wet market myself.

His name was Mariano Cruz.

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E-mail me at migs_vill@yahoo.com or visit my blog at migsvil.blogspot.com