 The theoretical part of the week is over, kids. So this is the session on how to build a wardrobe inexpensively, and I want quick caveat before I get into some bigger caveats, is that this presentation is aimed at the guys in the audience. I'm not equipped nor qualified to discuss women's professional dress. However, almost all of the principles and axioms will discuss during these next 30 minutes or so are equally applicable to the ladies. So, but as is my want, you have to indulge me for just one moment. I couldn't resist. I happen to be a big fan of Kerry Grant and have read a bunch of his biographies and quite a remarkable man and actually amazing gymnast, vaudeville comedian, physical actor, and this is COVID man on the right here, who's not doing quite as well. So, I'd like to start with just a few caveats. The idea that there are rules of dress or even comportment is somewhat in question in the modern world, and I suppose that's okay. So, there's an entire line of thought that goes something like this. Clothes shouldn't matter. I should wear whatever I want and nobody else should judge me or have anything to say or think about it. Clothes should be functional. They should be comfortable above all. They should be utilitarian. If I'm about to get on a long flight or something and I want to wear sweats and flip flops because I'll be most comfortable during that flight in sweats and flip flops, that's what I'm going to do and even beyond that, if you feel like you need to adhere to old fashioned rules or customs or attitudes about dress, if you feel like you need to wear a suit and tie, that almost shows that you are a pro, that you're a corporate drone because you have to dress up. Whereas if you're a master of the universe like Mark Zuckerberg, you just wear your hoodie and your sweats to the meeting with the venture capitalists who are going to give you billions of dollars and if you have to dress up, it almost shows that there's less substance to you and so this is an old fashioned thing where we're trying to be superficial or something like that. So there's an entire line of thought that goes that way and that's absolutely fine. It's not one I share but the point is that this presentation assumes that that is not your line of thought and if somebody wants to wear a sweats on an airplane, so be it. So the idea here is that we're talking about some set of rules. We're accepting or even desiring some sets of rules in our manner of dress. So no rules would be the idea that you just wear whatever you want and how daring but even suggest otherwise. Now some rules I think is the category that we'll find ourselves in today which means that we're interested in how to dress but we also realize that the rules are there to be broken in many ways and that they're often changing. So there's lots of famous rules that are way before my day like that at least in the United States originated out of the Northeast as you might expect. The Northeast was a Yankee Dome and that was really where a lot of the modern dress got it start the American look and so the idea that you don't wear white before Memorial Day. That white is purely a summer color and you stop wearing white or light color clothes at Labor Day. That's something that came out of the climate of Rhode Island and places like that in New England. So that rule is that's a rule but it's not really a rule that you would follow down here in the hot humid South, right? So there's some rules but there's some rules that are meant to be broken. There used to be a very famous rule. London is obviously a big center for men's dress. We think of England as a masculine country. We think of France and Paris as a feminine country in many ways. So a lot of men's dress came out of London fashion and so there used to be a famous saying in London no brown in town which meant brown and brogues and tweeds were out in your country because you're rich, you have a place in town and you have a place in the country. You wear that in the country but in town you wear gray or black or more formically. I mean that sort of thing is so completely outdated today that we can barely even call it a rule. It's broken so much. So we look at these rules and we say first of all they're highly subjective, right? Everything we talk about is highly subjective and they're temporal, right? All these, you are not gonna, most of us are probably not gonna wear spats or a top hat anytime soon, right? So we're all slaves to our times into fashion so in that sense we're no different than maybe the person who's wearing sweats on the airplane is actually more advanced than us in that sense, right? They're just, we're sort of top hats and spats and they've moved on. And of course they're geographic. I mean what you wear and it's appropriateness it depends very much on the geography and the location and the climate especially. You know if you go to Bermuda is not quite tropical but it's not even semi-tropical but if you go to Bermuda it is entirely okay to wear shorts to a business meeting. The Bermuda shorts that came out of the hot humid climate in Bermuda. If you go to a tropical zone in the equator versus if you go to Sweden or someplace cold I mean obviously the manner of dress even down here in Auburn in the summer people wear lighter fabrics and everything just because of the climate. So we have to understand that all these things are very subjective and subject to change. They're not ironclad and you shouldn't feel bad or feel constrained by any of this. It should be enjoyable and it should bring you pleasure and improve your life. And of course my own biases are prevalent here. I probably come from more of the Anglo-American Brooks Brothers look than more of a continental Italian Armani look or whatever you know however you might think of that but I'm showing sort of my 90s age here my bias. So take all this with a grain of salt this is just a fun presentation. So the question is what are we trying to do today? Well thinking about young people in particular I'd like to help you avoid some of the mistakes maybe I made along the way both money wise and fashion wise I guess would be the phrase. And I really think that it's important to start out young building a serviceable wardrobe for your future careers. And I believe that if you're diligent and if you're willing to work a young male could do this for well under $2,000. And that doesn't mean that you have to do that all $2,000 at once you could do this slowly over time using some of the strategies and techniques we'll talk about. But I don't think you need to go out spend $10,000 or something like that to be well dressed. And as a young person well dressed just means the minimum it just means the basics. But if you go about this in a more strategic or thoughtful way you're gonna avoid some mistakes along the way and so that maybe $2,000 you might spend over let's say a period of two years which isn't all that much if you think about it will be well spent and you won't make mistakes on spending too much on the wrong things too little on the right things or buying something that you don't wear or whatever it might be. And believe me I've made plenty of mistakes but if I could go back to your age maybe some of this would be useful for me. So I don't think the $2,000 is unrealistic in any way shape or form. And here's a little secret is that especially with COVID men's dress is really the market for it has bottomed out heavily. So there's a lot of clothing out there cheap right now even with inflation because demand has fallen so much. And the demand has fallen for a lot of reasons even before COVID there were very few places of employment that still required a jacket and tie for men. I mean most law firms have gone to business casual unless maybe you're in court most accounting firms most investment banking firms even it's just business casuals, polo shirts that kind of things. There's probably only a few dozen restaurants and private clubs left in America where a jacket and tie is still required to dine in the evenings there are some. So a lot of this stuff is kind of going the way of the Dodo bird and that has with intensified with COVID and work from home. And as a result there's more sales there's more stuff on eBay. There's just a lot of retail clothing manufacturers out there and apparel manufacturers who are kind of in trouble I think with their inventories and that helps you. And of course if you start thinking about it now creating a foundation now you're gonna have a lifetime of dressing well at relatively low cost. And with social media the way it is what you want to avoid is looking back on pictures of yourself in 20 or 30 years and saying oh my God what was I doing? You know like when we look at the 70s people have these giant collars and these really wide ties and lime green leisure suits and that you know everything oh man that looks terrible but when you look back in the 30s, 40s, 50s I don't know how they look great. So that's what we want to avoid. We want to avoid the lime green leisure suit in every facet of life metaphorically. And then of course one of the benefits of this is not just feeling good is that you can improve your career in romantic prospects. Look there's a famous Seinfeld some of you are too young but men are like jeeps, right? I mean men are pretty functional, pretty utilitarian. You know most men are pretty fungible. And most men are not, you're not a Calvin Klein model. Who cares? Just have it reasonably together and your romantic prospects are hugely improved. Okay, this is Mises University. So what are the rules? These are Jeff's rules not the rules but they're the rules, okay? So these again apply I think as much to females in my opinion. So the number one rule is fit. Fit, fit, fit, fit, fit. It doesn't matter if you have the most beautiful $3,000 canali suit from Italy. If it's ill fitting, you're dead in the water. You're better off in a t-shirt and jeans from Walmart that fit you than the most expensive or luxurious garment that fits you poorly. It's just an inescapable fact. Now that doesn't mean fit is everything in dressing well but it's the first thing. And if you don't have that you have nothing in it. So if you really like something and you put it on and it's just not right and you think it should look good on you or you really like it or you want to have this kind of style or somebody else looked really cool in it, it doesn't matter. You have to have the discipline to say, it just doesn't fit me. And that's it and you have to move on. So that's the number one thing. Now the flip side to fit for men, for business professional clothes is tailoring. You have to accept the fact that you may not be able to just buy a garment off the rack and have it fit perfectly. You have to go get it altered. Okay, that's just part of the deal here. And alterations in tailoring are your friend. I mean people used to understand this is the whole point of a tailor is to make the good things look better and the bad things look not so bad, right? So if you go back and look at a movie with Jackie Gleason in it, big, heavy set guy and kind of portly in the waist and not so broad shoulder and all that. But his tailors would do everything they could to make Jackie Gleason look more like a TV star and they succeeded. So this is the point of this. And I'm afraid so much of our culture and society is now is just like almost offended by this idea. Almost offended by the idea that you should try to look good for other people. And I don't know what to say to that. So we start with fit. The number two rule this is absolutely bulletproof is spend twice as much by half as much. And once you get to a certain level spend three times as much by a third as much spend 20 times as much by whatever it is. I mean the best stuff you can get whether that's new use thrifted eBay, whatever it is quality, quality, quality, quality it's so much better to have a few quality items than a whole closet full of garbage from Walmart for the same amount of money. And if you look at folks in Europe who generally Ryan McMacon has written on this quite a bit disposable income is actually considerably less in Europe than in the United States or at least it has been up until recently. I mean this is and if you look at folks in Europe in general, they have smaller houses and apartments. The closets are usually smaller and they just don't have all these clothes but they tend to have higher quality garments and they look better in them. So this is really a golden rule. If you're better off having two really good suits for example than five or 10 crappy Macy suits it's just a fact. And that applies top to bottom in everything in your wardrobe. So this is a fundamental rule. Get the best stuff you can and just get less than you think. And especially with work from home with COVID with business casual the opportunities and the requirements for you to have professional clothing it may be a lot less frequent. You know if it's 1955 and you work at Arthur Anderson accounting you're wearing a suit every day literally. You got to have a bunch of suits but you guys may only need a full on suit once in a while for an interview or something like that. So that means that you need fewer of them which means that you might be able to spend a little more on the quality end. Okay, so that's a key. This is something that people forget. You got to focus on the cost per wear and we tend to not do this. I mean we probably all have this. I have some gift items in my wardrobe that probably cost a hundred bucks that someone bought me and I might have worn it twice and that's terrible because if you look at that item, would I have rented that item to wear for $50? I mean this tie is so beautiful or cool or I'm gonna rent it for 50 bucks and then I'll do that twice and so it's a hundred dollars and then of course I wouldn't. That's a terrible deal, right? So but I have t-shirts from the gap that were probably on sale for five bucks that I've worn 200 times or something and that's from a cost per wear perspective. That was a tremendously smart purchase. So when you start thinking in terms of cost per wear, you get into like, hey, how does this fit with other things that I have and am I really gonna wear it a lot? And so if something's really expensive, if you go out and even on sale at Brooks Brothers, a really nice suit is $1,000 but you wear it once or twice a week for 20 years, what's your cost per wear? And that's harder for the ladies because the fashion's changed more but I think the principle holds. So focus on cost per wear. If you're gonna buy something expensive and by expensive I mean within your own context, make sure that item is key and central and goes with other things and you're gonna wear it a lot because then you're gonna feel a lot better about it. It's like your car, you use your car every day pretty much, you know? So focus on cost per wear. Next thing is simplicity. If you read about Kerry Grant, he talked about this endlessly. You know, if you try to pull off edge of your stuff, stranger stuff, more patterns and colors and that, you know, the more complexity the worse. I mean, simplicity is always the key to any elegant person. Things just work. If you go to a high school graduation, you'll see a bunch of kids who look just like the suit is wearing them, right? They're just totally uncomfortable. They never worn a suit before. It's brand new, it doesn't fit and they're walking down that aisle, you know, to get their diploma and whereas if you look at pictures of Kerry Grant, I mean, it's just like whatever the X factor is, it's just like, you know, he just had it. It's just everything he wore was very, very simple. A gray flannel suit, you know? And then one little twist to make it interesting, but simplicity, you know, your life's gonna be a lot easier if you're not buying orange clothes, right? Or so, you know, because that's at that one time a year, you know, you go to a pool party. I mean, so think about simplicity because that's going to always serve you well. And also, again, back to that cost, analysis is you got to figure out your own skin tone and body type. And so if your body type's changing a lot, that's going to cost you money. If you're gaining and losing weight, you know, you guys in your early 20s, that's almost an inescapable thing. I mean, you will buy 30, you'll just get a little thicker. I mean, it's just, it happens to all men. It's pretty much inescapable and it might not even relate that much to the number on the scale. It's just a fact of life. So there's nothing much you can do about that. And of course, in your 20s, you might not want to go out and spend a ton on clothing because you kind of want to wait until you, to, you know, I'm in that horrible middle age goes on a long time. And, you know, so I, you know, I have, I can keep that more constant, but if your body's changing a lot, you know, that's gonna be a cost to you and it's gonna be more work. So try to, try to figure that, but also skin tone. I mean, there's things that just look good on other people that just aren't gonna look good on you. And that goes to a lot of things, you know, but you're gonna just, you're gonna find that certain colors work better for you. It's just, it's just the way it is. And you might not like it. You might, you know, wish that you could, that a certain color look good on you, but you just have to accept it and be rigorous. Just like with fit, you just have to have the discipline and say, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Say no, it's a lot more important to say no than yes. And then finally, this is the last rule is that if you wanna be well-dressed or just reasonably, acceptably dressed, you're gonna have to do some work. There's work involved, especially if you're trying to buy clothes cheap. You know, if you're some rich guy, you can go out and hire a consultant and a tailor and just say, go buy me all this stuff and find out what looks good on me, but most people can't do that, right? I mean, so most of us, you have to go buy it. And if you wanna do it on the cheap, you're gonna have to do a lot more work. You're gonna have to own a shoe shine kit. You're gonna have to shine your shoes. That's better than making your bed. You have to shine your shoes. You're gonna have to own an iron. You know, you're gonna have to iron some clothes when you wanna look presentable. You're gonna have to do a little bit of research here and there. You're gonna have to drive back and forth sometimes and wait for a tailor to make something fit you correctly. So there's some work. You can't just buy, go out and just buy things and easily and magically, it doesn't work that way. And again, what we're discussing today is baseline stuff. We're talking about off-the-rack clothing, which you might get altered to fit you a little better. We're not talking about higher levels. What rich people do, which are made to measure is the next level and then full bespoke is the next level like Prince Charles, right? Prince Charles, if you say what's your shirt size to Prince Charles, he doesn't have a shirt size. He has a tailor who measures him and builds a shirt for him, right? And if any of you come from monarchical families, but short of that. So we're just talking about off-the-rack clothing here and doing the best we can. And if you do the best you can, you're gonna be ahead. You're gonna be ahead of the game. Very easy in today's age to look better than your competition. Very, very easy, never an easier, I might say. And yet, look how much more materially wealthy we are than like our great grandparents and yet they managed to look better than us, you know? So here's the hierarchy. When it comes to those precious dollars that you've got to spend, when it comes to your quality mindset, when it comes on the big questions of where to spend a little more and where you can skimp, where you can go new, where you can go used, this is the hierarchy. If you're a guy, if you're a girl, you know, there's a lot of goofy female shoes. And they, you know, but if you're a guy, if you're a guy, number one, number one, number one, number one shoes, shoes, shoes, belts are related. But the great thing about being a guy is that certain shoe styles can wear them 20, 30 years. You know, I mean, you look at an old wing tip from Cary Grant in the 50s, I mean, you can go wear that same shoe today. I mean, style-wise. So shoes are the absolute top priority in terms of your expenditure. There are lots of ways to get shoes inexpensively, but you should never get inexpensive shoes, ever, ever, ever. And you know, I mean, off-the-rack shoes, to get pretty, you know, there's a reality today. The full retail price for bare minimum we'll get to shoes today is about 400 bucks. And if you want a better English shoe, that's getting more than 700, 800 bucks. But there are lots of ways to not spend that and we'll get to that. So that I'm just talking about sort of the baseline mentality you have to have. And then the rest of the hierarchy goes from out to in. So in terms of where you should splurge and where you should skimp, it depends, you know, the more outside of your body the garment is, the more you should spend. And as you get in closer, you know, the less you can spend. So, you know, you just get, if you're gonna wear a T-shirt or anything, just, you know, just, who cares? Get a T-shirt from, get an eight-pack at Walmart, right, just, you know, who cares? But so outerwear, you know, you never, depending on what kind of climate you live in, in Auburn we barely have outerwear. But if you live in the Northeast or if you live in European climates, Northern European climates, something like that, you're gonna have to wear some kind of outerwear on top of a suit or a sport coat. You know, you're gonna ruin your whole, your whole mojo if that outerwear is crappy. And then, moving down the hierarchy, suits and sport coats, there's a little more leeway here. There's no leeway in shoes, but there's a little more leeway here. And then you get into furnishings where you're talking about basically suits and, excuse me, shirts and ties. Here you can find cheaper stuff that's serviceable. And then finally, you know, your casual wear, you know, that's fine. Whatever suits you, you know, on the weekends, t-shirt is a t-shirt is a t-shirt. So this is sort of how you're thinking ought to be done, hierarchical. So this is, the next slide is the slide of destiny for all of you. And I plan to go into the next world, well-shod on my feet. Just in case I have to, you know, walk through a lot of purgatory or something. So when I'm walking through purgatory, it's gonna be on good year welted shoes, damn it. So this is the deal breaker, okay? A good year welt. What is a good year welt? Well, you have the bottom of the shoe, okay? You have the sole of the shoe, then you have the top of the shoe, the leather portion, and my leather, I mean leather. We all know, not plastic, right? Okay, so this thing here that goes around it was a process started by the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company and that thing that goes around, that strip is the Goodyear welt. So that means that the top of the shoe is not stitched, or even worse, glued, stitched to the bottom of the shoe directly, there's a welt in between them, connecting them. So what this welt means, this piece of hard fabric means is that you can resole these shoes over and over and over again. There are old guys who have a pair of shoes for 40, 50 years and now the sole's worn out and they've changed the sole many times, but the uppers are still okay, especially if they're polishing them, taking care of them. So a good year welt is the be all end all, okay? And there are plenty of shoes that have a good year welt that aren't all that expensive. But the problem is you have to do the work to find out if the particular shoe you're buying has it or not because you can't count on the sales person if they even exist. I mean, the information out there is very slip shot. So you might have to do a little bit of work. So you have to buy shoes that are gonna last and that are resoleable, which is another way of saying they're Goodyear welted. This is absolutely critical. So the distinction, so I don't have a good picture, I was gonna bring some in, but the basic distinction is an Oxford shoe, sometimes people call it a Balmoral, is a more formal shoe, that's where the laces are really close together. And the front of the shoe, which is called the vamp, the front of the shoe is the two sides come together in a more, I guess, closed way. So we can call it closed lacing or open lacing. This shoe is what we would call a derby or a blucher because the two sides come together, this is the vamp of the shoe, the two sides come together over top of it. Okay, so an Oxford is a little more formal generally, so it's a little better with a suit. This kind of shoe, a derby or a blucher is a little less formal. Still okay with a suit, it's fine, but it's great with a sport coat, it's a little less formal. So, and then of course you have slip-on loafers, which are sort of a third category, but you need an Oxford shoe, you need a black Oxford shoe in your wardrobe. You need a brown blucher shoe in your wardrobe. I don't know if you need a loafer in your wardrobe or not, but these two are pretty much must haves. Now, the more stuff that's on a shoe, the less formal it is. So if your black shoe has nothing on it, the toe of it and the sides of it and the vamp of it are just smooth leather. That's a more formal look, that's a more formal shoe. Black is always more formal than brown. A shoe that has a line across it, a cap toe, I'm sure you all know what a cap toe is, a shoe that has this kind of what they call broguing, these little holes punched in it, decorative broguing, which actually comes from back in the English countryside when broguing was designed to let the, these holes were designed to let the water out of your shoes because you're walking around boggy muddy water. So a brogued shoe was always less formal, that was a country shoe. But today it's decorative, it's fine. But the more decorations on a shoe, basically the less formal. So if you're wearing a suit to an interview, you might wanna try to wear a black shoe that's a little bit more formal. If you're going to just wear a sport coat and you're just going out to dinner or something like that, then you might choose a shoe that's less formal. But the key with shoes is that, first of all, that they're quality leather, second of all, that they're Goodyear-welted. And that the style is somewhat timeless. That's very, very important. You don't wanna buy a shoe that's gonna be, or address you. I mean, we're just talking about professional wear here. We're not talking about your weekend or casual wear. You don't wanna buy a shoe that's gonna probably go in or out of style. And you really have to care about the last. Now what's a last? The last is basically it's akin to a mold in metalwork or something like that. It's a form. It's a shape around which the shoe is made. Again, if you're Prince Charles, you have a custom, they literally create a custom last of your foot. And that's hanging in these really expensive shoe shops down in the basement in Savile Row in London. And so Prince Charles wants a new pair of shoes. I'm sure he doesn't call, but somebody calls for him. And they just order them up and it's literally made around a last of his exact foot. So it's gonna fit him like butter, okay? But for just over the counter, ready to wear shoes, they have to just have it sort of a generic last and then make it bigger, smaller, longer, a shorter, narrower, wider to sort of fit a mass market audience. And what you're gonna find is some shoes are built on a longer narrower last and some shoes are built on a shorter, wider last. And you're just gonna have to try them on. There's no other way about it. You might love a particular shoe but you have kind of a wide foot and it's just, it's made on a narrow, more elegant last and it's just not gonna work for you. It's just the way it is. It's not gonna fit because if it's a narrow last and you have a wide foot, in order to get one that's wide enough for you, it's gonna have to be too long. It's gonna have to be a much bigger size and you don't want that. So you have to, you know, figure out what your shoe size is with a good, at a good, better shoe store with a brand, what's called a brandic device. And then you have to just sort of accept that some lasts are gonna work for you and some aren't. So you have to, you have to sort of do again, do a little bit homework and learn about this stuff. And shoes are most important. Again, shoes are critical. So some of the brands here that I've listed are within reason, either at retail on sale or eBay and other sources. All of these are good, you're well-todd. Unfortunately, some of the famous American brands, Floor Shime, Cole Haan, Johnston and Murphy have become absolute garbage. They're generally made in India now. They're not made, those are US manufacturers. They're not made in the US anymore. You know, you'll see that pure garbage at places like Macy's for 180 bucks. It's not worth 50 bucks. So that's where you're being penny wise and pound foolish, because the shoe looks fine, but it's not fine. It's plasticky, it's gonna fall apart, it's gonna crease worse. On a cost per wear use, it's gonna be way worse over time. Okay, so you buy a $400 shoe and you wear it for 10 years. On a cost per wear, it's gonna be cheaper than that garbage non-good year well-todd shoe that you buy at the department store in your town. So Allen Edmonds is a heritage American brand. Alden is a heritage American brand. Both of them go back to the 1800s. Both are still made in America. Allen Edmonds is wobbling, they're teetering, getting goofy to try to reach mass markets. Just like Brooks Brothers in many ways is wobbling, teetering, getting goofy. But nonetheless, Allen Edmonds are still serviceable shoes, but more importantly, they are just a zillion of them out there. So we'll talk about how to get them inexpensively in a second, but a very ubiquitous brand. So you know you're getting a good year well-todd shoe and they still make some very traditional styles that are gonna serve you well. Allen Edmonds are about 395, I think, at retail, full retail. Alden Shoes, also American-made, very famous. Those are gonna be $700, $800 at retail. Churches is a very famous English brand. Locke is a more affordable English brand. Herring is a website that's excellent for getting English shoes at a pretty good price. Crockett & Jones is where you're getting up more into that $700, $800 for a pair of those. Peele & Company is a great place to find bargains, especially on eBay, because it's not actually a shoe company, it's a company that was built that started back in the 1500s making shoes for princes and such and then ultimately went out into business. Then Brooks Brothers just bought the name. And so Peele & Company shoe is actually a Brooks Brothers branded shoe. And so they farmed that out to people like Allen Edmonds and Crockett & Jones. So Peele & Co, because most people don't know about it and have never heard of it, it's a good sniper brand for eBay and other use sources. So a Peele & Co shoe is a good shoe. And then finally, these two Spanish brands, don't sleep on them. Carmina and Meerman, both great, a little less Englishy. So they're a little more on that Italian end where they're gonna be a little sleeker, a little sort of more cool looking because the Spanish are a little less uptight than the English. But they're just fantastic. And actually, Meerman, if you go to their site, their standard shoe, which is probably the single best secret and single best bargain in the world is $195. And Meerman has a lot of traditional styles. If you depends on where you live, but if you're in the US, they shipped to you without VAT. So we don't pay VAT in the US. And yeah, it's gonna cost you something like 30 bucks to get those shoes from Spain to the US. But at 195, I can't recommend them highly enough. So shoes, shoes, shoes, shoes. Suits, just like with Goodyear welting, a suit has to be at least half canvassed. Now what the hell does that mean? So there's, every suit has the outside, which of course is wool. It has the inside aligning and sport coat. And in between, there's a third layer, okay? That third layer in a good suit or in a serviceable suit is called the canvas. It's made from horsehair and other materials. So that's a piece of fabric that runs throughout the suit. It's in between the lining on the inside and the actual fabric of the suit, the wool on the outside. So that interlining in a decent suit is canvas, which means that that material is in there. This is half canvas when it's just the upper part of the suit. This is a full canvas where it's the whole suit. That material in between that third layer is stitched inside, but it's free-floating, okay? And it moves around inside. And what that does is over time, it conforms to your body shape and it fits you better. And it's gonna look better and it's gonna feel better. It's going to sweat less. It's just gonna be an overall better feel. So most suits today below about $500 are not canvas, I'm afraid. You got to do what's called a pinch test. You can never trust a salesman. Nobody knows, I mean, you know, today. You have to do some research. The higher end lines of Brooks Brothers, for example, are fully canvas. The medium Brooks Brothers lines are half canvas. And then the cheap Brooks Brothers stuff is not canvas at all. So if a suit isn't canvas, it's called fused. So what that means is that that interlining is not made of horsehair. It's just felt or something inside and it's glued. So the three pieces, the three portions are glued together rather than having a stitched outline where the canvas can float freely. So if a suit is fused together, it's just gonna be hot. There's glue, you know, I don't know what chemical that is, but there's gonna be glue that's over time is gonna start to become unglued. You get these weird bubbling effects and it's just not gonna conform to your body very well. So you have to get a canvas suit, just like you have to get well-toed shoes. You wanna get a two-button suit in front. If you're taller, if you're over six foot, you can get away with a three-button. Sometimes you'll see NBA players on TV and because they're so tall, their tailor thinks they have to make them like five or six buttons and it just doesn't work. The suit just needs to be bigger with the buttons farther apart to suit the seven-foot NBA guy. So two buttons are three buttons. I don't think one buttons are appropriate. You're not Frank Sinatra. And so remember, it's always button to top button only. You never button the middle button or the bottom button on a three-button. Always just the top button only. Don't get an unvented suit. You're not Bill Clinton. It's not the 90s. You need a vent in your suit. You either get a single vent or a double vent. Single vent's right in the middle and the back. Double vent comes from an English horse riding tradition where when you got on a horse and you had to put your leg over it, you needed that flap in the back so that your back end would fit over that horse okay. So that's a sort of a martial or riding tradition from English tailoring. So one or two vets, but definitely not no vets. And please don't get a black suit. Don't get a super skinny suit that's gonna look weird just like that 70s lime green thing. I mean, I know super skinny is the trend now. You can get skinny or to sort of be in vogue today but don't get the super skinny one and not black. You're not going to a funeral. You're not a Japanese salaryman. Black suits are a little, they're worn heavily throughout Japan and Korea but in the West they really are just, most people look terrible in them so please, please avoid that. Shirts, these are some of the brands that you can certainly find at very low prices, online, eBay, et cetera. They have these new non-iron shirts that have a chemical treatment. If you're a younger person, those are fine, those are great. You can pull them right out of the dryer and wear them without ironing. I don't have any big objection to that but they have to be all cotton. Make sure that whatever shirt you buy is long enough in the sleeves. You're going to have to buy just basic sizes. You can't, again, unless you're getting custom clothes but it has to show under the cuff of the jacket. At least a half an inch, preferably more like an inch. Most people, shirts are too short here and their suit or jacket is too long and so you can't see it. Don't do that. Make sure your cuff shows at least a half an inch below the jacket. Absolutely critical. Ties, ties are difficult. They're very personal. It's one place where you can personalize a lot and the simpler your suit is, the simpler your shirt is, gray, navy, not a bunch of patterns, not a bunch of stripes. The simpler your suit and your shirt is, the more you can have a tie that's interesting and that's where you express your individuality or some splash of color or whatever it might be, some design. It's just easier to do. If you stick with blue and gray suits, at least as you're starting out, you're just going to find that that's easier. Ties keep changing in width. They were like this wide in the 70s. If you go up to the third floor library, you'll see some of Mises' ties which he was wearing in New York in the 60s. They're very skinny. They're like about like this. So, fashion's changed right now. I would recommend three and a quarter or three and a half inch at the widest, measure it at the widest. That's going to keep you in sort of the current range. Any skinnier than that, any wider than that, you might regret that purchase a few years down the road. But again, ties on like shoes and suits, they're more temporal. You're going to throw them out more. You're not going to necessarily wear them a lifetime. And then jewelry. I'm not going to comment on that. I'm against it. But again, that is my exceedingly Anglo-American huge bias. I think a wedding ring, a watch, maybe a fraternity ring or something like that. But I don't think bracelets and necklaces do men any favors. So this is, again, the opinion portion of the week here at Mises University. And we'll wrap up with some strategy and resources. And if anybody wants these slides, just ping me and I'll send them to you. You don't have to remember all this. But eBay is unbelievable. You can be very tactical with it. That you can set up certain searches. You can customize searches. You can have it, send you notifications for searches. There are particular apps that will tell you when a particular thing comes up. And there's all kinds of strategies on eBay to find stuff like if you were, I happen to be a perfect 10 medium shoe. Which, so I'm lucky in that I have a very easy to fit foot and there's a ton of them. Versus if you were a 15 or if you were a 7E or something, you're going to have a lot less to choose from on eBay. But if I search for 10 and a halfs, if I get a 10 and a half C, that's a little comparative advantage because hardly anybody's searching that. And there might be a shoe there that's a lot better quality that you can find for a lot less money because the size is just a little different. And I think that with given the photography today, some people don't want to buy used higher end shoes, just grosses them out or whatever. I think within reason, I think it's okay. I think you can look at the photos and make it an assessment for yourself. But it's a way for younger people to get that five, six, $700 quality shoe for a lot less money and it's gonna last a long time as long as you're willing to resell it. And maybe who knows? Who knows how it got on eBay? Maybe somebody died, maybe somebody didn't wear it very much. But again, if you get a quality shoe, you can literally wear that upper for 30 or 40 years if you take care of it. There's great website called Style Forum. There's a lot of really high quality classifies on there. There's a pretty vibrant community. So you can oftentimes find great deals there. Allen Edmonds used to maintain what they called a shoe bank website. They've discontinued that. But what you can do is there's, if you go to allenedmonds.com slash shoe bank, they have a couple of retail stores. And what they do there is they take what's called their factory seconds. And if you look at one of these new, it'll be like this absurdly tiny little thing, like a little scratch somewhere on the side of the heel or something that makes it so that they feel they can't sell it. But if you bought that shoe perfect, like in the first day of wear, you would put that little blemish on it or whatever. So, I mean, the Allen Edmonds shoe bank is really a great resource. If you're willing again to do the work, you gotta call them up on the phone, ask them what style is from the main Allen Edmonds website they might have in your size. And they'll ship it right to you. Surprising amount of decent clothing on Amazon basics. Amazon is really muscling into the territory that was once held more by some of the more traditional men's retailers. So don't sleep on Amazon basics. Some of their stuff is just fine. Obviously you've got local consignment and thrifting. That's a crapshoot that, you know, I don't care to spend my time doing that, but if you're young and you really want to save money, you might be shocked at what you find. Sometimes someone passes away or something and a bunch of their really high quality stuff gets ends up there. A lot of sites like Norton Rack and Saks off Fifth, Charles Tirwitt, which is a English retailer. Brooks Brothers is in big trouble since COVID. They've been bought once again by a different private equity firm, once again brought in new management. So they have a lot of old inventory. I think that you'd be surprised how cheap some of that Brooks Brothers stuff is. And then there's this whole new category of lux sites where there's a whole market. And I think women really drove this. You know, lux used lux goods like purses. Women are really into handbags and some of these handbags cost just $5,000 or something. And so from that sort of new genre of used lux websites filtered down into men. And so some of these sites like the RealReal and Poshmark have a lot of men stuff. So you can find pretty expensive stuff. There's a guy named Kirby Allison who does YouTubes. He's pretty famous in men's clothing circles. And all of his YouTubes are highly informative. He's got lessons on how to shine shoes, lessons on all kinds of things, how to typo ties. I mean, anything you might want to ask. Kirby Allison is a great resource. And then finally in the similar vein, Gentleman's Gazette, also a YouTube channel, also a website, really fantastic information and stuff. And there's a whole history to men's clothing which I think mostly escapes us, especially in the United States today. So I hope that you will take this presentation today and the spirit in which it was given. I hope you'll think about it and I hope you will all come back dressed and we'll see you next year. Thanks very much.