Dress the Part

It’s true that people always dress the part. Sometimes, unfortunately, they don’t know which part it is.

I was meeting some animators at a crowded restaurant.  We were doing a funny, off-beat animated television project together, but we had never met in person.  It was lunchtime, and people kept streaming into the place and I kept scanning the crowd for the animator guys but of course I had no idea how I’d recognize them.

Until they walked in.  

One of them was a huge guy, tall and round and completely dishelveled, in a t-shirt that ended about four inches before his pants began, exposing an ivory-white belly.  His hair was curly and sticking out, making him look like the world’s fattest hydrangea.  

The other was a tiny little guy in green felt pants with a cowboy shirt on and a funny pointed hat, brightly-polished tiny shoes, and carrying a little leather satchel with four brass buckles.

Ah yes, I said to myself.  Those guys are the animators.

People, in other words, tend to dress the part.

Some fashion industry gossips like to tell the story about Anna Wintour, the editor and President-for-Life of Vogue magazine, who once showed up to a function in a dress that still had one or two little pieces of foil covering some of the buttons, which is what they do at the dry cleaners before they put your clothes in the chemical drum.  

She had forgotten to remove them and, somehow, no one else noticed. Or maybe they did and were too terrified of her to say anything. Or maybe they did and hate her so much they wanted to embarrass her.  

I’m not sure I know why that would be embarrassing, though. Normal people go to the dry cleaner, and it follows that someone as clothing-obsessed as Anna Wintour would have a non-stop parade of deliveries and pick-ups from her (probably really expensive) cleaners, and would require a couple of wardrobe changes a day. A little foil wrapping here and there just sends the message that Anna Wintour does not use Shout Wipes and a little spritz of Febreeze to keep her clothes fresh, like some I might mention.

Dressing the part doesn’t always mean looking perfect.

For instance, early in my career, I went to the first reading of my first television series in a new jacket.

I bought the jacket the way you sometimes buy things for a special occasion. I need a jacket for this big reading, I thought, because I imagined the scene as being sort of fraught with complicated signals and important flags to plant in the ground. Which it is: the first reading of a television series represents several million dollars of studio and network money. Gathered around the table and lining the walls are executives and agents and managers and an entire constellation of people whose job it is, essentially, to watch me do my job and tell me later that I’m doing it wrong.

So it’s a good idea to signal to those folks that you’ve got this thing handled.

The jacket, I thought, would make me look and feel powerful and in charge. The jacket and a coffee mug and a pencil behind the ear would paint the exact right picture: a casual guy on the go.  A young writer who’s relaxed and in command.

Except I forgot to remove the tag.  

Well, not the tag, but that thing that they put on the sleeve, by the cuff, the playing-card sized thing that says the size and the fabric and some meaningless other numbers.  Somehow, in my excitement about the day I forgot to remove that, so instead of looking like a sleek and dapper young show business powerhouse, I looked like a guy who just stole a jacket.

“You’ve got the thing still on,” an older writer said to me quietly, as I took my seat at the table.  He pointed to the tag, which I immediately started to pull at.

“I was trying to look cool,” I muttered.

“You don’t,” he said. “You look like a writer. And you can always tell who the writer is,” he said, as I yanked the tag off, taking with it a large patch of fabric, “in any room, in any outfit.”

It’s true that people always dress the part. Sometimes, unfortunately, they don’t know which part it is.