The Melt is a newsletter by, about and largely to entertain Jason Diamond. Hopefully you also like it and will consider subscribing and sharing this post.
I knew this guy that worked at a bait shop when I was younger. His look is burned into my memory as this sort of figure of a certain type of casual that I think I’ve been enamored with my entire life. His name was Mark, and he was basically the Great Lakes version of a Jimmy Buffett song. If I recall, the bait shop was second or third generation, and it was a very locals only type thing because it was on a tributary, not the Lake I grew up by. Very IYKYK thing, but I remember very clearly you could buy lures, Winston and Camel cigarettes, maps, RC Cola, various generic brand chips that I’m sure Mark just went and bought from the local grocery store and marked them up fifty cents, and, of course, bait. I was also told he sold under-the-counter hooch, but never confirmed that.
Mark had a very good look. He had a rotation of weather-beaten Cubs, Packers and other dad hats before that was even a term, one of which, I very specifically recall, was a Chicago Yacht Club hat. I later found out Mark’s family was loaded, Midwestern old-money who just owned a lot of property, and he was basically just a bait bum. He liked being around the water all the time. The shop was something his grandfather had bought decades earlier, and when Mark finished somewhere out east, I guess being by the water was the only career path Mark wanted to take. Mark’s son, I found out, went to a prep school near where I lived, and he eventually went on to become a lawyer. I think about that sometimes because I like that Mark decided he wanted to go down a path of leisure, but he didn’t want his son to. I remember one of the old fishermen I used to get beers from once told me that Mark was “a genius” and could have gone to MIT but didn’t want to.
There’s a point to all of this, I swear. I promise I didn’t just ramble on about this bait shop guy from 1994 for no reason. I did it so I could get all the way to Mark’s big Oxford shirts. He wore the hell out of some blue Oxfords. It was a really cool look that I didn’t appreciate back then, all done with zero perfect pretense. There were the hats, of course. He also wore a handkerchief around his neck like a dirtbag Peter Bogdanovich, beat to ever-loving hell boat shoes, shorts and he almost always had one of those Oxfords on, either around his waist or he was wearing it with the sleeves rolled up so it looked like he had two half-rolls of toilet paper on his arms. None of this was about style for Mark. I know that now. It was 100 percent comfort, and I can’t help thinking the guy was way ahead of his time and if I found a photo of him now it would likely go viral on Instagram. He was living in the era of the Big Oxford, but I don’t really think he knew it. If he did he probably didn’t care.
I’ve been pretty obsessed with the bigger Oxfords for a long time, but a lot of people and places that sell shirts are still into doing that off-the-rack “tailored” thing which I’m sure is fine if you aren’t built to push a cart up a frozen hill in Minsk, but for many of us, “tailored” means you actually get a shirt tailored so the thing doesn’t feel like it’s grafting into your skin even though it’s “true to size.” I want an Oxford I can knock around in. I want a weekend Oxford, basically. The ones I hope to eventually wear to bars and meetings and whatever else we used to do fit me fine, but I had to pay a little extra for that. In the meantime, as somebody who honestly loves wearing shirts with collars whenever he can for whatever weird reason, I have been sort of adrift for a long time trying to find a good weekend fit, something that I feel like Mark would appreciate. That’s why I wanted to take a second to write this post and say how much I appreciate the Brooks Brothers Oxford, the “new old” OCBD (oxford-cloth button-down). I say “new old” in quotations because the originals were made in the U.S. by union workers and have this mythical standing in the minds of some people like myself, I suppose.
To be honest, I wasn’t as hyped about Brooks Brothers bringing back the OCBD as some people were. I was just excited to see what Michael Bastian was going to do at the helm of the iconic company. What I do get excited about, however, is a good sale. And when Brooks Brothers had one, I figured I’d give it a spin and got one of the Oxfords in my regular size. When it arrived and I put it on, I was surprised to find that not only could I fit my entire torso in there, but if I had a Siamese twin, we’d both feel snug inside the XL shirt. So I exchanged it for a large, and when it came, let me tell you, my friends, I felt a sort of joy I hadn’t felt in, well, I don’t know how long. Because the Brooks Brothers Oxford has the perfect just oversized enough look that I’ve been looking for in my search for a weekend Oxford. Room in the arms, room to layer and it looks great tucked in or untucked depending on how I’m feeling.
The roomy Brooks Brothers Oxford makes me think of Mark from the bait shop, I feel like it’s something he’d get as a Christmas gift and immediately put it on and just start wearing it day after day, beating the hell out of it, but looking like some hybrid prep school reject and river mystic. I was thinking about this certain sort of anti-style that always looked so great to me even when I was a kid. I think it could be summed up as the Weekend Dad look, something that speaks to a time before athleisure, before style blogs and Instagram, before we all knew what everybody else looked like. It wasn’t just dads, of course, but I think there was even less for guys to work with in terms of understanding style besides maybe the monthly copies of GQ and Esquire, so I’m fascinated by how older guys just put on whatever and they could make it look cool without being at all cool at the same time.
Why did a shirt set all this over-thinking off? Well, I was thinking about Mark and his supreme casual cool and the fact that he always had an Oxford around. Mark was probably 25 years or so older than me, and I think a lot about how my parents generation was the last one to grow up in a time when the majority of people wore button up shirts on a regular basis. It was more normal to wear one than it wasn’t.
That’s sort of how I’ve been dressing at home since it started getting cold. I’ve been really into chinos and baggy sweaters or 501s with some old t-shirt underneath an old L.L. Bean flannel shirt I have. And now I’ve added the Brooks Brothers Oxford, always with something under it. It’s nothing that wild or crazy or out there, but it is me dressing with intention, but I’m imitating people I saw in 1991 who I don’t think dressed with intention. They just put on something and to go to the grocery store or to take a walk or some other little thing.
I think one person that pulls off the weekend dad look quite well is Maxwell Q. Wolkin. I’m always interested in the fits he pulls off on Instagram, which blends a lot of stuff like favorite college professor circa 1978 or Midwestern liberal arts college prankster circa 1983, a more playful and more Jewish take on Ivy Style that I love, basically. I was thinking of him because Maxwell posted a review of the new Brooks Brothers Oxfords, and he and I started talking after he posted it. I was looking at Maxwell’s photos on IG and started thinking that he’s a guy that dresses with intention, but also gets that the influences he’s picking and choosing from maybe didn’t as much. They were just dressing…how they dressed.
Another example is this photo my friend found when he typed “New York Dad” into a search engine. It’s literally a New York Dad in 1987, reading the Times Book Review. This man is the Patron Saint of the Weekend Dad idea. He’s not wearing a button up shirt, or any shirt at all—but I have to imagine he’s got one in his bag.
Other points of reference include this essay Tony Sylvester wrote a few months back on artists style. When I first moved to NYC, I worked in the West Village, and there was this one guy who would come in some mornings for a cup of coffee. He always wore coveralls splattered in paint and canvas tennis shoes that, besides the scuffs and gunk you can’t avoid in the city, they were pretty clean. I once asked if he worked in those sneakers and he told me, “No, never. I only put these on to leave the house.” That conversation rings around in my head a lot, and it made me think about how there is actually some overlap between some of the artists Sylvester mentioned in his article and my idea of a Weekend Dad look. For instance, Picasso’s Breton Stripe shirt works well with just about anything. Chore coats can be weekend dad, old denim shirts that have seen better days are definitely weekend dad, baggy denim jackets work and old North Face or Patagonia can be Weekend Dad. Basically, Weekend Dad isn’t a look, but a state of mind. It’s Maxwell with a fit like this or the artist looking cool as shit in his paint-splatter clothes with a pair of canvas Vans or whatever they were. It’s the idea of looking like you just threw something on, but there is actually some intention behind it.