In the ever continuing chronicles of a young (What’s the cutoff for using young as an adjective for myself?) sartorially aspirational guy, the best part of my day isn’t racking up #ootd likes. It isn’t that sweet sensation of winning a Nike release, nor is it the extended look another dude gives you on the sidewalk when you’ve totally mastered the ankle to pant ratio. It’s not being selected for a street style shot. And it’s not the satisfaction you get when you win the gamble of “I’m not bringing a jacket today because I know my weather app is just being a narc.”
The best part of my day is furiously abandoning all of my earthly, socially constructed possessions. The literal stripping of all the clothes that Complex, Four Pins, and Hypebeast told me to wear.
On a physical level, nothing beats the act of taking your jeans off that you spent all day in. There’s a really bad country song that came out in 2008 that I shall not name, because acknowledging its existence gives it a bigger cultural footprint. However, its hook contains a key insight and notes that there is a special feeling of having a pair of denim that fits right on a very specific weekend evening.
What the-song-that-shall-not-be-named fails to mention, though, is the serenity gained from changing out of your jeans into basketball shorts, or sweatpants, or into nothing at all. The sheer joy of peeling off the bag of heavy fabric that has been insulating heat, moisture, and everything disgusting that happens between your knees and your waist is immeasurable. Immeasurable, that is, until now.
We asked renowned astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson to develop a way of quantifying the joy that comes from shedding the alphet at the end of a long day. After several grueling sessions in his lab, where he conducted countless (okay, more like four) experiments, Tyson was able to develop a complex equation that clearly illustrates the amount of joy a human being attains when switching from swaggy/stunt mode to home mode.
The equation takes into account the weight of your denim in ounces, the hours spent walking in these, humidity levels, your waist size, your actual waist size and not the one from two years ago, whether or not you're wearing A.P.C.s, and finally the presence of outside influences, which include but are not limited to baby powder, Calvin Klein boxer briefs, and crew vs. ankle socks.
So, as an example, today, I wore Nudies that weigh 12.5 ozs for 12 hours. It averaged 88% humidity today in NYC. My waist size is 29, but my actual waist size is a 30.5 They were not A.P.C. No baby powder. I wore Uniqlo boxer briefs and Uniqlo no show socks.
Taking all this into account, the Hayden Planetarium formula says the transition from my jeans into my Nike dri fit shorts this evening was somewhere near the 84% stokage level, but this result came with a +/- 7% because I was in an air conditioned setting for most of the day.
To be somewhat serious for a minute, the expectations of being comfortable at home are completely detached, not only from your ever-judging peers, but from your own mirror. I am my harshest critic, and like many before me have pointed out, no one really cares what I wear. A bad outfit worn to the grocery store can put me on edge and as I walk down the frozen food aisles and catch a glimpse of my failed attempt at a “Whole Foods casual” look. This can cause really poor decisions at a venue that requires peak awareness, lest you walk out of the place down $100 and with no real food to show for it except a handful of seaweed snacks and a few cartons of almond milk.
Being at home means no is evaluating you. Not even yourself. No one ever looks into their closet and laments that they only wear the same home alphet. No one looks into their drawers with resentment because all they see are last season’s cozy-ass sweatpants. Ultimately, the best look I have is when my #rarehemlines are literal rare hemlines—as in 248 washes later, the stitching on my old college sweatshirt is falling apart in an extraordinarily unique way.
Nickolaus Sugai wrote this in basketball shorts.
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