Some people’s clothes have a way of riding up in unfortunate places, in a way that seems almost willful. It’s as if the clothes are sentient, and cloth and wearer are locked in a lifelong battle for supremacy. I know people who can look out-of-place in a tailored jacket. In fact, I am one of them.

I know other people who are the opposite: they can get away with anything. Cloth, no matter how cheap or poorly cut, drapes over their muscles. If I am exhibit A, Immanuel is exhibit B. He can look stylish wearing things that I’d be ashamed to even be seen in public wearing. He had a pair of boots that he’d repaired with bicycle inner tubes and brass rivets. The repaired section immediately blew out, but he wore them all over town, to special events, as if they were the latest hip thing, and because he pretended, and maybe even believed, that they were the latest hip thing, they were, and everybody commented approvingly.

This is, of course, totally unfair. And, since, in this case, I am on the wrong end of the bargain, I want to know how it works.

Hypothesis time:

One: some people are just the wrong shape.

In so far as clothes are made for an average-size average-shape person, some of us are just plain unlucky, by being non-standard. We rattle around in our clothing like a metric allen key in the head of an imperial allen screw.

I have long arms, and large man-boobs pecs, and wide shoulders, and a super huge neck. There is not a single off-the-rack dress shirt that fits me, and I’ve looked.

This is a nice theory, but I think it’s at best partly true.

Two: suave people are always adjusting their clothes without us noticing.

Maybe everyone’s clothes, without maintenance, look equally ridiculous, but, somehow, suave people are more aware of how ridiculous they look, without seeming to be preoccupied with their clothes, or having it take them out of the moment, and are thus able to be constantly making image-maintaining micro-corrections to their outfit.

The difference between the person with the wedgie and the person without is that the person without pulled their clothes out of the wedgie before anyone noticed.

I think this is probably partly true. I’ve noticed that glamorous people are often continuously touching their hair, in a way that is totally pointless, other than as a way of attracting attention to their hair, and as a result, attracting a mate. So, if your clothes are nice, and you look nice, constantly adjusting them could have a double benefit.

Three: goofballs aren’t embodied

The people with clothes that never seem right are often the people who are clumsy, or absent-minded.

The people who always have the just right outfit are often more embodied in other ways (like, actually going to the gym).

Is this a coincidence?

Maybe it’s simply that some of our minds don’t tend to notice the sensations from our bodies, because we are (obviously) super busy thinking about important things (like why other people look better in their clothes than we do), so we don’t notice the tactile sensation of fabric bunching up and stretching, or don’t connect those sensations to a need to do something about them.

Four: it’s a psyop

Maybe there is absolutely nothing physically different about the appearance of the suaves and the suave-nots. It’s all in how we perceive people (and likely, how confident they are, which affects how we perceive them, which affects how confident they feel… unfortunately).

In this case, Immanuel can get away with his hideous boots, because everybody is lost in his eyes and full of warm fuzzies and social bonding neurotransmitters. But when they’re talking to me, they’re bored and uncomfortable, so they look at my feet, and think, dang! that guy needs a new pair of boots!

I think it’s definitely partly a psyop, and we shouldn’t let them get away with it.