Hope everyone had a relaxing holiday weekend!

I am back in NYC after a busy, travel-filled week last week and am excited to tackle some big things over the next few days (more on those soon).

But first, I thought I’d let you take a peek at a few reader questions recently cleaned out of my inbox, along with some thoughts on my original advice.

Got a question of your own? You can always email me at megan@stylegirlfriend.com to get a female’s take on your style conundrum.

Bailey says:

Firstly, love the website.  Been following you for about a year now and find almost everything on here helpful.

I am currently transitioning out the Army and moving to the Austin area.  My fiancee and I are getting married in November, and I am having a tough time deciding on what my groomsmen and I should wear.

What are your thoughts in weddings about grooms parties for suits vs. tuxedos?  I was thinking charcoal suits with bow ties and pocket squares in the wedding colors.  Additionally, how important is it for all the groomsmen’s suits to match?  The bridal party will be wearing black dresses, but they may or may not be the exact same dresses for a frame of reference.

{J.Crew weddings}

(Ed. note: This response marked an evolution in my stance on wedding-wear. Read this post and see what a softie I’ve become in my old age. I still think it’s a valid point to call out that bridesmaids almost never get the choice to wear what they want, which is why I’ve always been anti-guys getting to wear a suit already hanging in their closets. My opinion on rented tuxes, however, will never change: they’re ALWAYS a Don’t.)

Thanks for writing, and congrats on your impending move/wedding!

I think what you have planned for your groomsmen sounds great. You’ll be complementing the bridal party’s colors without being too matchy-matchy (which, in my opinion, can get tacky fast).

Since your fiancee isn’t being a stickler about all her friends’ dresses being the same, I’d say follow her lead and let your guys use the gray suit of their choosing. And if one of them doesn’t have a suit, you can kindly guide him to a nice suit in their price range.

Want even more wedding style? Read all the SG posts on the topic here.

Good luck! Send me a pic from the wedding!

Terrence (very politely) asks:

Hello, Ms. Collins:

I’ve been following SG for a while, and your site is awesome. Tell me, what is the Style Girlfriend position on fragrances, colognes, shower gels and the like? What should I look for when choosing a scent? Do’s and Dont’s?  Any advice would be most appreciated.

{image, safecosmetics.org}

(Ed. note: See, here’s where the resource pages I’m working to create will come in handy. I hope to make it easier for guys to find answers to the most commonly asked questions, and general “good to know” advice on what us ladies want to see guys wearing. Which is why I directed Terrence to the following…)

I’ve written a few things on cologne and scent; you can read them here:

• Year-Round Colognes for Guys
• What’s Your Signature Scent?

Beyond that, I’d just say – keep it light! You don’t want to overpower every woman in the room with your body wash/cologne/hair gel/etc scents. It’s better to smell clean than perfume-y, and that’s especially true for guys.

So when in doubt, go for one spritz of cologne versus two

Jarrod questions:

What are the best ways to preserve that great, fresh, dark, crisp (can you tell how much I love these pants?) selvedge jeans? I want them looking as awesome next winter as they do today? How can I keep them fresh, in every sense of the word, with minimal washing?

{Naked & Famous Selvedge Denim – “Weird Guy” in Indigo, $135}

I love your devotion to denim, and I do have an answer for you, though you may not want to hear it. Ready? Throw your jeans in the freezer. Yes, the freezer. Put them in a ziploc bag and leave them overnight. It’ll kill the germs without doing anything crazy to the rinse in the washing machine. In the morning, they’ll be good as new.

Fellas tell me: got anything to add to the answers above? Leave your two cents in the comments section!

The post Reader Mailbag: Outfitting Groomsmen, Selecting a Scent, and De-Funking Denim appeared first on Style Girlfriend.

{maybe I just need more mailboxes?}

While I’d probably do well to unsubscribe from a few newsletters, the source of my email overload is actually…you guys. Which is why, instead of digging into a reader question this week, I want to quickly address the status of any of your unanswered questions.

I try as hard as I can to respond to you guys’ emails, which – by the way – I LOVE getting. I feel so honored that

1. You value my opinion, and
2. You’re looking to better yourself by asking for help at all. It can be hard to say, “I don’t know the best way to do ____” or “How do I ___?” Especially for guys, I think – so I really admire every single one of you who emails me for advice.

Which is why I try my hardest to get back to each of you – but my inbox is horribly, grossly, embarrassingly overstuffed with questions going back months now that I have not been able to get to.

I tend to work from the most recent down because some questions are time-sensitive (ie, “I have a date this weekend with a new girl i really like! what do I wear?”) and I want to be able to help out while those queries are still relevant. But that means that some reader questions that are evergreen – “I want to overhaul my whole wardrobe – where do I start?” – sit in email purgatory, and unless I take a solid week out of my life just to un-bury myself from my inbox, I’m not ever going to reach them. Like I said, I love getting your questions, but lately, I’ve just felt this huge sense of burden and guilt knowing how many were sitting in my backlog. I want to tackle your questions with excitement and enthusiasm, not dread opening my email each day because of the huge number of unopened emails I know I’ll see.

So I’ve made a big decision. I’m declaring email bankruptcy. If you sent me an email before March 1, I very regretfully inform you that I am simply not going to get to it.

If it was time-sensitive, I apologize for not helping out when you needed it. And if it was a broader question – about the best wingtips at a certain price point, what to wear on a first date, etc etc – please know that in the next month, I plan to build a few resource pages on the site for some of my more commonly asked questions, which should alleviate both your need to ask the question, and my inability to answer it in a timely manner. Some questions I know are just going to take so much time to answer that I put them off. With these new resource pages, I’ll be able to say, “Glad you asked! Check out this page on …whatever.” Problem solved.

Also, excitingly, I’m about to have far more time to devote to Style Girlfriend, so I will set aside a portion of each day to answer reader questions, rather than the hour or two here and there that I tunnel through a hundred at a stretch. While I hesitate to set an expectation right now of responses within 24 hours, I think saying you should receive an answer within a week is reasonable. And because my “ask” box has recently gotten hit by some crazy spam monster (I don’t think “Play Online Poker” is the name of any of my readers), I’m removing it. If you have a question, go ahead and email me at megan (at) style girlfriend (dot) com. I’ll put that where the submission form is now, so you won’t forget it.

I’m sure I don’t say it enough, but THANK YOU GUYS for everything you contribute to Style Girlfriend. You help make the site what it is, and I couldn’t do what I do without you. The brands I work with, and the friends and family who pop by SG from time to time to see what I’ve been up to always say the same thing – “Your readers are amazing! They’re so engaged! They’re so positive! They help each other out in the comments section! They sound like they know you!” Please don’t think any of this is lost on me. The internet is not known for being a warm, loving, inclusive place (just take a look at any YouTube post for proof of that), which is why I feel so SO lucky that you guys are so great. I feel really blessed to have such a great group of readers on Style Girlfriend. 2013 is already awesome, and it can only get better from here.

Tell me: Have you ever had to declare email bankruptcy?

(image: Grumbler/Flickr)

The post Too Big to Mail: Style Girlfriend’s Over-Stuffed Inbox appeared first on Style Girlfriend.

You may have already guessed my answer already, but go on indulge me, and read on anyways…

The post From the Archives: Double-Time on a New Blazer appeared first on Style Girlfriend.

Is it possible to have jeans shortened, like chinos or dress pants? Is this necessary? I have a shorter inseam (29) than is often available, and can never remember to roll up the cuff; my jeans always get really frayed and worn on the hem.

Yes, it’s totally possible! And more than that, highly recommended. Your pants should be falling above the back of the shoe, not dragging on the ground behind you. If your pants go longer than that, then yes. To the tailor you go.

{Remember that Friends episode where Ross had to tell Joey his tailor was “a bad man?” I miss that show..}

Get recommendations on tailors from guys whose style you admire. Co-workers, friends…even sharply-dressed strangers. They’ll appreciate that you notice that their sense of style, and you’ll get the benefit of not having to pick a tailor’s name out of the phone book (or probably more accurately, off Yelp) and hope for the best.

Pants should never be pooling around your ankles, and you certainly shouldn’t need to cuff your pants to have them fit right. That sounds like a Band-Aid solution to use on a problem that really requires surgery.

Honestly, most off the rack items in a guy’s closet could probably use a little tweak here and there. There are things that can’t be fixed (the shoulders in a suit jacket being too wide, for instance, kind of puts you SOL), but for the most part a good tailor will be able to fix at least some of the issues you have with your clothing – and definitely the ones that deal with your pants.

Maybe most importantly: understand that it’s not your body, it’s the clothes. Those chinos you bought were fitted on either a form mannequin at worst, or at best a fit model who the brand hopes has the same body type, is the same height, and weighs the same as the largest number of guys out there who identify themselves as the specific size you’ve picked up in your hands at the store. It would be great to think that everyone who classifies himself as a “__ / __” needs the exact same fit, but that’s not reality.

Ultimately, any clothes that sit in your closet because you don’t like quite how they fit is not doing you any good. And any clothes you wear anyway but feel terrible in, likewise, are not doing you any good.  Find the tailor, fix the fit.

The post Reader Question: Can I Tailor My Jeans? appeared first on Style Girlfriend.

“I only recently discovered your blog but it had such good advice I read through all 38 pages in one night! There was one question I have been wondering for a while: If you have a few staple clothes/shoes, they look amazing and are versatile, but how do you avoid saturating the occasions to which you wear them without totally voiding your wallet?  What are your thoughts?”

First of all, thank you! I’m impressed you made it all the way back to the beginning; I think I would be sick of me by then.

Secondly, that’s a great question, and one I’ve thought about a lot before too.

I’m a big proponent of a ‘have fewer, but nicer things’ philosophy. It’s a simple concept, but one that I don’t think gets put into play by either men or women nearly enough. Because look, I get it. You walk into Forever 21 and can buy five shirts. You walk into Brooks Brothers and can buy one. It feels like a better value to go for more stuff, but when that stuff starts falling apart after a couple spins in the wash, it doesn’t seem like such a great deal anymore.

I don’t have any delusions that a guy is going to scrap all h&m or Target from his wardrobe, and hey, there’s a place for cheap-o basics. But when it comes to signature pieces – a solid pair of dress shoes, a great suit – it’s worth it to pay a little more.

And if you’re paying more for certain pieces, you might as well wear them more often. I mean, sure, you probably shouldn’t break out that tuxedo hanging in the back of your closet for brunch, but most other stuff can make appearances more often without fear of “saturation” as you put it. It won’t be like that Seinfeld episode where Jerry thinks the woman he’s dating only owns one dress, I promise.

The key is to mix those pieces with what’s already in your closet so, like you said, you’re not breaking the bank trying to elevate the entire outfit to the same level. A really great navy sportcoat for instance, could be worn with jeans and a dress shirt one day, and again a few days later with trousers.

Ladies won’t be wondering, “Didn’t he wear that jacket on Tuesday?” They’ll be saying, “He always looks so put together, I wish more guys dressed like him.”

(image)

The post Reader Question: Wardrobe on Repeat? appeared first on Style Girlfriend.

American Eagle and Old Navy were fine through high school, I tried to “dress up” a bit with polos, but most people still wear tees with big huge brand names across them. Ick. How do people feel good in that? I’m all for being comfortable, but there’s gotta be better options, even at a young age.

What should I be wearing in college? I don’t want to look like the kid who shops like he’s in junior high, especially when I’m going to be around people in their 20s, 30s, and 40s. I’d like to garner a little respect if I’m going to practically be living with these guys.

Any advice? Does it even matter until I get into the professional world?

Thanks! Caleb

Hi Caleb, congrats on the early graduation! If I could have gotten through high school a bit faster, I probably would have done it too.

my senior year bar tour – I’m the slob on the right. This is what college looks like.

The thing is, a college guy’s wardrobe isn’t reeeaaally all that different from a high school kid’s wardrobe. I know, bummer. Come August, no fresh-faced 18 year old is taking his t-shirts with “AEROPOSTALE” and “HOLLISTER” splashed across the front and packing them away in the attic, telling his mom, “It’s repp ties and wool trousers for me from here on out. I’m a man now.”

Here’s what to expect about dressing for college:

Weekday Sweats
Weirdly enough, this sorta-sloppy move actually makes you look more like you’re in college. I’m sure you’d never dream of wearing sweats to school in high school  – or at least, I hope kids these days aren’t doing that — no, actually, I hope no parent would let their kid out of the house dressed like that.

But in college? Sporting sweats on campus is totally acceptable, and even a signifier of “Oh man, I had a late night out at the bars last night,” which indicates you’re either an upperclassman (yeah!), or a lower clansman with a convincing fake ID (yeah!). Take advantage of this collegiate wardrobe loophole because, unless you become a doctor or professional athlete, this sartorial backslide will not last. Embrace it while you can.

A plea: don’t put this poster up in your dorm room unless you’ve actually SEEN “Animal House”

State U Everything
Another no brainer? Your university’s official gear. I’m with you on saying “no” to brand names stamped all over your clothes, but sporting your school’s name all over is a whole different story. Here’s what you do: when your parents drop you off at school, prey on their impending Empty Nest Syndrome by convincing them to buy you everything in the university book store to help you fit in at school. An added bonus? Matching your clothes is that much easier when incorporating your school colors into every outfit.

A Slow Build
But back to that whole “dressing up” part of your question – this is a great time to start building a basic grown man wardrobe. Just start small. Think straight-leg pants in dark rinse denim, khaki and corduroy. Un-branded pocket tees in neutral colors (gray, white, black, tan). Crew-neck or v-neck sweaters in something other than cotton. These items will take you through college and beyond.

If you have internships – and you should – spring for one good suit. Buy off the rack then get it tailored..immediately. You won’t need to wear it too often, but when you do, you’ll be the one guy in college who doesn’t look like a high schooler headed to homecoming.

…And for anyone not already reading Art of Manliness or Effortless Gent, get on it! Great info presented in an engaging way. I highly recommend both.

(image, image)

The post Reader Question: How to Build a College Guy Wardrobe appeared first on Style Girlfriend.

First of all, I appreciate a good neg when I see one. Well played sir.

As for where to find a steal? How about the clothes I recommend…about two weeks after I recommend them?

I’m always on the lookout for a good price too, so trust me, I get it. But what’s the point in me suggesting a discounted dress shirt you love, only to find out when you click the link to go buy it, that the only size left is an 18/38? That doesn’t do you much good (unless you have an 18″ neck, in which case..you seem like a strapping young man, could you come over and help put in my air conditioner unit this summer?). You get annoyed with me for getting your hopes up about finding a great deal, and I don’t do anyone much good.

Most of the time, the clothes you want are clothes you don’t absolutely need, at least not yet. I get excited when a clothing catalog arrives in the mail touting the next season’s all-new offerings, but I don’t usually buy anything right away. Just like when stores start putting shorts in their windows…in March.

Another way to look at it of course, is to say that your time is valuable and by being pointed in the right direction with a certain article of clothing – even a full-priced one – you’ve saved money by not having to go out and shop for it yourself. When I’ve worked with personal shoppers, that’s the approach I took, and the notion gave me comfort when I would otherwise have felt sick paying retail.

The post Reader Question: Where’s the Sale? appeared first on Style Girlfriend.

Dear Stylegirlfriend (is that your official title or do you prefer Megan?!?)
I’m a reasonably young guy (halfway to eighteen) and I was wondering: I want to dress nice but not look like I’m trying too hard. I don’t want to look like I’m going to a fashion show, but I’d like to slowly get away from the “worn hoodie and beat up running shoes” look. For example, would suede boots or a cotton military jacket work? Thanks for your time and I hope you have a good one! PS. You are totally hilarious!

- Cody (Sent from my iPod)

Oh dear.

Reasonably young? Reasonably young at seventeen years old? Cody! Do you know how old I am? No sorry, I meant: do you know how old I felt until you called yourself “reasonably young” at 17? Not very Cody. Not very. But now? More so.

That said, I will answer your question through my resigned laughter and bitter tears. But only because you think I am funny, and I am nothing if not a total glutton for compliments about my wit.

I don’t want you to look like you’re going to a fashion show either, so we’re on the same page there. Beyond that, it sounds like you’re on the right sartorial track. You clearly know a thing or two about style already, with your suede boots and military-style jacket scenario (yes to both, by the way). That’s a huge advantage in terms of upping your wardrobe game. Some guys realize they could dress better but don’t even know where to start.

I would suggest phasing in clothes made in higher-end materials and a slim cut. You’ve got to give up the hoodies eventually (there’s not many jobs where they’re encouraged in the dress code), so start experimenting with more interesting textures and clothes that fit closer to the body now.

Make these wardrobe updates in a way that feels gradual, rather than abrupt (which will be easier on your bank account anyway). You don’t want to all of a sudden go from faded bootcut jeans to a three-piece suit. You can, however, go from faded bootcut jeans to a dark, straight-leg jean without causing too much whiplash for the friends who see you every day. From there, the jump from jeans to cords or khakis doesn’t feel so scary. Later, graduating from the khakis to a pair of wool trousers (or that suit) will be even easier.

This move works across your whole wardrobe – maybe next you’ll swap out your dirty old sneakers for a pair that’s fresh and clean (and clearly not meant for the gym, track, or court). The hoodie for a v-neck sweater. Do this with all your clothes, and you’ll slowly amass a closet full of great-looking, quality clothes, without anyone accusing you of going all Zoolander on them.

And for the record: my official title is actually “Your Highness Style Girlfriend Emeritus,” but you can call me Megan ‘cuz we’re cool like that.

(image)

The post Reader Question: Too Young to Dress Up? appeared first on Style Girlfriend.