I am always going on about living naturally. I don't mean eating organic food or not washing your hair. I am referring to living naturally in our clothes. I think, and this is not the first time I have written about it, one of the great challenges for any guy dressing with a sense of dignity in 22, is living naturally in his clothes. It is so easy to live a bit stilted, be a bit too careful. It is so easy to be "too worried" about one's clothes. When you care about how you present yourself, it is so easy to get too outside yourself and be constantly thinking about how you appear, rather than simply being in the clothes.
This is a tough thing to overcome, it makes the most sense in the world though. You care about how you present yourself, so of course you think about it more and thusly it leads to a preoccupation. This impacts how you carry yourself, how you stand, how you sit etc... It is so easy to end up being just a bit mannequin-like. Nobody wants this of course, but it is so easy to slip into it, it is so natural to do so. It makes sense. Those who care more, care more. Simple. If you watch old interviews (50s, 60s, 70s), you will see how natural everyone carries themselves. Many, most, or all (depending on the decade) of the men will be wearing suits or sport coats. Notice how they sit on their chairs, the couch etc... Notice how they are not constantly adjusting their jacket, their pants, their shirt. Notice how they don't appear preoccupied with their clothing. They are just there, just being. Sometimes their collar will hike up in the back, their sleeves come up too much, their shirt billows a bit. It all happens because they are just being, living. They don't look like models or mannequins, they look like men, living.
This is the goal, this is natural life in your clothes. This is your clothing being on you, not you being in your clothing. This is true comfortability in self and style. It was easy for men to be in this place before because most didn't "care" so much about their clothing, not like we do at least. It was normal to wear sport coats, so they wore sport coats. They were just living like most do today. The difference is most live naturally in a tee-shirt while they lived naturally in a blazer. We find ourselves situationally different. This is where the difficulty comes, this is why it is hard to get to this place. It shouldn't be hard, but it is.
While it may be hard to get to a place of natural living while dressed with a sense of modern male dignity, it isn't impossible. I think it takes time, I think it takes time dressing in this way and becoming more and more relaxed and comfortable in the style. Letting any element of costume that may have been there at the beginning, fall away. I think there is a sort of active letting go that needs to happen, a sort of forgetting the "camera" of the outside world. Acting like you are totally alone, in at least this one way. I think part of this key to natural living is dressing because you care but temporarily continually intentionally forgetting to care because you forget the camera of the observer and you simply live. There is more to this.
This topic possesses me, natural living and being, yet with dignity in dress. This is the place we are trying to find, to reach. It is beyond makers and companies, it is beyond measurements, it is beyond even color, it is about natural being. With natural being exists confidence, sureness, steadiness and acceptance like an acceptance of gravity, it simply is. This is the place of sustainable natural living, when our style and dress, way of presenting ourselves, feels as natural as waking up in the morning.