It is February and it feels like winter will never end. The pandemic hasn't helped matters. Staying cooped up inside all winter in a normal year is enough to drive someone mad. Adding a pandemic on top of it all has limited our lives and normal interactions in so many strange, atomizing, alienating and disorienting ways. Winter blues indeed.
These blues are not the only blues I am referring to. I am also referring to the standard blue OCBD. The standard blue that I am wearing in the photo above. When spring comes around I put just about all of my standard blue OCBDs away until autumn comes my way. I wear light blue OCBDs in the spring and summer. The standard blue I keep for fall and winter, almost exclusively.
I have to admit, I am anxiously looking forward to the arrival of spring. I really don't like trying to hurry time along. I try to never do it. We only have so much time here on this earth, I don't want to FFWD through my life. But, I think we can look forward to things without our lives passing us by, and still try to the best of our ability to savor every passing day as a gift.
Because in just over a month I will put my standard blue OCBDs away in storage until autumn, I think I will end up wearing them much more often in the coming month. It always seems to go that way with so much in our lives. Once the end of something becomes more palpable, once we can see the end on the horizon, we start to really embrace that which will be gone soon. I don't think this impulse is limited to something as simple as a standard blue OCBD.
In this setting above I am wearing a standard blue OCBD from J. Press paired with a vintage Brooks Brothers brown, navy, gold and red rep tie. The sport coat is a beautiful 3/2 roll vintage Brooks Brothers. The warm hues of the tie and the sport coat suit each other well at their bases. The thread of red passing through the sport coat joins up with the thin red stripe in the rep tie to help create a natural complimentary coupling between the tie and the sport coat. The standard blue provides a plain, relaxed, less-formal-feeling than white, cold neutral canvas. This time of the winter always feels a bit like the standard blue OCBD. A cold neutral canvas.