Confessions: I Look Ridiculous in Suits

Here’s the real deal, y’all…I look absolutely ridiculous in suits.

I always have. I always will.

My first “adult” suit was purchased from a Goodwill in the Midwest for roughly $15.

It was gray. It was old. It was too small. It was worn at the knees and elbows. It had buttons falling off.

It made me look like a disheveled hobo clown headed out on the town for a night of binge drinking Colt 45s and punching doormen for sport.

Needless to say, it was not an effective suit to wear when job hunting.

I realized this after wearing it to my first official grown-up job interview at MIT.

I wasn’t really a fit for the job anyway, but looking like a dude who had just acquired the suit by winning a tussle with a homeless person was probably not the best way to impress prospective employers.

While I was walking home from that interview, I stopped in a suit shop and purchased two new suits on the spot for my upcoming interviews.

They sized me up and told me to swing back in a couple of days and they’d be all tailored and ready to roll.

I did just that and acquired my suits prior to my next couple of interviews.

Admittedly, I made the mistake of not trying on the “tailored” suits before I left the (unsurprisingly now defunct) suit shop and when I got home they were a tad baggy.

It wasn’t, like, “potato sack” baggy or anything, so I just rolled with it.

I looked respectable in my new black suit—and have since been offered every job I’ve ever applied for whilst wearing it—but it was still just baggy enough that I looked as though I had purchased it off the rack on my way to the interview.

Pictured: Me in my best suit.

Fast-forward a couple of years and I’ve lost quite a bit of chunkage since then.

At the time of purchase, I clocked in somewhere between 190-200lbs. Nowadays, I generally weigh-in somewhere in the 170-175lbs range.

Needless to say, now I look even more like a little kid playing dress up in his dad’s closet when I slip into a suit.

Sure, sure…I could go out and get these suckers taken in so I my pants don’t flail about like a flag in the wind. I could get the jacket modified a bit so that it doesn’t look like I’m trying to smuggle a dozen pillows everywhere I go.

I could also just go out and buy a brand-new suit that fits my sleek, aerodynamic, borderline anorexic body; but that just seems like a lot of work for something that I only need to wear a couple times of year.

Anyway, I just wanted to go ahead and share some straight talk with y’all so that if you see a tall, gangly-looking guy who appears to be wandering around in a suit that was stolen from a better dressed fat man, it’s just me.

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