as I have discussed before, in my opinion "trad" as a clothing style was promoted by wannabe prep(s) who hadn't gone to private schools or Ivy(esque) colleges and so felt they needed another name for the Ivy and preppy clothing they didn't feel they could wear without a disclaimer, as if a pedigree were required. 

Southern Trad meanwhile was contrived to include all the darted, pleated clothing conservative guys with a dandy side throughout the South had acquired before they learned from the OPH and the internet that those items were non-prep.

The corny pastels are the male trad's Easter bonnet, blame Alexander Julian and Ralph Lauren .....

From its earliest days, the Andover Shop touted its "traditional, conservative woolens" and its "conservative and gentlemanly" clothing.

Charlie Davidson called the Andover Shop's preppy Ivy clothing "traditional" in the ads announcing the opening of the shop in 1948: "Fine British and Domestic Woolens in the traditional style of Cambridge, New Haven, and Princeton."

What is wrong with Red ties on a pink shirt?

Clothing holds many qualities at the same time. Sometimes the clothes can represent a certain political bent but it depends on the context...and the audience. The people Tucker Carlson is speaking to every night are old enough to have nostalgia for a prior age.

More generally speaking, some clothes can mean respectability for one observer, being out of touch to another. The meaning can lie as much with the observer's experiences as much as the collective DNA imbued in a given article of clothing.

And being from one tribe does not guarantee that clothing as a symbol will always be viewed the same way.  Once, two Goth girls saw me in a suit; one of them was making eww faces but the other one loved the suit and traced the lapels. I assumed one of them grew up around men who wore suits and the other did not. It occurred to me that clothing is an individualistic experience not only for the wearer but also for the observer.

A self-declared clothing enthusiast really is only answerable to themselves in that the only have themselves to please, and any naysayers can be batted back with any length of ramble about subjectivity/personal taste etc , which can lead to the clothing equivalent of a deluded flat-earther...to really see something for what it is is hard work especially when you have so much of yourself invested in it, the neutrality is what allows you to grab on to the beginnings of good judgement..

Thats not to say there is only one approach, there isn't, there is all manner of ideas of expression, mood and all the other things we look to communicate with clothes.. and just because we dont like a certain style doesn't mean it cant be done well or poorly.

Humans are quite well attuned visually because it helped us survive in a world of threat and disease, we like to see things that communicate survival..symmetry, balance, health...its hardwired in, and it all comes down to harmony.. and nature's signals of colour and form... these things are not fixed however because the objective nature of what succeeds is for ever adapting, so our thoughts become transient..people try to look stick thin and drive themselves to the edge of poor health because in a perverted sense society has picked that to be a successful state..

No one has a fixed answer, and if they say they do, then really they haven't because the nature of things being in flux demands constant reconsideration... there are things such as frequencies and ratios that can give us a grip on fixing the relationships between things...and that is a good place to look for anyone looking to gain insight

Last edited by Babbling Brooks (2018-06-14 00:49:13)

I was eating my hotel breakfast yesterday and the Disney Channel was playing away silently in the background. I noticed that if you want to portray men as old, fuddy duddy and a bit slow on the uptake then have them wear a button down collar and some traditional item like a shawl neck cardigan.