Dear Matthew Alice: I have a shirt that has a pocket on the left upper front that has a buttonhole and stitches down one side (top to bottom) about the width of a pencil. I’ve seen many other people with the same thing. What should we put in there? If we’re supposed to put a pencil in there, what’s the buttonhole for? — Just Curious, La Jolla
Well, Just Curious, I’ll admit to being Just Baffled when it comes to the chicanery of chic and the fascism of fashion. I usually avoid answering questions that actually require me to get dressed, but for you I’ll make an exception.
Poked around for a while in the traditional oasis of the sheiks of shirts, Brooks Brothers, but came up dry. The crafty staff, though, knew 1 was looking for Nautica brand, one of the hot style taskmasters (casual-shirt division) for today’s fashion slaves. One of Brooks’s brothers even demonstrated the fashion disaster averted by those mystery tubes. He popped a Scripto in his shirt pocket and bopped side to side a little bit, and darned if his pen top didn’t slide to a shocking tilt, creating an alarming diagonal lump across the pocket. No CPA with pen askew could ever be taken seriously, I’m sure. Well, you say, then why not just clip the pen cap to the pocket, as always? Aha...the answer to why the buttonhole (but no button). If your pen is always clipped to the same part of your pocket, as it would be with the pen-holder shirt, you’d wear the fabric out pretty fast. Slide the pen clip over the pocket top and then back through the buttonhole, and you have no strain on the fibers and that four-figure Mont Blanc can’t fall out or be snatched. Pen peace of mind. Works, too, for mechanical pencils, very trendy writegear these days, I understand. Are you sure you need clothing that requires this much explanation? It also occurs to me that this whole thing could be the secret revenge of the AV squad, the high school pocket-protector brigade, who were anal-retentive when anal-retentive wasn’t cool.
Dear Matthew Alice: I have a shirt that has a pocket on the left upper front that has a buttonhole and stitches down one side (top to bottom) about the width of a pencil. I’ve seen many other people with the same thing. What should we put in there? If we’re supposed to put a pencil in there, what’s the buttonhole for? — Just Curious, La Jolla
Well, Just Curious, I’ll admit to being Just Baffled when it comes to the chicanery of chic and the fascism of fashion. I usually avoid answering questions that actually require me to get dressed, but for you I’ll make an exception.
Poked around for a while in the traditional oasis of the sheiks of shirts, Brooks Brothers, but came up dry. The crafty staff, though, knew 1 was looking for Nautica brand, one of the hot style taskmasters (casual-shirt division) for today’s fashion slaves. One of Brooks’s brothers even demonstrated the fashion disaster averted by those mystery tubes. He popped a Scripto in his shirt pocket and bopped side to side a little bit, and darned if his pen top didn’t slide to a shocking tilt, creating an alarming diagonal lump across the pocket. No CPA with pen askew could ever be taken seriously, I’m sure. Well, you say, then why not just clip the pen cap to the pocket, as always? Aha...the answer to why the buttonhole (but no button). If your pen is always clipped to the same part of your pocket, as it would be with the pen-holder shirt, you’d wear the fabric out pretty fast. Slide the pen clip over the pocket top and then back through the buttonhole, and you have no strain on the fibers and that four-figure Mont Blanc can’t fall out or be snatched. Pen peace of mind. Works, too, for mechanical pencils, very trendy writegear these days, I understand. Are you sure you need clothing that requires this much explanation? It also occurs to me that this whole thing could be the secret revenge of the AV squad, the high school pocket-protector brigade, who were anal-retentive when anal-retentive wasn’t cool.
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