Go Guy Fieri Mode on ‘em
Plus great shorts that cost nothing, 1-of-1 home-jawns & more
Early this year I embarked on a month-long experiment — “One-Fit February” — where I wore the same outfit for 28 days straight. A few things motivated me to do this, and near the top of the list was my desire to know what it feels like to go “uniform mode” — that is, to experience the unvaried approach to fit-assembly often invoked via the example of Steve Jobs, who famously rocked a black Issey Miyake mockneck with Levi’s and gray 992s for over a decade…
The fantasy of uniform dressing has a paradoxical appeal for the polyglot jawnz enthusiast. It conjures up a version of yourself where you have “solved” the “problem” of “getting dressed” by devising an outfit so self-expressive yet durably swaggy that it distills something distinctively true about you and, as a result, you can stop caring about clothes. (By month’s end I felt insane and, despite learning many things about myself and clothes, vowed to never do that s**t again. Your results may vary.)
Last week, my thoughts returned to uniform dressing after a video (linked below) made the rounds, capturing an unlikely figure as he chilled with a cigar in the V.I.P. at a Rage Against the Machine concert: GUY FIERI !
“Wow,” I thought to myself. “Salute this king. We, as a culture, once mocked him, but he stayed deaf to the dumb s**t, did his d*mn thing, and proved himself to be a certified real one who outran his opps.”
Time, in other words, has been kind to Guy Fieri, who started appearing on the Food Network in 2006 and was almost instantly clowned on. Undeterred, he kept shining a bright light on small, unpretentious restaurants … He opened and then closed a Times Square restaurant that apparently was s**tty as h*ll, not long after a Pete Wells NYT review that LAMBASTED the food’s s**ttiness … In 2020, during the early days of the pandemic, he helped raise more than $20 million for out-of-work restaurant employees … He kept rolling with a tight circle of broskis with unbeatable “dudes rock” nicknames like “Gorilla,” “Mustard,” “Kleetus” and “Dirty P”…
AND, at the burning core of Guy’s certified realness??
He locked in a deranged hairstyle, accented it with a goatee and wraparounds, and let that s**t rock unchanged in the public eye for 16 years and counting. Mamma mia.
By now, even the bitterest hater who saw that bleached spiky hair way back when and dismissed Guy Fieri off rip as a “bozo” or “jamoke” has gotta give it up: Whereas someone made of weaker, fickler stuff might have switched up his swag by now, buckling under the scorn and bidding for “newfound respectability,” Fieri stayed unwaveringly true to his own vision!
We’ve got to acknowledge the high degree of difficulty at play — whereas Steve Jobs locked in a tasteful, understated look from the shoulders down, Fieri locked in a screamingly déclassé look from the neck up. It’s like he said, “Yeah I’m cool with looking like I’m the touring bassist for Smashmouth forever, that’s just the kind of s**t I’m on,” and when the jokes flooded in — as they invariably do when someone risks ridiculousness but enjoys success nonetheless — he stayed the course until the jokes died out, because the jokers realized that deep down they admired and maybe even envied what Fieri had possessed all along: an unbudging sense of self.
(Is there also a degree to which Fieri’s appearance became such broadly recognizable, lucratively licensable I.P. that it formed a kind of market-based death mask he feels imprisoned within, unable to escape? Possibly, but let’s not dwell on that!)
There’s something compellingly audacious about his resilient idiosyncrasy. Call it F.I.E.R.I. Mindset:
This isn’t to say that you should copy Guy’s look (though some of those bowling shirts & wraparounds he rocks could go pretty hard this summer). But, when it comes to how we present to the world, we all could take some inspiration from his long-lasting dedication to the big, weird swing.
MEANWHILE — we found some very handsome 1-of-1 throw pillows to BRIGHTEN YR HOME. But before those, it’s hot out there … so what better time to recommend the fire and extremely inexpensive shorts Erin and I have both been wearing & loving this summer: