The Sam Reich fans are finding that one selfie again, saying we look alike and have the same style, and I’m begging folks to understand that man didn’t invent having a beard and wearing glasses + suits.
Gonna be a grump and blame athleisure in part for completely obliterating men’s day-to-day fashion to where a sportscoat and vest are conflated for a suit, and all suits in the last 300 years have been compressed into a singular style.
Sorry, guys, I don’t watch his stuff. Our styles are about 80-90 years apart. He dresses very corporate entertainer. I dress vintage country gentlemen. The vibes are nowhere near the same, I don’t know how else I can tell you.
Like, OK. Let me break this down.
Reich favors a very corporate palette. Greys and blues. Pinstripes are a very conservative pattern. No texture to his fabrics. His colors communicate a formal persona despite being an entertainer. His ties are wide and modern, flat colored, with “power” knots. Double-breasted coats, also a “power” cut. He offsets the Boss Boy look with sneakers to look more approachable.
(I don’t like this style, but he enjoys it and looks confident and good in it, which is what’s important.)
I don’t really wear suits. Usually single-breasted sports coats. A mixture of textures and fabric types, usually the more “rustic” stuff like corduroy and tweeds. I favor browns and greens, which are not seen as formal, or even really business professional. My glasses are small and owlish, not big Mad Men frames.
My look is much more casual and has a vintage rural connotation (and yes, sigh, academic), even if I’m considered dapper. I don’t belong in the boardroom.
We’re communicating very different personas, and even if you don’t know that half my clothes are cut in 1930s/40s style (while Reich’s are modern), it still makes me sad to be conflated with someone who is doing a completely different thing with his look. I feel like we are losing a lot of fashion vocabulary.
ALT
It started as an annoyance, but it’s been happening enough times to where people have felt the need to tag Reich *himself* into my threads, which is really fucked up parasocial behavior that has the additional outcome of centering a cis man on a trans joy post.
Absolutely deranged combination of face blindness, fashion blindness, and the real sin: overstepping boundaries to be a parasocial weirdo.
There’s all sorts of other nonsense in my tags from people who have only ever seen 1 TV show or don’t know a pair of brown jeans from Victorian trousers. But those, I can ignore after a little venting.
But I now block anyone making Sam Reich comparisons, because people have no goddamned manners and I have to cut off the reblogs from spreading amongst his fans lest more people try to tag him in.
Tagging a celeb into a thread irrevocably makes that thread about the celeb and people’s reactions to that celeb and is always going to be a shitty thing to do, especially on someone’s personal content.
Happy to see folks recognize that I am wearing sportswear. Reich is dressed for business. I am in outdoor clothing, which is ironic given the “librarian” connotation tweed now carries.
Maybe one day I’ll be brave enough to wear plus fours, like this gentleman of yore, golfer Tom Morris:
Also Sam Reich’s style is textbook gameshow host– because he is one.
Should you need to compare his style to someone else’s compare it to another gameshow host’s. 😒😒 The pinstripes, the neutral dark tones, the double breasted cut, the slightly shiny fabric texture, even the statement tie are straight out of the gameshow uniform.
Meanwhile if there’s any celebrity most of us would be familiar with I could compare op’s style with its J. R. R. Tolkien
There’s the tweed, the open jacket with waistcoat/vest, the mix of textures and colors, very much country gentleman meets casual professor.
The resemblance between these looks, beyond both being menswear styles, is nonexistent. For reference, this comparison sounds as ridiculous as someone claiming the two styles below are the same:
Imgaine claiming these were similar enough to even be compared. “They both have a hood and long sleeves!! So it’s basically the same outfit!” That’s how deranged this sounds. No amount of face blindness could explain this, it’s just an infestation of idiots. God help them if the Twitter menswear guy gets ahold of them.
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amhrancas 