When I was 17, I stumbled into the world of men’s formal wear on a whim. My job had gone bankrupt and closed down and I needed a new job. The only place hiring was the local men’s tux shop, so I applied because why not, right? Little did I expect that at almost 22, I’d still be working in men’s formal wear and that this industry would teach me so much about myself, the mind of most men (not all), and the society we live in.
When I first started working in men’s wear, I mostly did weddings. I would fit and book full wedding parties in an hour or less. Our typical wedding party was between 10-14 men. On occasion, we would have some grooms come in to pick out the suits and shoes for their wedding, but most of the time the bride came in with the whole groom’s side of the wedding party and told me what the men were wearing. The men would just go along with it in fear of “upsetting her on her big day.” This type of work made me realize two things.
The first being that we live in this culture of a wedding solely being the bride’s “big day” or “her day.” I thought a wedding was about two people joining together and swapping last names? I don’t agree with this culture of weddings only being about the bride. The groom wants to look good too. It’s a big moment for him as well. Why, as a society, do we completely neglect to note that he gets a say in the wedding as well? This is the same with same-sex wedding parties as well. There is always one person in the couple that will say “This is MY big day” instead of “This is OUR day.”
The second thing I realized is that women genuinely have such a high distrust in men, which is very much valid in case you haven’t been watching the news lately. I’ve seen brides pick out their future husband’s suits from the jacket right down to his socks as though he doesn’t know to almost always just wear black dress socks. I just feel as though if you said “yes” to marrying someone, you should at least trust them to pick out their own pair of socks. We, as women expect the worst from men and we complain about toxic masculinity being a thing in men but from behind the cash register and from behind the measuring tape, I’ve watched fellow women and partners, perpetuate it.
Currently, I work in a big and tall men’s store and I truly love my job because I’ve learned that the same way women have insecurities about our bodies, men do too. All people do. But it will always break my heart when I go to measure a man for a suit shirt and he says “You probably won’t have anything to fit me” or “I know I’m fat, haha, they don’t have clothes cheap for fat guys.” Why do we, as a society, not use the same loving language that we use for women? For men we see labels such as “portly”, “husky”, “XL” and “big” but for women it’s “curvy”, “plus-size” and “voluptuous.”
We’re all about making women feel beautiful, as we should because we are beautiful, but sometimes a man needs to feel handsome too. Fitting a man that can just walk into any store and be guaranteed to find something is almost meaningless, but every time I fit a plus-size man for a suit, I make sure he leaves my store knowing and feeling that he is beautiful, because all humans deserve the right to feel beautiful, because we are all beautiful. That’s the core of feminism: treating all people like people and eliminating sexism, turning it into equality, equity and justice. Toxic masculinity wants to separate that and ruin people’s minds with negativity and harmful thoughts. We should fight that, tooth and nail. Always. Men are beautiful. Women are beautiful. LGBTQ+ people are beautiful. Trees are beautiful. The Amazon is burning. We should love each other and love our planet.