Conviction / Militora / Three’s a Crowd / A Colour for Summer

THE RADAR // Issue #6

Hello! Welcome back to THE RADAR, The Prep Clubs’s fortnightly digest for interesting bits and pieces in the sphere of collegiate threads. You can attend last week’s meeting here, for discussions of regional specialty in fashion.

A CRISIS OF CONVICTION

If you want to learn how to do something, or about something, you go to YouTube. Video content is just more effective for the illustration of certain points, and the demonstration of certain practices. However, it has its own culture that has been built up over years, and which I’ve found makes the discussion of fashion really bloody difficult.

There is no shortage of informed, interesting, and articulate fashion creators on YouTube, yet in my experience they all seem to suffer from the same flaw. Every time a someone on YouTube expresses an opinion, particularly a critique, they must state it as such. The audience is constantly reminded that fashion is subjective, they’re allowed their own opinion, and it just makes me sad.

Why is it that creators have to pontificate fashion’s subjective nature? I just feel like it should be a given. It interrupts what would otherwise be very well structured and natural monologues with a reminder that the poor person speaking on your screen is being held at proverbial gun-point by their comment section.

Interrogating this further snowballs very quickly, take a look into “Bean Soup Theory” if you’ve not heard of it.

It’s got me thinking though that perhaps we lack conviction at a wider level. It circles back to the personal style discourse, there is an unwillingness to back one’s own decisions. The way we speak now is often heavy on caveats and clarifications, at times this is important to avoid offence, of course, but at large I feel we might be a little better off if we said things with our chests, especially for trivial matters like clothes. As for a solution for fashion YouTube, it might just be a matter of trendsetting, all it takes is one person to strike out in defiance to change the style of others.

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THE MILITORA OCBD

Heritage fashion is still a growing market, Olderbest is a retailer rising to meet demands for more affordable options. I’ve shopped with them before, and generally had a good experience, both quality and customer service were more than adequate when factoring in the price.

It has been very interesting to see them slowly dip their toes into the collegiate realm, first with a collection of letterman knits, and now with an OCBD, one that’s priced very competitively, especially for folks outside the US for whom J. Crew shirts are prohibitive.

PC: Olderbest

Coming from their “Militora” label, it seems to tick a lot of the boxes that the club likes to see in an OCBD, 3” collar with a good roll, back button and locker loop, a roomy fit. It’s sort of a funny mix between a Brooks and a Gant shirt, with the added quirk of a sort of Western-ish point on the back of the collar, and very rounded tails.

I think I might try and get my hands on one for a review at some point, it’s definitely piqued my interest, maybe the best collar roll for less than £50 this side of the pond. Not perfect by any means, and you’ll still get better results going for second hand, but a damned solid offering in a good selection of classic colours.

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THREE’S A CROWD