Friday night.
Table for three.
And dress to kill.
A message that's loud and clear in the group chat Just The Boys, shared with my sex bunny friend Stanley and the dense one Carl.
To our horror, the message wasn't clearly put across.
Then again, it's Carl the dense one we're dealing with.
"Which part of dressing up do you not understand," Stanley said in horror, staring at Carl who was wearing a dry fit T-Shirt that sticks to his Incredible Bulk body. The getup was paired with slim-cut berms that shows off Carl's under-nourished, under-worked legs.
Carl smiled sheepishly and raised his girly cocktail at Stanley and me saying "Happy Friday Night, guys?"
"There's nothing to smile about especially when you look like a drumstick," Stanley said, rolling his eyes.
That night, along with majority of the Singapore population who's allowed to drink alcohol at 10:31pm, the boys and I decided to wear decent clothes and to see and be seen outside.
No more home parties, no more clinking of glasses in home clothes, no more washing up after parties.
The location was an Italian restaurant with an excellent al fresco dinning area in Duxton.
The brief was to dress up.
And trust the dense one to mess up.
"I just came from the gym," Carl said pouting as Stanley stares unbelievably at the gym rabbit's unbelievably disrespectful dress code.
Stanley was in a tailored black shirt with floral patterns, custom-made to hug his lean frame, and skinny jeans.
I managed to throw on something decent too -- tailored navy suit with a black-and-white striped t-shirt.
"You're unbelievable," Stanley scolded Carl, who, in all honestly, isn't missing the memo for the first time.
All his life, Carl has been dense, and two beats slower than the general public.
To this day, he cannot name three of Singapore's presidents, nor tell you what the capital of Indonesia is.
Apart from pumping iron, and indulging in his own hobbies Carl has little interest in -- and knowledge of -- what's happening outside his bubble.
Unfortunately, Stanley was bubbling and boiling to the point of no return.
"Adam here dresses up, even though he looks like Ellen DeGeneres," Stanley said to Carl, pointing a finger at me.
I knew better than to rebut. An angry Stanley is like an angry mother who, even though she's scolding your sibling, that flammable anger can easily catch fire on you if you so much as to appear in that angry mother's peripherals.
I took a sip of my tap water and tried to ignore Carl's pleading look.
Finally, Stanley decided to stop.
"It's up to you if you want to dress up like a hobo," he concluded, and signalled the waiter to place our orders.
To be fair to Stanley, it's been quite a while since the three of us had partied outside.
In our thirties, before we each bought our own places, we would often hang out at trendy places to see and be seen.
And we'd often dress up since many of those places were patronised by equally shallow people who're keen to be seen and heard.
A decade later, while we had outgrown that shallowness, Stanley had often wished we could still revert to those happy party nights every once in a while.
Since we each bought our homes, parties have been confined to very comfortable and cosy settings, often at Stanley's lovely home in Queens Close, or occasionally, at my large one-bedder.
Two weeks prior to our table-for-three dinner date, Stanley had made it a point to remind us to dress up and have a good time outside.
To be fair, I don't blame Stanley for flaring up -- the memo was sent to us
To be fair to Carl, he's not the most intelligent person in our group. And while he definitely means no harm, his world is all about him and his hobbies, him and his interests, and him and that himbo brain of his.
Stanley decided to move on and make the Italian chefs busy with our food orders.
Promptly, cocktail orders were placed (Carl who arrived the earliest chose a girly pink drink; Manhattan for Stanley and a negroni for me).
And while we sipped our cocktails quietly, Stanley decided on a wide range of dishes to fill our table -- a $200 bottle of Italian wine, sirloin, pasta, sausages, cold cut platter, fish and lots of bread.
The night was indeed beautiful.
The Italian restaurant was bustling with life and laughter.
Soon, Stanley relaxed as the alcohol kicked in.
Carl was visibly relieved.
As I looked around the restaurant, I realised that there's a Carl at every table.
Right behind us was a family -- the 50-something daddy dressed in a t-shirt and a pair of faded, washed out berms.
To our right, a man came with his woman companion. The woman was dressed up decently -- blouse and pants. The man looked like he decided to skip is IPPT and come straight to dinner, clad in a black sports t-shirt and shorts.
The most decently dressed table -- apart from ours (but minus Carl) -- was this young couple who looked to be on one of their first puppy love dates.
The boy with floppy hair was wearing a loose striped shirt. His jeans were torn at the knees and shin, as if he fell from his skateboard enroute to Duxton Hill.
I have not been out for quite a while since COVID, and seeing this many people is a culture shock to me -- both in terms of mass and dress sense.
Are Singaporean men hopeless in dressing?
I mean, yes, I know Singaporean men are famous for wearing their flip flops and sports attire while dinning out.
But at a trendy restaurant downtown?
What has happened to the dress sense of Singaporean men?
I dared to raise this topic after our fourth round of glass refills .
Stanley rolled his eyes.
"Singaporean men wear sports t-shirts and jeans even to wedding dinners. What do you expect?"
Indeed, I must say that my fellow countrymen are an embarrassment when it comes to wardrobe pieces.
We're no frills like that, and that's a good thing.
But there's fine line between no frills and no class.
Has the Singaporean men dressing been influenced by years of being told what to wear?
Perhaps, we all started off on the same page: Our mummies decided for us what to wear, down to our boring, white briefs.
When we went to school, we were all forced to dress uniformly though we each tried to find our own style.
And then came National Service where again, we're told what to wear: Standard-issue tees, shorts, shoes.
It's like after all those years of hand holding, men have simply given up on buying their own clothes and resorted to reaching out for the first piece of clothes they see on their way out.
Sure, army singlets and unit tees make for comfortable Sunday fashion. Visit any heartland coffee shop or hawker centre and you'll see just that: Men of all shapes and sizes, of all ages, wearing just that, and sipping kopi in their just-out-of-bed hair.
At shopping centres, we seldom see men bothering to dress up.
It's the proud Singaporean man identity -- wear a sports finisher tee, or an army singlet with shorts and slippers.
"What's there to be proud of, come to think of it," Stanley asks.
Carl starts to shift uncomfortably in his comfortable dry-fit tee.
"Then again, what really matters to me isn't so much as what the men choose to wear," Stanley said.
"At the end of the day, it's what 's beneath those bad dressing that matters."
No comments:
Post a Comment