Help! I’m Self-Isolated and Stuck Wearing My Boyfriend’s Wardrobe
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Have you ever dated someone who loves “jawnz”? (Translation: fancy menswear.) Surprise, I am currently dating someone who loves jawnz, and his closet is throwing me for a loop. It’s an overwhelming cornucopia of jawnz. I’m talking jawnz in every muted color of the linen rainbow. Jawnz made by some ancient Japanese guy who tie-dyed each tiny recycled thread of a shirt with some homemade concoction. It’s my own personal Narnia hellscape, where every shirt comes with a print on it, and almost every tag reads “Our Legacy,” aka the beloved Scandi chic label from the land of Sweden. But bright colors like these hurt my retinas, and after two weeks in self-isolation at my boyfriend’s, I had a moment of missing my all-black wardrobe more than ever.
For now, I’m stuck dressing from his hellishly happy wardrobe. At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, I came to his house one night dressed in workout gear: old Nike leggings and a fleece. One day turned into two, blurring into four, then a week, and now I’m currently stuck here in self-isolation and working from home for the foreseeable future. When I have a morning Zoom call, the thought of showing up for it in the same workout gear again and again makes me want to go for a run...off a bridge. I no longer have my own clothes to choose from, something that I had just started to delve into two weeks ago. At first, I just wore his boxers (clean) and one of his ratty T-shirts. But Zoom video meetings kept happening, eventually extending beyond my tight-knit group of colleagues. I had to start looking professional again.
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To bring some normalcy back into my routine, I asked if I could dip into the jawnz closet and wear a few of his favorite pieces. I started with an Our Legacy camp collar shirt. (He explained to me that the design was based on a restaurant napkin.) The second piece I wore was another Our Legacy shirt, this time in a stained glass print of green, brown, blue, and white. It even came with tiny mother-of-pearl buttons. He didn’t let me eat a bowl of tomato soup in it—but I understand! I would feel the same about my most treasured pieces. For my boyfriend, this love for Our Legacy runs deep; he’s even been to the Our Legacy Work Shop retail space in Stockholm (twice), where they rework pieces that never make it to production to be resold as one-offs. “Their clothes are a mix of quality and have a little funkiness to them. It looks regular and normal on the surface, but if you’re wearing it and spending time with it, you notice these weird things from the prints to construction techniques,” he told me. “Everything is a little off, which I really like. Plus, it’s a brand I have been following for literally 10 years.” Hey, I can get behind that die-hard, earnest philosophy!
Nonetheless, seeing someone so heavily into jawnz has gone against every instinct from my years-long, twisted school of dating. To be frank, I’ve always preferred men who dress horribly. Either they have had bad taste, or no taste at all. Dress shoes shaped like duckbills. Regular-degular blue jeans picked up from some big-box store and a Hanes white T-shirt. Maybe transitional lenses too. Someone who was really into clothes felt too close to home. Fast-forward to now: I’m with someone who is, yes, into clothes—trendy clothes, even—and who shops more than I do. I’ve been introduced to a world of menswear that I never knew about, and never particularly cared about. But who am I kidding? It’s not about being trendy, or shopping more than me, it’s just that I have never dated a guy with taste. And that can feel a little intimidating. (I asked for chicken soup the other day, assuming it would arrive in a Campbell’s can, but he ordered a homemade batch of it. I felt like an uncouth idiot!)
In truth, I appreciate his drive for the label and menswear. I’m also a clothing obsessive, after all. I can’t get enough of Tom Ford–era Gucci, for example. I like the history. I like the fabrics. I like the hunt. At the end of the day, we aren’t all that different—and maybe it’s nice being with someone who appreciates my same rabid draw toward certain clothes. (It’s also nice to be with someone who doesn’t get mad at me when I set an alarm for 3 a.m. to bid on that latest Gucci steal.) Maybe it’s Stockholm syndrome, but I’ve grown to love his Our Legacy shirts—and I feel like they’re beginning to suit me. The question now? How do I convince him to let me keep one.
