The wardrobe rules, which are mostly about intent#
- Wear the tie properly or don’t wear one. A tie hanging loose with the top button undone reads like a schoolboy at four o’clock. Wearing it deliberately loose as a bit of studied nonchalance is genuinely difficult to pull off, and most attempts don’t.
- Wear a real watch. It’s about the only accessory a man actually needs. Keep the fitness tracker for the gym and sleep. Checking your wrist looks settled in a way that pulling out your phone never does. Seiko, Citizen and Orient all make good ones cheaply, and a watch handed down from a grandfather beats anything you can buy.
- At a wedding, dress down, not up. You are not the point of the day. Navy, or stone linen in summer. Skip the double-breasted pinstripe. Ask other guests what they’re wearing and land near them. Be better dressed through cut, fabric and shined shoes rather than through anything anyone would describe as a statement.
Maintenance nobody taught you#
- Skin. Your dad genuinely can’t be blamed for this one — it wasn’t a thing he was ever told about either. A basic routine does more for how you look than most people expect: face wash, a scrub twice a week, moisturiser with SPF in the morning, moisturiser at night.
- Hair, monthly, with a standing appointment. Scruffy hair undoes an otherwise tidy look, and booking it in advance removes the decision. Use product — a startling number of men unhappy with their hair are using nothing at all, and no style holds without it. Oil-based pomade for anything traditional; wax, cream or gel for other looks.
- How you move. Head up, eyes ahead, steady pace. Undo some of the screen hunch. Speak slowly enough to be understood without ever needing volume.
The one that isn’t about grooming#
Never send an unsolicited photo of yourself undressed. It’s crude, the less well you know the person the worse it is, and unsolicited it can land you in genuine legal trouble.
Even where it’s wanted and mutual, there’s nothing wrong with letting anticipation do some work.
Less is more, and it’s the actual rule#
Everyone wants more — money, status, attention. Fine. But the things that reliably feel good are small: quiet water, an early sky, a fire and a book you’re in no hurry to finish.
Be ambitious and unhurried about it. Treat people well on the way through. Don’t announce yourself.
Where I’d push back slightly#
The framing of all this as “what your dad should have taught you” is a good hook and a slightly unfair one. Plenty of men had a father who taught them none of this and was still a good father. And plenty of the list — skincare, standing barber appointments — genuinely wasn’t available to teach.
The useful version isn’t a grievance about what you weren’t given. It’s that this is all learnable at any age, from anyone, in any order, and nobody is checking whether you learned it on schedule.
The through-line is restraint. Dress with intent, keep yourself in order, and then stop drawing attention to it. That’s the whole difference between being well turned out and being loud.
A few small things to try:
- Book a standing haircut for the same day each month.
- Buy one decent watch and wear it every day.
- Add SPF moisturiser to the morning, nothing else, for a month.
- At the next wedding, aim to be the second-best dressed man there.
