What is the best way to get a shirt tailored? What do you recommend?

While there are a LOT of different ways and degrees to which you can get a shirt tailored, but there are four bigger (or at least, common) ways you can get a shirt tailored:

• You can get a shirt shortened. This mainly seems to happen to things like polo shirts and casual shirts. Dress shirts are usually intentionally long (to tuck better), so shortening them tends to be a bad idea, but some people still do it.
• You can get a shirt tapered. A simple taper is usually just slimming the shirt at the waist, usually from about the beginning of the side seams down. This is what most guys have to get tailored on virtually every shirt. Most shirts (for some strange reason) get wider/baggier as they go down, whereas most guys need them to taper in to a slimmer fit. This is generally the bread and butter of tailoring.
• You can get sleeves shortened. Most neck sizes are sold with corresponding sleeve lengths — for example, a Size 16 neck is usually associated with a 32/33 or 34/35 sleeve length. This doesn’t work for everyone, and as such, you can get the sleeves shortened.
• You can get the arms AND the body slimmed. In perhaps a more dramatic sense, you can get the arms slimmed and the body slimmed at the same time — basically slimming the shirt as much as possible. This has the (good, but possibly bad) effect of also making the chest slimmer. This is the most extensive (and usually most expensive) amount of tailoring, but it also can drastically transform a crappy shirt into a good one.

With that being said, a good tailor will be able to identify what you need done and will be able to assist you in measuring, pinning, and ultimately getting the work done to your satisfaction. Still, some general tips:

• When you go to a new tailor, bring in a cheaper, more destructible shirt to have them do the work on. Don’t risk your entire wardrobe initially.
• Check the tailor’s work. Check the inside sewing for any issues (loose threads, bad stitching, mismatched stitching, etc) and be willing to demand fixes if necessary. Sometimes, legitimate errors are made, but that doesn’t mean you do not hold them accountable.
• When a tailor pins your shirts, always have them pin each one, on both sides. Even if all of your shirts are the same brand/size/year, they will vary, and so will your individual sides. If your tailor doesn’t take the time to pin properly (and measure while doing so), find another tailor.
• Don’t feel bad about having a tailor do even relatively small work. Even a half inch on a shirt can make a lot of difference. Be picky.
• At the same time, don’t tailor a shirt TOO much. Seek a fitted shirt, but not a skin tight one. Skin tight dress shirts pull at the chest/stomach, making them unsightly and awkward looking. You should be able to move your arms freely and feel relaxed in a shirt, and it should always have the slightest bit of room in any part of your body (after all, you may gain muscle or fat).

My suit is really uncomfortable. How do you make suits more comfortable or wearable?

I hear this a lot, and my answer will sound odd, but it is very important: get your suit tailored, and if possible, get a better suit.

In my opinion, the most common reason guys feel uncomfortable wearing suits is that the suits feel horrible. Cheap, poorly tailored suits feel baggy, childish, flimsy, and utterly nasty. Cheap excessively padded suits (like wannabe sack suit slash Italian cuts) can have huge shoulders and can be far too long both in the length of the body and in the sleeves to be anything close to comfortable. Suit pants, usually pleated excessively, can also feel uncomfortable, if not outright old-man-ish.

First off, hunt down a better suit. Don’t go for the typical cheap-y baggy stuff at your typical department store unless you must — invest in a real suit. If you want to buy one off the rack, go for a decent and reasonably affordable brand such as J.Crew. If you live near an outlet mall, Brooks Brothers’ outlet mall offerings (their 365 line) is incredibly good, and ridiculously cheap compared to their main line. If you want something Made to Measure, look for a modern but educated company, such as Thick as Thieves LA.

Whatever you do find, make sure it fits you. The sleeves should never feel excessively long or baggy — if the sleeves are too thick/bulky/large, an adept tailor can fix that problem. If the pants are too long, hem them, but aim for a subtle break (or none at all, if you feel like channeling Tom Ford). While you’ll obviously feel like you are wearing a suit in some respects, a well fitted, comfortable suit will feel more like a second skin than a wool prison.

Also, make sure your shirt and tie fit you well. If the shirt feels too tight on your neck, size up. Get the shirt tailored, never accept a baggy shirt. Tie the tie properly and keep it at your neckline, but never choke yourself.

Can I wear denim on denim? Like, a denim jacket + jeans?

Yes, but only if the two styles and washes are distinctly, noticeably different.

For example, an appropriate outfit would be something like a nice indigo washed jacket and white jeans, or a very very light wash jacket and dark wash jeans. Personally, I think any mixture of indigo on indigo asks for trouble — try to avoid matching even acid wash indigo with regular indigo washes. The only exception to the aforementioned indigo on indigo rule may be pairing a chambray shirt with denim jeans, which really isn’t pairing denim with denim anyway.

I’m a thin 22-year old guy of moderate height (5’11″), and in need of new clothes and ideas of all kinds – casualwear, possible winter combos, and so on. However, Don Cherry (Canadian here) has better fashion sense than I do. What articles of clothing should I go and get before summer ends that won’t make me look like I’m still in high school? Let me know if there’s any issues. Thanks!

You’re actually at a perfect age to begin thinking about this. At 22 or so, you’ve finally stopped growing, your proportions are pretty much finalized (and since you’re thin now, it’s likely you’ll be thin in the future), and you’re just about ready to begin kicking into the workforce full force. With that being said, here are some basic tips to get you started:

First of all, ditch all teen labels pronto. This is one of the bigger issues most people have — they continue to wear stuff like Abercrombie into their twenties. Unless it fits really well or you simply cannot afford another better quality/better looking/more adult replacement, ditch whatever you have. Obviously, don’t go and burn your whole wardrobe at once, but try to, as much as possible, distance yourself from teen brands.

Second off, invest in clothing that’s more adult that works well in a variety of contexts. For example, a simple blazer (tan, navy, or black) can be dressed up for work, dressed down with jeans, and the like. Get rid of graphic t-shirts, and try to wear something other than a plain t-shirt most of the time. Dress shirts can be worn casually, pending they are well tailored and not terribly formal — invest in some good fitting oxford cloth button-down shirts, some colorful lighter dress shirts, and the like. Transition out of sneakers — a good pair of black or brown dress loafers, when not excessively dressy, can be worn with jeans, slacks, or even a suit. Get rid of most of your hoodies and the like — they are never flattering. The nice thing about dressing a bit classier is that a lot of your wardrobe will mesh with professional wear for work — meaning you’ll begin to outfit yourself with a decent wardrobe for the office, the classroom, and for out on the town. Naturally, no matter what you purchase, it should fit you well.

As for outfits, like the above, try to pair professional with casual. For an everyday outfit, try to pair good dark jeans (which tend to be more classy/adult) with well tailored but casual dress shirts and comfortable oxfords, boots, or similarly adult shoes. To dress it up, throw on a blazer. For cold weather, look into nice but casual wool coats like a nice pea coat or car coat, either of which you should get tailored to fit your body well. Nice sweaters are also a way to adapt to cold weather — v-necks in particular can be worn with ties for a nice preppy-ish look. Don’t be afraid to wear casual or dress pants out and around with a shirt or even a sweater, just make sure they are sufficiently casual (i.e. not from your suit). The combinations you can make with the aforementioned clothing items are pretty much limitless — you could wear a sweater with an oxford shirt and a blazer, a coat with a casual (slimmer) tie, just one of the shirts with the sleeves down or even rolled up, and the like.

Really, the key here is to show that you wear clothing because you want to look good, not because of some sort of odd peer pressure or pressure from your parents. Dress like you mean it and dress well.

When can I wear a skinny tie?

The general rule of thumb is casually, and ideally with a blazer with slim lapels. Skinny ties are fairly fashion-forward and youthful — don’t wear them in a business context, try wearing them in more of a stylish, perhaps more casual context.

Ties are actually kinda basic: they range from about 1″ (super skinny) to up to 4.5″ (huge) at their widest point, which is right before it tapers into a triangle shape. “Skinny ties” usually float under the 2.75″ mark, which means that they are very very slim, especially up at the top, which makes the knot look fairly small and slim. “Narrow” ties — particularly the ones J.Crew sell — tend to be around 2.75″ to 3″. Anything larger is a fairly standard size, with 4″ being the most for a modern style, and 4.5″ being something of a maximal 70s sort of size.

With all of these ties, the big rule is to, at least as much as you can, wear the tie to be around as wide as the lapels, though obviously you have some room for error. With slimmer lapels, skinny ties and narrow ties look much better, and the overall cut is remarkably modern (though very inspired by the Man Men esque styles of the 50s/60s). For standard sized lapels, obviously, wear bigger ties — slimmer ties can work, but sometimes they can look engulfed in your coat. I don’t ascribe to any sort of hard-and-fast sizing rule between the coat lapel and the size of the tie — the best thing you can do is look and a mirror and see if the lapel and tie compliment each other.

Hope this helps!

There are often times I’m left at home without a way of leaving (No keys to re-enter the house), yet I want to exercise and work out. What are some simple, yet effective workouts you can do at home without any equipment?

I’ll list a few different exercises — some require no equipment at all, whereas some are ridiculously cheap.

Weightless Compound Lifts
Yes, you can do compound lift movements without an olympic bar — you aren’t gonna build up big muscle mass by doing them, but they do burn a number of calories. Squats are easy — just squat down like you would with an olympic bar, and obviously squat all the way to the ground. If you have them available, a backpack filled with books or even a heavy object you hold over your head will add weight to the movement. Bench presses can be replaced by push-ups — switch hand positions (closer, farther apart, etc) to place different amounts of weight on your triceps/pectorals. Deadlifts can also be done weightless — find a heavy object and lift it up like a deadlift, keeping as much knee movement in the motion as possible.

To really make these count, focus on variation. Instead of doing the standard weight lifting 5×5 routine, focus on doing a lot of reps and a lot of sets with different types of reps. Try a set full of deliberately slow reps (like squatting very slowly), half reps (coming down halfway, stopping, counting to one second, and standing up again), pulse reps (stopping midway and lightly bouncing) and half-slow reps (going down slowly, popping up). These are a lot more effective than they sound — going slow and pulsing in particular is fairly intensive, as it can trap lactic acids in the muscle (a good thing). Squat-jumps and, if you can, clapping in between push-ups are also great ways to add intensity. Don’t rest as much between sets — keep your heart rate pumping. Again, none of this is going to make you body builder huge, but these movements all activate a significant number of muscles, which will burn calories fairly efficiently, especially at a faster cardio-like pace.

More specific exercises

There are plenty of other exercises you can do without weights. Tricep dips are fairly easy — find a couch or bed, put your hands on the edge of the couch with your chest facing up, keep your legs out, and dip your body down, push up, and repeat. To hit your legs, calf raises and lunges work incredibly well, even without weights. While presses are somewhat hard to do without weights, if you find two very heavy objects in your house, you can easily press them for a nice shoulder workout.

Burpees

Burpees are god’s gift to weightless exercise. I won’t go into the finer details, as you can find a ton of information on them online, but burpees area killer exercise, and should really be put into any sort of weightless exercise routine. Do them.

Easy Equipment Exercises

If you do have a little bit of spare cash on hand, you can get some pretty good tools to do exercises inside of your house that shouldn’t break the bank or take up too much space. One of the best purchases you can make is a good pair of dumbbells — even 10lbs will do, as at a cardio speed, they will feel 100lbs. For a heavier cardio focus, look into a jumprope. If you want a good ab workout outside of crunches, reverse crunches, and similar weightless motions, look into an ab wheel — they work incredibly well. If you really want to look into something effective, a pull-up bar (or simply a bar you can do pull-ups on) works wonders.

I can’t possibly show my friends your articles on how PUA books suck, they won’t read em. Can you give me just the cliffs notes version so they stop paying cash on classes?

I’ll try to keep this as humanly short as possible:

PUA books work for two reasons: they get you trying and they get you confident. The actual material in them is useless. PUA books, be they “Double your Dating”, “The Game”, or anything similar, all usually have advice that only works for clubs, and even then only rarely. What they are effective at doing is, in a nutshell, convincing you that you can pick up women so you go out and try a lot. Trying is 99% of the game, for the most part, especially since the books convince you failures are just learning experiences. You don’t need to have special lines, graphs, the ability to “peacock”, or any of that crap to get women. You are much better not deluding yourself, developing real confidence, and ignoring $300+/wk seminar classes designed to profit off of your insecurities.

I’m really scrawny, and no matter how much SL 5x5or other lifting I do, I can’t gain right. I’m interested in starting some ‘roids. What do you think?

Well, first off, drugs of that caliber are illegal, so I have to advise you don’t do so simply on the basis of legality. Yes, it makes very little sense that they are illegal, and most of the ideas regarding them are misconceptions, but the fact remains nonetheless.

Outside of that, however, there are multiple reasons why not to do steroids. While it seems tempting to do them because they help body builders bulk up, steroids have a lot of nasty side effects that make them pretty horrible for anyone who wants to look good. First off, taking steroids inhibits natural hormone development — it’s a temporary effect, but nonetheless a pretty strong one. Steroids can also strongly encourage gynecomastia (aka “bitch tits”) — meaning you develop breasts. Steroids will typically give you lots and lots of acne, and encourage the chances that you begin balding early (if you are going to). Other side effects include liver damage, changes in your cholesterol, and the like. There are a lot of horrible, horrible side effects — read about them yourself.

If you want a quick way to bulk up and put on muscle, do GOMAD — that is, drinking a gallon of milk a day. While this is not advisable on the long term, GOMAD is a great way to rapidly put on weight and muscle — for all intents and purposes, it’s shocking your body into developing muscle quickly. GOMAD is never advisable for people at normal/heavier weights, but if you do it (with a very heavy, extensive weight training regimen, including lots of compound lifts) as a skinny guy, you will gain muscle like crazy, and you will usually keep it. GOMAD is basically a hellishly intensive bulk, a very effective one.

So basically, don’t focus on steroids, they are almost always a very poor answer to a problem you can fix in a much more efficient and legal way. Stick to GOMAD and intense training, while remaining patient, and you will get results.

I just got some new luggage ([redacted]) and wanted something besides black. The color I chose was platinum and now [I'm] having second thoughts, that maybe [it was] too feminine. Should I just exchange [it] for black?

Note: I have reason to believe this was actually a really halfassed way of trying to get me to name drop a brand of luggage. I get these every so often (“talk about my brand!!!!”), but I’m just going to take it and discuss luggage.

Silver luggage is inherently not feminine, and actually may be a fairly good choice: as a general rule, most people at airports and bus stops have black luggage (or variations of black luggage), making finding your own luggage rather hard. Having something that stands out from a distance is invaluable, pending the color is not too garish or ridiculous.

Alternatively, if you do purchase black luggage, what I advise to do is to customize it somehow in a very noticeable way. For example, take a bandanna or strip of cloth and tie it around the handle, or otherwise mark the luggage in a way that you can identify from a distance. Little ownership tags are always useful and should be used as much as possible, but they really don’t cut it — everyone has those too.

How do I pick a gym? Should I join a local joint or a big company one? Any advice?

The first thing you need to always keep in mind when picking a gym is what you’re actually going to use it for – not surprisingly, many presume they will use more of a gym’s facilities than they actually do. Before you even go “shopping” for a gym, make a mental list of what you actually will use it for — cardio, light weight training, heavy weight training, group classes, etc — and stick to your guns.

Most gyms nowadays make money not necessarily based upon day-to-day membership but rather based on selling memberships on a long term basis, meaning that they try to push you to sign for long term contracts on ridiculously expensive plans that promise everything from weight room access to personal massages. The idea, of course, is to get you to sign up for things you cannot possibly use and you will eventually never use (by means of forgetting or simply being lazy) — meaning they make raw profit. The best thing you can do, then, is to determine what you want to use and to only pay for that in the most affordable way possible — and to find a gym that caters to your specific needs.

If you want to do heavy weight training, find a good gym equipped for heavy weight training. At minimum, a good lifting area will have one or more squat racks, one or more bench presses, a few Olympic bars and sets of Olympic plates, a set of dumbbells, a pull-up bar, and maybe some extra accouterments like a leg press machine, a sit-up machine, and the like. You can often identify places that cater to the muscle building crowd, as  they will have equipment like straps, chalk, lifting belts, and other tools laying around for your use — and they’ll usually have a few meatheads either working there or working out there. These places are phenomenal for beginners, as the aforementioned meatheads are usually awesome guys who will help you (and keep you safe) much better than underpaid mega-fitness center staffers ever could.

If you plan to do cardio or light weight training, you’ll probably want to find a place with a bit more variety and friendliness, so look for somewhere with a variety of cardio machines (treadmills, bikes, elliptical machines), some weight lifting equipment (maybe nothing heavy duty, but machines are nice, etc), and the like. If you want group classes, find a place that offers them on a regular basis with a real personal trainer, and look up reviews if you have to. In the context of cardio machines, make sure they are kept clean and neat and in working order as much as possible, and that they are relatively expensive machines — they don’t have to be amazingly new, just sturdy and ready for your use.

Don’t be waylaid by gyms that offer things like the “latest” equipment, ridiculously fancy televisions, in-house protein supplements/nutrition bars, and the like. Usually, these are all scams. The “latest” equipment can be nice (and relatively clean), but it never justifies paying more — exercise has not fundamentally changed so much as to make the latest equipment that much better when it comes to getting fit. Weight lifting machines are good for absolute beginners, but nothing beats free weights. Some gyms offer great televisions and iPod services and the like, but don’t pay extra for them — bring a MP3 player of your own or something to keep you distracted. In-house protein mixes, nutrition bars, and juice bars are almost always overpriced under-performing scams — and, if they offer any form of diet supplements, they can be dangerous (to the extent of being life-threatening). Unless you really need or want one, never pay for a personal trainer — few know what they are doing enough to give you results you can’t get on your own.

Additionally, avoid gyms and fitness centers that are obviously set up for the Jenny Craig crowd — they’re usually for women and not equipped for anything hard at all. Avoid Planet Fitness like the plague, their “lunk alarm” — a literal alarm that goes off if you grunt and/or drop a weight — is an insulting idiotic policy that is prohibitive to all but the most pansy weight lifters. I hate to say it, but basically try to avoid any place that calls itself something like a “judgment-free gym” — while the idea is nice, most of these places are set up to be non-offensive and easy, meaning they sometimes are entirely insufficient for actual exercise. Places like your local YMCA are usually a good start, but always be careful, as YMCA centers can be a mixed bag.

In all reality, if you are male, the best thing you can do (in my mind) is to find a super-cheap small gym that has oldschool weight lifting equipment and maybe one or two cardio machines. Nothing really beats freeweights for building muscle, and nothing really beats an old-fashioned treadmill or bike for cardio. It doesn’t have to be pretty, have fancy equipment, or even have personal trainers on hand — all you need is a place that you can push yourself.