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Properly Hideous

February 11, 2009, 11:13 am

My old Princeton roommate Brink Lindsey and I agreed today that our 25th reunion jackets meet the primary test of such apparel:  They must be both original and so hideous that one would never wear them outside of zip code 08544.

jacket

Can clothing be both hideous and cool at the same time?  I think so (which my wife would say explains a lot).  Now, if I could get Robert Graham to do an orange and black shirt to go with it....

PS:  Brink has a new paper out,  "Paul Krugman's Nostalgianomics: Economic Policies, Social Norms, and Income Inequality"

Update: Hat tip to the commenter who seems to be a fellow rail geek for coming up with the D&RGW locomotive analogy.  I almost ran this post differently.  I was going to have a joke post claiming to be an item from the stimulus bill, claiming one provision to increase employment was to replace traffic cones at construction sites with live humans wearing appropriate gear.  But I am having trouble seeing very much funny in the stimulus bill right now.  Never has so much been spent so quickly with so little deliberation or even understanding of what is being spent.

As for the test pattern comment, this does remind me of the "moiré" test patterns -- in fact, I had trouble trying to compress it too much as the jpeg  started producing moiré patterns.

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  • feeblemind

    Makes you look like the nose of a Rio Grande diesel locomotive.

  • ErikTheRed

    Wow. Are you sure your class didn't lose a bet or something?

  • Jim Collins

    You could get away with that jacket in Cincinatti in November if the Bengals were winning.

  • The angle of the picture almost makes it look like that thing is plugged in and set on test pattern.

  • Coyote little sis

    Kate is going to look LOVELY in her matching skirt or vest or whatever she chooses. Perhaps she can knit the HRH, the Hideous Reunion Handbag, to match. But alas, Geoff's 20th theme is the circus. worse. much worse.

  • feeblemind

    I am sure I speak for everybody in hoping you have a lot of fun at your reunion.

  • The other coyote

    It kind of reminds me of an Adam Ant costume/outfit. Didn't Simon Le Bon wear something similar in the "Rio" video? Just kidding, I'm sure it's much cuter in person.

    I went to high school over the river in Bucks County. At the time, my dad (nominally) worked for Mobil at the old DuPont mansion in between Pennington and Princeton. I say nominally b/c he traveled all over the world for months (years) at a time - Saudi; Malaysia; Frostproof, FL; Dauphin Island, AL... all the garden spots.

    By the time we were juniors, my friends and I thought we were entirely too mature and sophisticated for high school boys and took to coming over to Princeton in the afternoons and shopping / eating / meeting up with freshman boys who probably couldn't get dates with freshman girls - who I'm sure thought themselves entirely too mature and sophisticated for freshman boys.
    That winter we took a few lonely kids out to the old Belle Mountain ski area and ice skating on the lagoon at Washington Crossing State Park. One particularly bitterly cold winter day, I skated way past New Hope on the canal with a nice, but really dweeby guy from Connecticut whose name escapes me right now. We nicknamed him Hans, for Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates. Good times, good times.

    I would have considered Princeton, but I actually hate cold weather. Mom said I could go one days drive from home, so I pulled out a U.S. map and a protractor, put the point on Newtown, drew a semi-circle on the south side, consulted the college guide, and applied to colleges that were on, or arguably close to, the pencil line. UNC came up the winner (Duke was too much like Princeton. I'd just come from the original, I sure wasn't interested in a copy, complete with annoying people from Long Island).

  • Very nice. By the standards of Princeton Reunions, that is a classy jacket. Almost as nice as the design worn by 33-58-83.

  • feeblemind

    If no one is looking, I will come out of the closet long enough to admit to be a railroad geek. And I like factories too. You are quite right about the perceived weirdness factor. On the perceived weirdness scale, liking trains and/or factories is just a notch more respectable than cross dressing, I think. I blame our interest on some sort of combination of recessive genes.