What My Grandfather’s Closet Looked Like the Last Time I Saw It

On forty years of careful ownership, the specific things that survive decades of wearing, and the standard I have been trying to meet ever since.

Photo by ASR Design Studio on Unsplash

My grandfather died in October 2009 and I helped my father and my aunt clear the house in the two weeks after the funeral. My grandfather’s closet was one of the last things we cleared, not because it was the most difficult emotionally — though it was — but because it took the longest to go through properly, and going through it properly was what my grandfather would have expected.

The closet was organized with the specificity of a man who had been organizing it for forty years. Suits on the left, grouped by weight: summer wools on the far left, then the mid-weights, then the flannel. Shirts folded on the shelf above, not hung — my grandfather was from a generation that folded dress shirts because hanging them on wire hangers distorted the collar, and he had maintained this practice after wire hangers became the standard. Shoes on the floor in a row, each pair in a flannel bag or a cotton drawstring bag, each bag labeled in my grandfather’s handwriting with the contents and the year of purchase.

The year of purchase on the shoe bags. I think about this. My grandfather bought a pair of shoes and noted the year because the year was information he intended to use — to know how long he had owned them, to understand the expected remaining life, to have a record of when Mr Abrams had last seen them, because shoes went to Mr Abrams for stretching and polishing on the same schedule the suits went to him for pressing. The shoes were not things he owned. They were objects he was in a relationship with.

The oldest shoes in the closet were from 1971. They were a pair of black cap-toe Oxfords, still wearable at thirty-eight years old, the leather cracked at the vamp in the small way that leather that has been properly cared for cracks rather than the large way that leather that has been neglected cracks. My grandfather had worn them to my father’s college graduation. He had worn them to several funerals. He had worn them to every significant event that required black formal shoes from 1971 until he could no longer manage the stairs to the church.

I took the shoes and the two suits and three of the shirts and left everything else for my father and aunt to distribute. The shoes are too small for me by half a size. I keep them anyway. I look at them when I am thinking about what I am trying to do with the clothes I own and the relationship I am trying to have with the things I wear.

The standard my grandfather met without thinking about it — the careful ownership, the relationship with people who knew his clothes as well as he did, the specific expectation that something bought with care would last decades rather than seasons — is a standard that the current market does not particularly support. Everything about the incentive structure of contemporary clothing retail is designed to produce the opposite of the 1971 black Oxfords in a labeled bag on a closet floor: short ownership cycles, low attachment, fast replacement. The man who uses his things the way my grandfather used his is a consumer anomaly.

I am trying to be that anomaly. The Alden boots are heading toward the 1971 Oxfords at whatever pace a pair of boots accumulates time. The grey flannel suit is somewhere in the middle of its expected life. The Red Wing 875s have been going for thirteen years and have a full resole still in them. I do not have a tailor I have known for forty years yet. I am working on it. Raphael has known my suits for four. That is a start.