What to Wear?!?!

Women have it EASY.  Pick a white dress off the rack, get the opinion of your 15 closest friends and family members, PLUS the guidance of a professional whose only job it is to put women in white dresses...  Have it fitted to your exact body size and proportions.  Try it on and get more opinions AGAIN...  How can you go wrong?  Not to mention the inborn sense of style ever girl is instilled with at birth.  Guys, on the other hand, are forced to sail into dark, uncharted waters, pretty much on their own.

[editor's note: the previous paragraph is meant for entertainment purposes only and should not be taken seriously on any level.  It does not necessarily reflect the thoughts or opinions of this blog's author.  Furthermore, the blog's author realizes and appreciates the incredible amount of time, effort and thought that goes into a bride's preparation for her wedding day, even if the said bride in question needs no special preparation to be perfectly beautiful in every way.]

Renting a tux?  Most likely, your only previous experience with these monkey suits was for your junior prom 10 years ago.  What are the current styles?  Colors?  Fabrics?  Cuts?  Two buttons or three?  What sort of shoes?  And then... you have to put on the exact same shirt and pants some other dude spent last weekend in sweating in.  Gross.

What if you're not wearing a tux?  Then you're completely on your own.  This is the route I'm taking, admittedly by choice.  A tux would be too formal for our lake-side ceremony, and the last time I wore a rented tux last fall I ended up with an awful rash around my neck for two days after.  Not something I wanted to risk repeating during my honeymoon.  So my wedding attire of choice is a simple suit.  One I already own, in fact.  In an effort to make is special and match our wedding as closely as possible, I needed a few other garments to complete the look.

I had it in my brain pretty early on that I wanted a pair of bright blue Converse.  I've never worn this style shoe before in my life, and have no particular attachment to them or concrete reason for wanting to wear them, beyond the fact that I think they're sort of cool and would work with our casual-ish wedding.  So early on in our preparation I found a pair of "skydiver blue" Converse, and picked them up.

Larissa's dress has a bright blue sash, though not the same shade as my shoes.  It made sense to find a shirt that matched Larissa's sash.  After a bit of searching, we lucked out and found a shirt that matches it EXACTLY.  Score (insert a bit of ordering and returning because the store didn't have my size in stock.  We eventually got it right).

So now I have a blue shirt and a different shade of blue shoes, and a charcoal gray suit.  Next on the list was a tie.  We found a couple different options, and brought them home to try.  The first was black and bright pink (another wedding color) but really didn't work at all.  Next up was a black & blue that matched the shirt great, but left the shoes looking sort of out of place.  Just this weekend I picked up a solid blue tie that matches the shoes, and still looks good with the shirt.  So now we're set.  It was a lot of trial and error, but now I'm confident I'll look at least half as good as Larissa will in her beautiful gown.

~Tim