I was meeting some animators at a crowded restaurant. We were doing a funny, offbeat animated television project together, but we had never met in person. It was lunchtime, and as people kept streaming into the place, I kept scanning the crowd for the animator guys. I had no idea how I’d recognize them — until they walked in.
One of them was a huge guy, tall and round and completely disheveled, wearing a T-shirt that ended about 4 inches before his pants began, exposing an ivory-white belly. His hair was curly and stuck out, making him look like the world’s fattest hydrangea.
The other was a tiny guy in green felt pants with a cowboy shirt, a funny pointed hat, brightly polished shoes, and a little leather satchel with four brass buckles.
Ah, yes, I said to myself. Those guys are the animators.
People, in other words, tend to dress the part.
Some fashion industry gossips like to tell the story about Anna Wintour, the editor and president-for-life of Vogue magazine, showing up once to a function in a dress that still had one or two pieces of foil covering some of the buttons, which is what they do at the dry cleaner before they put your clothes in the chemical drum.
She had forgotten to remove them, and somehow, no one else noticed. Or maybe they did and were too terrified of her to say anything. Or maybe they did and hated her so much they wanted to embarrass her.
I’m not sure I know why that would be embarrassing, though. Normal people go to the dry cleaner, and it follows that someone as clothing-obsessed as Wintour would have a nonstop parade of deliveries and pickups from her (probably really expensive) cleaners and would require a couple of wardrobe changes a day. A little foil wrapping here and there just sends the message that Wintour does not use Shout Wipes and a little spritz of Febreze to keep her clothes fresh, like some I might mention.
Dressing the part doesn’t always mean looking perfect.
For example, early in my career, I went to the first reading of my first television series in a new jacket.
I bought the jacket the way you sometimes buy things for a special occasion. “I need a jacket for this big reading,” I thought as I imagined the scene as being fraught with complicated signals and important flags to plant in the ground. Which it was: The first reading of a television series represents several million dollars of studio and network money. Gathered around the table and lining the walls are executives and agents and managers and an entire constellation of people whose job it is, essentially, to watch me do my job and tell me later that I’m doing it wrong.
So it’s a good idea to signal to those folks that you’ve got this thing handled.
The jacket, I thought, would make me look and feel powerful. The jacket, paired with a coffee mug and a pencil behind the ear, would paint exactly the right picture: a casual guy on the go, a young writer who’s relaxed and in command.
Except I forgot to remove the tag.
Well, not the tag but that thing they put on the sleeve by the cuff, the playing-card-sized thing that says the size and the fabric and some meaningless other numbers. Somehow, in my excitement about the day, I forgot to remove that thing. Instead of looking like a sleek and dapper young show-business powerhouse, I looked like a guy who just stole a jacket.
“You’ve got the thing still on,” an older writer said to me quietly as I took my seat at the table. He pointed to the tag, which I immediately started to pull at.
“I was trying to look cool,” I muttered.
“You don’t. You look like a writer. And you can always tell who the writer is,” he said, as I yanked the tag off, taking with it a large patch of fabric, “in any room, in any outfit.”
It’s true that people always dress the part. Sometimes, unfortunately, they don’t know what part it is.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
