How to dress like a rich hobo

“Bring a blanket,” a friend suggested when issuing the dinner invitation. “The place has heaters and covering, but it’ll be cold in the plastic tent.”

So I brought a blanket — one of those acrylic “stadium” blankets, a gift from the place where I got my most recent set of tires. The logo was emblazoned on the blanket, as was the tag line, “Let Our Rubber Meet Your Road.”

Everyone else in my party arrived with what I now know are called “cashmere throws.” Theirs had logos, too: a big “H” for Hermes, swoopy cursive for Loro Piana, that sort of thing. While the rest of us see a pandemic, with a rising infection rate and newer, deadlier strains appearing all over the world, New Yorkers see an opportunity to flash a little money.

Wrapped up in my cheap giveaway blanket, I felt exactly as I did a few years ago when I went to a fancy store on a Saturday afternoon to buy a suit.

Before I went to the store, though, I took the dog to the dog park and replaced a bunch of ceiling-high lightbulbs in my house, meaning I had to find the ladder, which was around the side of the house collecting mud and rain dirt. This left streaks across my T-shirt, so when I finally walked into the fancy men’s store covered in dirt, dog hair, and the general squalor of a busy Saturday afternoon, I had a hard time getting anyone to help me out.

I looked like a hobo. And hobos don’t need suits, as was clearly the thinking among the store’s staff.

Wait. We’re allowed to say “hobo,” right? I suppose the approved phrase is something like “currently unhoused person” or, maybe, “independent freelance recycling activist,” but “hobo” more accurately captures the look I was sporting that day.

I was expecting to meet my brother at the store, and when he arrived, I was fuming about the lack of chop-chop service I was getting at this pricey boutique. He asked me to look carefully into the three-way mirror and tell him what I saw looking back at me.

“Oh,” I said, really seeing myself for the first time that day. “I look like a hobo. No wonder I’m getting the high hat.”

It was a simple image problem: The people in the store assumed that a hobo doesn’t need a suit, just a place to sit down for a moment. As long as he doesn’t get unruly, we ignore him and he’ll move on.

So the brother and the hobo left the store and walked a few blocks to Sulka — now long gone, but at the time a spectacularly expensive and superdeluxe men’s shop — where the salespeople were trained to ignore the clothes a customer was wearing and focus on his watch instead. A hobo wearing an expensive watch isn’t a hobo. The hobo is a slob with money.

Some people feel the same about cars. A writer I know hasn’t worked in a long time, and his career-energizing decision was to cash in a portion of his retirement savings and buy himself a new car.

This was an odd choice, really. I speak as someone who happily drives a Subaru Outback, which I recognize makes me look like a folk singer on the way to a day job at a women’s bookstore. But in reality, no one I do business with ever really sees my car.

In every business situation, the process is more or less the same: You park in the parking garage, and you take the elevator up.

I could be driving a Rolls-Royce, I could be driving a 1993 Buick Skylark, or I could be driving a clown car. No one would know. When I mentioned this to the writer, he nodded sagely and then showed us his new zillion-dollar watch.

I’m in no position to make fun of his outrageously expensive watch, as I have recently purchased a $2,500 cashmere blanket that will allow me to go to expensive Manhattan restaurants and dine outside, near the gutter and the rats, like a stylish and elegant hobo.

Rob Long is a television writer and producer and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.