East Village Afternoon

8. David Letterman's White Socks
Yes, we get it, Dave, you're brilliantly funny, immensely talented, rich and powerful and it's most likely that no one will touch your gift as a talk show host for generations to come. Then why in god's name do you insist on looking like such a fucking dork every night by wearing white socks with a dark suit?
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You know that Letterman has an army of handlers, people who make a nice living just by selecting Dave's clothes and telling him what to wear. And you know those same people cringe every night as they watch him reach for those white socks. You can also imagine what happens to those people when they try to tell him to try some dark socks. And Letterman is not a stupid man, you know he has to know better. It's almost like something happened in his childhood, maybe he wore white socks with dark pants to school one day and the older boys made fun of him and stuffed him in a trash can. So now Dave gets his "Fuck you!" revenge on those schoolyard bullies every night of his working life. Well, that's sad and all, Dave, but maybe you should get some self-respect, can the ridiculous fashion statements and save your adolescent revenge fantasies for a psychiatrist's couch. I mean, there are some fashion rules which are flexible, but then there are those that if you break them, you end up looking like a backwoods hillbilly who just got off the turnip truck from a trailer park in Alabama, wearing white socks.

(the last time long shorts looked good: 1954)

Shorts Gone Bad!

And while we're on men's fashion, we'll throw in one more thing that is way past its time to go. Knee length men's shorts. Holy shit, guys, basketball players first starting wearing longer shorts in the early '90's; that's at least fifteen years ago. And you still think it looks cool to wear long shorts? No! No, it doesn't. Men's shorts are slowly starting to go shorter, at least to mid-thigh length. And the guys who still parade around in knee-length shorts are starting to look like they're wearing clown pants. It's especially strange considering that so many guys in the gym wearing little to nothing on their upper bodies, yet they cling to those long Bozo shorts. Ditto for the beach: "I'm not wearing a shirt, look my hot pecs, but don't dare look at my legs, then you might be gay, and I might be gay for inviting you to look at my legs!" See how fucked up this is? It's as if it's somehow acceptable in the male culture to be admired for one part of one's body, but definitely not another part of the same body. You're a man if you show off your pecs and biceps, but you're gay if you show off your thighs. Wow! It's especially sad when so many gay men continue down the wrong fashion path because they're so desperately trying to look straight. Calling Dr. Freud!

So come on, guys, get with it, put some scissors to those embarrassing looking long shorts. As we mentioned in an earlier paragraph, people who make social mistakes don't realize they're making them while they're making them, they only realize it years later. So we're here to rescue you, now, from a future in which your children will look at your photographs in 2008 and ask, "Why did Daddy join the circus?"