Utility and Fashion
Ask about belts, and you’re likely to get a soporific and homogeneous response: Make sure it matches your shoes. Few give the belt the consideration it warrants. Start looking, though, and you’ll find all kinds of interesting information about the belt’s utility and how to wear it with style.
The Purpose of the Belt
The belt’s primary purpose is utilitarian: It keeps your pants from falling down. Jethro BoDean of the Beverly Hillbillies illustrated this principle when he fashioned a rope as a belt; we can’t think of one episode when it failed him.
We’ve known others well outside the Beverly Hills set (and hardly hillbillies) who used masking tape to keep their pants up, even though it may look gauche.
Of course, there are equally gauche and far less utilitarian purposes for belts. Members of the World Wrestling Federation look at the belt as a symbol of power and success.
Still others are sensitively attuned to the utility as well as the style a belt confers its wearer. Construction workers wear belts over their belts and fill them with tools. The result? International recognition as a symbol of sex.
Batman and Robin wore belts, drawing devices from them on a regular basis that saved untold lives in Gotham City.
Martial artists use belts to recognize levels of mastery. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the highest level is the black belt. Black isn’t only a classy all-purpose color, it looks good on almost everyone.
How to Wear Your Belt
More typically, we blend function and fashion in our belts. We want to keep our pants up, but we also want a belt that reflects our sense of style.
Casual experts on fashion offer a range of advice for wearing belts. Says one music industry insider in Los Angeles: “Wear dress belts with suit pants but never with jeans. Wear casual belts with jeans but never with dress pants. Wear a knotted piece of cord if attending a hayride.” Ha ha!
A San Francisco fashionista known for stylish and colorful casual outfits says: “Belts should match shoes and other accessories and always wear a belt with jeans (because they’ll look bad and unfinished without). Women can go thin or thick, dangly or tight. Men are pretty much reigned in by the beltloops unless they’re going for a haute couture look.”
Not everyone agrees the belt should match the accessories: “Everyone has their own style, but some things can be too matching,” a fashion designer who likes mixing colors in a strange (and marvelous) way tells us. “Some people go for a more eclectic mix by playing with different accessories. Be daring. Now’s the time.”
Men are advised to match the leather of the belt with the quality of the garment. Says a longtime style maven: “If you are wearing a lighter weight, tropical wool, gabardine, or shark skin suit, something with a sheen to it, that should also be reflected in your footwear and also your belt. The opposite is also true. If you are wearing a heavier weight of wool, tweed, or corduroy, a duller shoe and belt (suede, pebble grain, nubuck) will complement the overall look. In casual circumstances, anything goes.”
Our privacy policy is simple. We will not provide, rent, or make available in any way, our customer information to any parties outside of SUSA, Inc. Period. All customer information is stored offline in an encrypted format in a secure data environment. No personally identifiable information is collected on visitors to our site.... Privacy Policy
Copyright 2009 SUSA, Inc. - Solis
Yahoo Store Designed and Developed by Ydeveloper.com (A Kaushalam Company)
