Nick Jimenez

Sunday, June 11, 2000

Fashion trend comes home

When it comes to the constant change in clothing fashions, it's all like the sound of a distant battle to me: I hear the occasional rumble of cannons and rattle of muskets, but I never go there.
   I decided long ago how I want to look, and usually it's not like those anorexics in the men's fashion magazines. I've been wearing the same type of shoe since I left the service. It's just a matter of whether it's going to be a brown loafer or a black loafer.
   I still consider the button-down shirt a trendsetter. And that shirt will be any shade of white or blue. I once bought a purple shirt - the packaging said "eggplant," but it was purple - and my wife began checking my pockets for suspicious notes.
   My luck with fashionable casual clothes is no better. Polo shirts, thank God, are still in fashion or I would be prisoner to what, in my opinion, has been a fashion run of clothes that looks like what I used to wear to cut the lawn. I used to wear my jeans to a nice faded condition: now they buy them that way. And we're talking T-shirts as formal wear and shirts made to hang outside pants, pants that are baggy enough to hide a small family.
   Then, recently, my son came in and said, "Hey, Dad, I bought a new shirt. Do you like it?"
   Prepared to deal with another one of those clothing items fashioned to the taste of the most current rap star artist, I sidled over.
   There he stood before me and I had to rub my eyes. This shirt was worn outside the pants, all right, but it was neat and sharp, with four pockets in front and pleats.
   Yes, it was a guayabera.
   The guayabera has come and gone, come and gone again and now - is it possible? - it's making a comeback on the strength of the surge in things Latino. Of course, my son didn't know he was wearing a guayabera. To him it was only a cool fashion item.
   And where had he purchased this shirt? Old Navy, a national chain that caters to the tastes of young people.
   No sooner had my son donned his new shirt than I saw a large ad for a major department store advertising, surprise!, guayaberas.
   Why this new interest in a shirt long associated with Cuba, the Caribbean and Latin America? It's part of the craze over everything Latin from Mexican beer to Jennifer Lopez-tight dresses to Ricky Martin and to guayaberas, says Demographics magazine.
   According to the July, 1999 issue, guayabera shirts are showing up in hip design lines and even in mainstream lines like Donna Karan. To quote Demographics, "The boxy, short-sleeved, lightweight shirts were once only popular with old Cuban men because they're extremely comfortable and because of the big breast pocket, perfect for storing cigars. But now kids everywhere, from Miami's South Beach to New York's hip Lower East Side, are sporting the shirts."
   Who knew? For once, here is a fashion item that makes sense. In South Texas, wearing suits and ties is going against nature itself. Where else in the civilized world do we take off our coats outside and put them on inside? But with a guayabera, say, topped with a snazzy Panama hat, we're ready to take on global warming mano a mano.
   Bob McCracken, a former columnist for this newspaper, made it his personal campaign to eliminate ties as a mode of dress in South Texas. It's just too hot. I have always agreed with that, but the alternative has been to look like we just came off the 18th green.
   Of course, in Latin America, guayabera shirts have never gone out of fashion. Even Fidel Castro wears them on occasion for those affairs where his military duds don't quite fit the bill. And Mexican presidential candidates usually don guayabera shirts to indicate they are one with the people.
   Move over, son. I'm hip. I'm happening. I'm now. I'm with you on the guayaberas. Now, should I get the blue or white painter's shorts?
  

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