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Hey Sid!

The Mix: Pairing Shirts & Sweaters

Hey Sid!

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“Hey Sid. I'm starting to think about gifts for my sons. Last year I came in around Christmas and the men in the store pointed me toward a table of shirt-and-sweater combinations. I think it might go over a little better if the pairings come from you, rather than me. Any suggestions?” - Nancy

Tom and Sid around the Ping Pong table in the Atlanta shop pairing up sweaters and sport shirts. There are an array of flannels, plaids, and checks, while the sweaters lean pretty neutral (lots of taupes and greys) save one striped sweater towards the bottom right.
with the master mixer himself, Mr. Tom Jackson 

Nancy, wow. It is November 19. You are ahead of the game when it comes to the holidays… I have enjoyed putting shirts and sweaters together for several decades now… just about as long as I've been working. So this is gonna be fun.

There was this fantastic old-school haberdashery in Jackson called The Rogue, where I would work on breaks from college. The next rung of the ladder up from my high school gig at Busick’s over in Pearl, Mississippi. Anyway, the Rogue was a very formative place for me. All year round — but especially around this time of year — women would come in looking for our help with a gift. “I need something for my son/brother/boyfriend/husband/dad/granddad…” – any special guy in their life. So we’d come back with a shirt and you could tell by the look on their face, it didn't feel like quite enough. Same thing if we’d come back with a sweater. On its own, each piece wasn't quite enough. It wanted a friend.

So I figured out pretty quickly if we came with a combo of the two, that was the ticket. And it was not intended as an upsell… I didn't even know what upselling was. (Fortysomething years later I'm still not that comfortable with it.) It was a customer service piece… a way of spinning a gift to feel slightly more curated than just a random shirt the salesman brought to you. Even if it's the same shirt-and-sweater combo he's bringing everyone, the mix makes it feel more special.

Some people would try to stretch out the unwrapping ceremony and get two gift boxes – other women loved the presentation element of putting the shirt inside the sweater and folding them together in a single. Selfishly, I would have rather received two boxes myself but no one was asking me (and I was trying not to overwhelm the wrapping team, Helen Puckett and Vicki Pickle.)

The world is filled with things that are better combined. I could run down a rabbit hole with so many ways this works: food (peanut butter and chocolate) people (you and your better half)… but if you'll indulge me for a second, my very favorite rabbit hole is music. Warning: you may have to take some time off from work to watch the following video… it’s a tad long!

I was blown away by this video I saw recently on Instagram breaking down the making of David Bowie's Space Oddity. The magic of the multitrack. JJ Blair, who is this producer and engineer, isolates each of the 8 tracks that make up this total masterpiece of a song. It's been one of my all-time favorites since it came out, but I have a whoooooole new appreciation for it now. The story is that Tony Visconti was producing the album but he was not down to produce the song. He thought it was a gimmick. DB hadn't even had a real hit yet! I can only imagine. “Yeah, right, they're doing a space launch and you're wanting to do a space song? Like, okay, David, why don't you write them a jingle?George Martin said no, too. Eventually they got Gus Dudgeon to do it.
Are you still with me? I promise it's worth it.

But there's a whole cast of characters on each of those 8 tracks and each one is practically a star in its own right. There are so many elements that they've got to pair up. The drums and the bass share a track (Terry Cox on drums, I don't think I'd fully appreciated that bassline until now; JJ says he could do a whole video on just Herbie Flowers' bass)… the guitar and the stylophone share a track (Mark Bolan of T.Rex made him figure out how to squeeze the stylophone in there)… the cello and the flute share a track (Tony Visconti did wind up playing the flute)… the harmonies and the Mellotron share a track (allegedly Rick Wakeman did this in one take!)… anyway, I could go on. You can watch the whole video if you're as into this kind of thing as I am. But the point is, everyone is playing their part. And as much as I love the full thing, hearing these parts paired up on individual tracks makes it all feel a little more magical to me. Hey, kinda like sweaters and shirts. For me, anyway.

But back to your question, and apologies for the tangent. I still have a lot of fun pairing shirts and sweaters together, and find it easiest to do it in person… so I went over to the Atlanta shop and got to work on the ping pong table. I got some help from the inimitable Tom Jackson, who has been selling menswear for decades. Here's 8 combos — in the spirit of Space Oddity, let's call them 8 tracks — that got us really excited. We even added a bonus piece on the last one in case you really want to step things up and throw in a tie.

Nancy, thank you — this was FUN. I don't know how many sons you've got, or if any of them care about clothes, or David Bowie… but hopefully there's a combo or two in here that'll feel right to you. And if not, holler back to us and we'll dial in the right mix.

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