Weddings are the one time when you should go the extra style-mile to make sure you look your best, but it’s a road paved with pitfalls.
Staggered – the experts in
No sniggering at the back. We’re talking keys, wallets, mobile phones and cameras protruding through the pockets and ruining the line of your suit. Carry only the essentials and leave the rest in your room.
Have your grooms suit professionally pressed and keep it that way until you come to put it on. There’s nothing worse than a suit that looks like it’s been living on the bedroom floor for a month on your wedding day.
It’s a moment’s mistake that can ruin the day, so assess each situation for its stain-creating potential. Hold the baby? No sir! Ice cream cone? Only with a bib! Breakfast of bolognaise? Put that spaghetti-twirling fork down!
As a rule of thumb, black shoes work with navy, gray and black suits. Tan shoes work with navy suits but rarely with black. On your wedding day, it’s likely you’ll be wearing a new pair of shoes, but, for the sake of comfort, make sure you break them in first by wearing them around the house. You won’t look good if you’re wincing in pain and oozing a trail of blister juice down the aisle.
Not unless you’re wearing a white suit and white shoes. And you definitely shouldn’t be wearing a white suit unless your name is John Travolta, Martin Bell or The Man From Del Monte.
Spend more than £20 on your style at the hairdressers. Go to a place where they insist on washing your barnet and where the reading material on offer is GQ, not Nuts. And do it a week or two before the wedding, so if everything goes horribly wrong you have time to get it cut again or let it grow out slightly.
Match the tie and shirt carefully, and don’t be afraid to ask for more opinions if you haven’t got a clue. If it’s matching wedding ties you’re after then speak to Swagger and Swoon and say hi from Staggered and they’ll treat your right.
A well-fitted suit will hide a multitude of sins, masking your unsightly bits and emphasising the, er, sightly bits. A badly fitted suit will do one of two things: have the effect of a sausage skin, squeezing flesh into hideous lumps, or make you look like the boy at the end of Big, when Zoltar has returned him to teenage form but he’s still wearing Tom Hanks-sized clothes. And that is not a good look for a wedding, or any time for that matter.
As a rule, a well-fitted suit will allow a full range of motion, both buttoned and unbuttoned. You should be able to fit one finger between your neck and your shirt collar when buttoned up and the arms of the shirt should not ride up when you stretch your arms.
Sweat patches are unsightly, embarrassing and deeply unsexy, and also very hard to get rid of once they’ve saturated the area under your armpits. When they do, the sweat spiral begins: you can’t remove your jacket for fear of people seeing them, but the jacket makes you hotter and hotter. Pretty soon, the microclimate in there is as humid as Madagascar in monsoon season. The key here is prevention: spray with industrial strength antiperspirant before you dress and take the can with you in case a top up is required later in the day. And remember, a dark shirt will hide the patches of even a profuse sweater.
One of the responsibilities of the best man is to see to it that your groom is the sharpest man in the room. You don’t need to be carrying around a hair dryer, but you should give him a glance over every now and then to cover off things like food in teeth, has his shirt come untucked, if he’s got food all over his face and even whether the drunken fool has forgotten to zip himself up. It’s truly a tough gig being the best man…
