Downtown Rochester has covered itself in lights every winter since 2006, when the first show used 500,000 of them; it now runs about 1.5 million from late November to mid-January. For six weeks the town fills with people who park, walk a few blocks in the cold, go into a warm restaurant, and come out again. That sequence, cold-warm-cold, is a specific problem, and it is not solved by a heavier suit.
Why not a heavier suit
Because the walk is ten minutes and the dinner is two hours. Dress the suit for the cold and you spend the evening indoors overheating in it, which shows: a man in too much cloth sits differently and photographs worse under all those lights. Dress it for the room and solve the ten minutes with a coat.
What the coat asks of the jacket
One thing. The jacket has to come out from under the coat without a fold across the back, which is a question of how well it fits through the shoulders rather than what it cost.
Under a million lights
Colored light is unkind to anything shiny and generous to texture, so a cloth with some surface is the December choice. Signature Wool, $259 to $299, is where to look.
Also for Rochester Hills: The M-59 Corridor: A Desk at Nine, a Plant Floor at Two. More on style consulting, or plan your visit to our Oak Park showroom.
