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Oscar Isaac is a man of many useful hacks. It is he who figured out how to eat Cheetos without staining your fingers. It is he who figured out that the key to casual Friday isn’t dressing up your dress-down clothes, but dressing down your dress-up clothes. This week on Late Night with Seth Meyers, Isaac silently demoed another style solve. On the show he wore a classic, single-breasted navy suit styled in such a way that it was ready for spring in form and prepared for winter in function. This just so happens to be the key to transitional dressing: hope for the best, prepare for the worst.
Under his suit Isaac wore one of the great icons of the warm-weather season: the striped T-shirt. Specifically an $85 T-shirt from Mr Porter’s excellent in-house line, Mr P. Then, instead of derby shoes, loafers, or clean tennis shoes with bare ankles, all appropriate choices for this sort of nautical-inspired combo, he laced up in some heavy, black military-style boots—the kind of boots you wear when it’s cold as hell and it may of may not snow later. The look had springtime energy without being naive about the fact that the first day of spring isn’t actually until tomorrow. It was smart.
It’s tempting to break out your lightest, breeziest clothes as soon as the temperature starts peaking at 70 but this can easily end in disaster. Visible shivering. Impromptu H&M purchases. Expensive Uber rides. That sort of thing. Segue into spring with lighter, brighter colors and prints, with good T-shirts, before going full espadrille-season on everyone. Like all great style hacks this move isn’t hard to master—and sometimes a bit of common sense is all your style needs.
