Alan Ilagan

Being that I’m back in Boston for the next few days, I decided to post a few website promo desktop photos from one of my last stays in the condo, specifically in the back-end bedroom portion, which is now one of my favorite havens.

Like the front of the condo, the back bedroom has been through a number of  transitions. It started out stark white, and back in 1995 I was not having a boring boudoir, so I doused it – walls and ceiling – in bold, deep blue. We’re talking a brilliant, some might say blinding, hue of blue. I thought that sponging a few cloudbursts of white onto the ceiling would soften it. (I won’t testify to the effectiveness of that, but it did add a whimsical touch.)

After painting myself into a blue corner, the room was dim no matter how much light I poured into it (which was a substantial bit, thanks to those at-the-time-ubiquitous 500 watt halogen college floor lamps). My solution, in an admitted lapse of taste and judgment, was to fill the place with light furniture, choosing… drum-roll-of-embarrassment… white wicker. Yes, I wrote that correctly. A bedroom of white wicker furniture. In Boston. I can’t even cry Florida foul. And one of the pieces of white wicker? An armoire. Oh yeah. The one saving grace of all this wicker? I could move it all around by myself, practically with one hand. (I won’t mention the zebra-pattern bedspread in the middle of all this.)

Needless to say, after living there a few years, one of the first rooms to be re-painted was that blue bedroom, clouds and all, and we went back to plain white, rendering the white wicker furniture useless.

Today, there is a rustic set of worn, wooden furniture – warm in the afternoon sunlight, and picking up the amber shades of the hardwood floor. On the bed is a slate blue duvet cover from Calvin Klein, officially christened “Bamboo” but more widely known as the Carrie Bradshaw cover. (It was decidedly NOT selected because of that, however.) Recently, I made a tufted headboard of dupioni silk, in a muted burnt  raw umber shade bordering on gray, that picks up a bit of the duvet, as well as the silk shade of a bedside table lamp.

It is here where we will spend the weekend. A perfect getaway at the end of summer.

I’ve been given the chance to carry my catty snarkiness to PinstripeMag.com - where they promote, “Genius. Gear. Girls. Gadgets.” I guess I’m contributing to the “Gear” part with a few fashion reviews (because I’m certainly not hitting any G-spots).

I started with a blurb about the Prada mesh vests that I was on the fence about and most recently gave my take on the new Calvin Klein campaign starring Kellan Lutz (whom I had not heard of before this). The site is sort of an online Maxim, but looking beyond the scantily-women there is some useful info on men’s fashion and accessories, and this is the part that interests me.

And for those who know and care, here is Kellan Lutz in all his Calvin Klein glory:

I’m a big fan of underwear, and I make it a rule to never leave home without it. However, there comes a time in every man’s life when he must forego his skivvies and, like Brooke Shields in those Calvin Klein ads so many decades ago, do without something between him and his Calvins. Whether it’s from lack of clean laundry, poor luggage packing, or simple forgetfulness, we’ve all had to do without at one point or another. Today was that day for me.

My usual habit is to put whatever I’m going to wear in the bathroom while I take my morning shower (particularly in the winter, when running around naked is not so much fun as it is an episode of Bear Grylls-like Arctic survival – minus the homemade enema and animal dropping appetizers). This includes my underwear (as it is, like my outfits, selected the night before so as to avoid mismatches made in the poor light and mental fatigue of early morning). For whatever reason, the underwear I had selected last night – a simple pair of striped boxer briefs from Banana Republic, in a soft shade of green– did not make it into the bathroom with me this morning.

Sure, I could have walked across the hall and found them, but I didn’t bother. It’s not like I’ve never gone commando before (though it’s usually on a spur-of-the-moment trip to the store or something, not for an entire work day).

It wasn’t a totally disagreeable experience. I was expecting to freeze certain body parts off, but I’m pleased to report that everything is still intact. It was made bearable by the type of pants I had on too – this wouldn’t have worked nearly as well in jeans or wool. As it was, my pants were mostly-cotton, and worn in enough to be softer than most of the regular boxers I wear.

Even so, this isn’t a practice I’m going to continue. I’ve invested too much time, effort, and money into amassing a sizable collection of undergarments to ever give them up. Our Latin teacher had a silly joke that she used to make all the time: Semper Ubi, Sub Ubi. Literal translation: “Always Where, Under Where.” She was so ahead of her time, if a little ridiculous.