I’m Luis. Welcome to North Collar,
Twenty-Four Years of the Same Haircut
I kept the same side part from 1998 until I was thirty-nine. Same part, same length, same six words at the barber every five weeks: “just clean it up a little.”
Danny, who has run a two-chair shop on Fulton Street since the first Clinton term, finally said something. He didn’t tell me the cut was bad. He said it belonged to a guy who didn’t live here anymore.
I sat with that for about four months before I did anything about it.
The Part Where a Barber Ruins Your Life for Your Own Good
I was forty when I started paying attention. Not to fashion. To the gap between how I thought I looked and how I actually looked in a photo somebody else took.
There’s a specific version of this that hits men around our age. Your face changes shape. Your hairline moves or thins or goes gray at the temples, which happened to me at thirty-seven, on the left side first. Your shoulders drop a little. The shirt that fit you at thirty-two now pulls in one place and hangs in another, and nobody tells you, because who would.
So you keep buying the same shirt. In the same size. From the same store you’ve been going to since your first real job.
North Collar started because I got tired of that being the whole plan.
The Advice Out There Wasn’t Written for Us
I spent a year reading men’s style content before I wrote a word of my own. Most of it was made for twenty-six-year-olds with flat stomachs, full hairlines, and the freedom to look a little ridiculous on a Tuesday.
The rest was the opposite problem. Beige. Safe. Golf polo energy. Written as if turning forty meant filing paperwork to stop caring.
Neither one helped me figure out what to do about a jawline that’s softer than it used to be, or a scalp that shows at the crown under office lighting, or the question of whether a man my age can wear a tee shirt without a collar to dinner. That last one took me embarrassingly long to answer. The answer is yes, if it fits at the shoulder and the sleeve stops mid-bicep.
That’s the space this site sits in. Grown men, real bodies, real hairlines, actual calendars with actual obligations on them.
What I’m Working With
I sold menswear wholesale for thirteen years. Mid-market label, nothing you’d recognize, and my territory was Ohio, Michigan, and the top half of Indiana. Roughly forty independent shops, four times a year, in a Camry with sample cases in the back seat.
That job taught me what a catalog can’t. I watched owners refuse to stock a jacket because the armhole was cut too low for their customers. I heard the same complaint in Toledo and Fort Wayne and Grand Rapids: the man who walks in is forty-five, he’s thicker through the middle than he was, and almost nothing on the rack accounts for that.
After the label folded, I spent three years at my brother-in-law’s alterations counter. Rosa ran the machines and taught me the only thing that actually matters, which is that fit is a shoulder measurement and everything below the shoulder is negotiable with a tailor and eleven dollars.
The hair side I learned slower, mostly by asking barbers questions they weren’t expecting. I’ve now sat down with fourteen of them across five states. Danny still cuts my hair. I drive forty minutes for it.
What You’ll Find Here
Four things, mostly:
- Outfit breakdowns for specific situations. Not “smart casual” as a concept. What to wear to your kid’s graduation in August heat, what to wear when you’re the oldest guy at the offsite, what to wear when you’ve lost eighteen pounds and none of it fits yet.
- Fit, explained in inches. Shoulder seams, sleeve length, rise, break. I give numbers because “should fit well” is not information.
- Hair for hairlines that are changing. Cuts that work with recession instead of pretending it isn’t happening, what a good barber can do about a thinning crown, and how to talk about gray without defaulting to a box of dye.
- What I bought and whether it was worth it. Including the jacket I paid too much for in 2021 and still keep the receipt of, in a drawer, as a reminder.
Things That Say More About Me Than I’d Like
I keep a spreadsheet of sixty-one shirts. Columns for shoulder seam width, sleeve length, and whether the second button sits right. Yes, I measured them all. It took a Sunday.
I own nine pairs of the same navy chino in two waist sizes, because I know my weight moves about twelve pounds across a year and I’d rather solve that problem once.
I can’t wear round-toe shoes. Something about my feet. I’ve accepted it.
I’m forty-two. I still read paper catalogs at the kitchen table on Saturday mornings, which my wife finds funny and I find calming.
How Everything Here Gets Checked Before You Read It
I don’t publish anything I haven’t verified. Product claims get checked against the manufacturer or my own hands on the item, and when I’m quoting a barber or a tailor, I go back to them and confirm I got it right before it goes live.
Every article on North Collar is reviewed and edited by me for accuracy and plain language. If a piece is confusing, that’s my failure, and I’d rather catch it than let you catch it.
Style advice ages badly. Fit standards shift, products get discontinued, a cut that was easy to ask for in 2023 gets blank stares in 2026. So I go back through older posts on a schedule and update what’s changed, and I note when a piece was last touched.
When there’s an affiliate link, I say so, plainly, on the page. When something is sponsored, I label it as sponsored. I’ve turned down four partnerships since starting this site because I couldn’t honestly tell you the product was good. I’ll keep doing that, because the whole thing falls apart the second you can’t trust what I say about a jacket.
If You’re Standing in Front of Your Closet Right Now
You probably don’t need a new wardrobe. You most likely need three or four things that actually fit you, and one haircut that matches the face you have now instead of the one you had in your thirties.
That’s a much smaller problem than it feels like at 7:20 in the morning.
I’m at luis@northcollar.com, and I answer my own email. Send me the thing you’re stuck on.
Luis