So six years after everyone else i found out about how incredibly expensive john’s wardrobe is. I knew the shooting jacket was probably in the area of a couple hundred, but i never ever expected it to be 800 dollars.and a 3000 dollar watch??with his 300 dollar shoes??
Sherlocks entire outfit, from Belstaff, Spencer Heart suit, Yves Saint Laurent shoes barely equal out to just Johns watch, but then Sherlock’s watch is less than 100? It’s just… a normal watch. Tells time. Not good for water or heavy use, it just… tells time and looks nice.
So i go look at the first episode again, meeting him by surprise as Barts, Sherlock’s wearing a.. decent suit, I’ll admit I am not an expert here but it doesn’t look as crisp as others. Its wrinkly and a weird sort of material and not half as crisp as we see him looking in suits later on. Also that shirt is simply not his size, so either Sherlock bought the wrong size off the rack, it’s an old shirt he’s grown out of, and the collar is all mangled. Yes i know he was whipping a corpse, but
((also for the sake of all this hair discourse this weekend, ill make note that me and BC apparently have the same hair type and sometimes it just does this. up on one side, down on the other, cant do anything unless you shower again and start from scratch. This is a ‘fuckit, thats good enough’ hairday))
^^Look how pilly old and soft that scarf is! Sentiment Scarf, decades old or something cheap he got from the uk equivalent of Goodwill?
Then comes John in… this jacket doesn’t look too expensive to me, a couple hundred. A good jacket, though, has a nice lining lots of pockets and ostentatious wooden buttons.
I’m going to say that if its a notable brand then its old, pre-military service and noticeably so (to Sherlock), someone that had money for an expensive but not obscene jacket several years ago and could do with a better one now.
[[An Aside: When John says ‘I'm not the John watson you used to….” and looks down at his hand, we are meant to see his hand tremor, but it doesn't really tremble much, …. aaand we can see a glimpse of that expensive watch. I like @vanetti recent comment (which i cant find to actually confirm if i'm remembering source correctly) about ‘it may have been a gift from James Sholto, who we know has money’, because that’s the most painful moment for him to think about that, which makes it perfect for Jolto pain.]]
Sherlock says about Baker Street ‘Together we can afford it’ meaning Sherlock can’t afford it, meaning Sherlock is saying ‘the both of us are pretty broke, right? Let’s go halfsies’
So the next day Sherlock’s wearing a different suit, (still doesn’t fit) and we all know he’s the cutest eagerest puppy trying to impress John, all growly voiced and mysterious. Even in a platonic way, we can all agree he wanted to look cool for his interesting previously-wealthy, skilled and battle-hardened flatmate.
Later in the episode, he takes this expensive (but still reasonably priced, i would wager) suit and JUMPS IN DUMPSTERS WITH IT. For a man that needed a discount AND a flatmate and wears old pilly scarves and cheap watches (his is about 100 dollars and not good to get wet) i would say Sherlock does not treat his suits well. His suits, which are probably old. He takes off the jacket, which ought to stink of garbage juice, when he gets home, then puts the stink jacket back on to go eat at Angelo’s. This man doesn’t care about his suits.
Its definitely FUN to see his shirt begging for death and ironing and to be let out at the sides, your buttons aren’t actually supposed to explode off when you just have one arm out. Makes it Wrinkle.
Look at these trousers, Sherlock, shame. Too long too loose and the shoes need polishing as well. This picture is before he spends the evening jumping in skips, btw, these are just the quality of his suits at this point.
But what does John show up in? Perfectly sized and crisp ironed shirt, under a very nice and well-maintained sweater (you know that nice sweater wasn’t found at a thrift shop. Difficult to care for, they pill and get snagged and get stretched in the wash. That sweater looks great) Oh yeah, and his $800 shooting jacket, and yes, again, $3000 watch.
I am 100% believing that John doesn’t think about clothes that much, that he buys good sturdy things that fit him perfectly, with the intention of having it hold up for as long as possible. He buys a $900 jacket because he wants to have that be his primary jacket for the next 15 years. Even the watch, which was probably a gift from Sholto, is great underwater, will survive nearly anything i expect, and is probably, to John, just a Very Good Watch.
But you know who would look at John’s totally reasonable and normal looking outfit and go ‘holy crap, this man is dressed incredibly well’?
Sherlock.
Sherlock that goes to dinner in a garbage-juice suit and whose shirts are too small and his pants too big and his scarf too old.
What clothes does Sherlock wear after John saves him from the cabbie and impresses him and he now might have a bit of a crush? At least a friend crush?
A suit. A nice suit. A well fitted suit. One he immediately starts preening and fixing and which seems to be getting in the way of assassin-fighting, honestly. His collar is crisp, now, his trousers are actually the right length this episode, he’s sitting all folded and fancy and waiting for John to get home. He spends the whole episode doing the Lone Wolf showoff thing, too, and tries to act like he doesn’t need the money from Sebastian, even though we know he’s broke.
Then in TGG, 1-2 weeks after TBB and after John said rude things about him on his blog, Sherlock is in a cheap comfy hanes-looking shirt and normal PJ bottoms and is flopping all over the living room like a regular frumpy person. (he also, a couple days into the tgg investigation, makes the horrible mistake of brushing his hair with the wrong type of hairbrush, the kind that makes his/my hair go weird and flat, which if he was meticulous about appearance he would have known better than to try)
The reason i make this whole big dumb post.
I like to think that maybe Pre-John, Sherlock dressed more or less like everyone else. His shirts were off the rack, his suits were either secondhand and untailored or gifts from Mycroft who didn’t know Sherlock’s exact measurements(either due to time or distance). He probably wore off-the-rack trousers and off-the-rack shirts and his coat and scarf and that was as far as he cared to try.
His long coat was probably a big warm gift that he only sends to get dry cleaned when it starts to smell, his scarf was just His Favourite Scarf that might have been something he’d had for 20 years or just last week when Mrs Hudson took it off her own rack and handed it to him. His watch did Watch Things and didn’t need to be nice, because Mycroft was the brother that agonized over appearances and Sherlock didn’t care about any of that stuff, he looked Fine and if he deigned to put a suit on it was for a purpose (he may well have needed it earlier in the morning of asip to sneak around, or even the day before, and was just not bothering to change yet)
Then he met John, with his $800 perfectly maintained jacket, perfectly fit clothes and $3000 watch, no scuffs on his shoes and smart, capable, a fighter, a hero, a doctor, and Sherlock goes ‘Oh shit, I need to step up my game’.
Gets all his clothes tailored and starts making an effort to take care of the fancy robes and things that Mycroft and his parents always gift him at the holidays.
Sherlock used to be a garbage child, which suited his lifestyle, and now half the reason Mycroft likes John is that Sherlock cleaned up for him.
And of course, John thinks Sherlock always dressed like this, always acts like this, and never realizes just how much effort Sherlock is going into to impress him.
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