Clothes-shopping is a bit of a chore for us. Yeah, we’re gay, but we’re pretty convinced that the whole gays-love-shopping stereotype is a total fallacy perpetuated by Hollywood. We’ve reduced the time we spend in clothing stores down to about two days a year. It’s just a chore we need to get out of the way.
With that in mind, Junkii and I trotted off to upstate New Yawk this weekend for our biannual shopping excursion. Lists in hand, we hit the stores at Carousel Mall and Waterloo Premium Outlets to see how many items we could collect.
Turns out, quite a few, actually.
My main goals were to find a couple of pairs of dress shoes (brown and black), as well as a new hoodie, and a couple of pairs of jeans that didn’t have a saggy ass. I was able to get all that and more. And Junkii did well too, getting himself a new Calvin Klein suit for 50% off the already-reduced price. Sharp!
I did wind up with one “holy grail” though; I couldn’t find a pair of tan pants to save my life. Banana Republic. Calvin Klein. Even the Gap. None of them had a suitable pair of trousers. They all had loads of khakis – I tried on pair after pair, style after style – but all were either too big, too tight, too short, too long, or too baggy in the bum.
And it’s not like I was laying down on the job. This was a full day of shopping. After spending the night in Syracuse, we rose early to fuel ourselves with a trip to IHOP. We then shopped from 10am until nearly 9:00pm when the mall closed, stopping only for lunch and to periodically top up our caffeine levels. We didn’t make it back to Ottawa until nearly 2am! No, this was work, and we put our all into it. And still no golden trousers. I had to satisfy myself with what success I did have.
Now, if we can wrangle some alone time one of these evenings, maybe we’ll make a little online fashion presentation to showcase our new couture. Don’t hold your breath, though.
Our Flophouse 
Are you willing to buy the pants at a regular Canadian retail price? If so, I’d suggest finding out if any of the malls in Ottawa have a personal shopping service. Let someone else run around the mall and find out where all the tan pants are hiding. At Yorkdale, you can do this for $50, but you get the $50 back in mall dollars. Sherway does it for $150, but it’s more of a premium service, I got this for Taj for his birthday, and he had two, and sometimes three people looking for stuff for him. He got some incredibly well fitting stuff, but also had to drop some serious coin. If you let them know your budget, and what you are looking for, you may have some better luck than just looking on your own.
I remember you blogged about doing this for jeans a couple of years ago. Sounded like an awesome idea, but the extra $$ kind of puts me off doing it for myself. I’m not averse to buying pants in Canada though. I will likely need tan pants soon (they’re kind of a staple) – but I will wait for sales if I can.
Hehe, this is hilarious timing. We were going to see if you guys wanted to go to Syracuse sometime in the near future!
We didn’t foresee another opportunity in the fall – so we decided kind of last minute to go. Our weekends are all booked. It’s getting a bit silly.