What Comes Off in September

A brown corduroy jacket over a beige tee, cream trousers, black shoes crossed on a chrome frame, a brown leather chair against a bare plaster wall. Nothing in it is summer, and nothing was bought yesterday. The men's magazines called this look a week ago. Put the summer away. Buy the pieces that last. Change the trousers. Every one of those lists is right, and every one of them stops at the collar.

Brown, beige, cream and leather. The wardrobe is already in October.

The edits the magazines already made

Ape to Gentleman ran three pieces in the first ten days of September, and read together, they are one instruction. The first names what stylish men stop wearing when summer ends: flip-flops, vacation shirts, madras, linen, summer fragrance. The second names what to buy before autumn starts: a wool coat, brown boots, a textured navy suit, a heather-gray hoodie, an ecru sweater. The third covers the trousers, in olive, khaki, chocolate, and burgundy.

Set the three lists side by side, and a palette appears that nobody spelled out. Navy, forest green, burgundy, brown, olive, stone, ecru. Deeper and richer, in the first article's own phrase, in place of the sun-faded brights. It is a cool, earthy, low-saturation palette, and it runs opposite the warm amber palette the women's side is wearing this fall. Men's autumn dressing goes cooler and darker. That matters more for hair than any of the three pieces.

What summer did above the collar

Hair spends a summer outside the same way skin does. Sun oxidizes it; salt and chlorine strip the tone laid over it; the ends go lighter and warmer than the roots, and on a man who colors, or blends his gray, the warmth shows as a faint orange or gold that wasn’t there in June. On a man who does nothing to his hair at all, the same thing happens more quietly: the natural color lifts a shade, the gray reads yellower than it is, and the whole head sits a little lighter and a little warmer than the face under it.

In August none of that shows, because everything around it is bright. The shirt is white, the skin is tanned, the light is high. Put that same head above a navy coat in October light and the arithmetic changes. Cool, dark, matte fabric beside warm, light, slightly brassy hair is a contrast, and not the flattering kind. The coat looks expensive, and the hair looks tired. Nothing in the wardrobe is at fault.

The edit ends at the hair.

So the September edit has one more line, and it is the one the magazines leave off. The hair goes a half-shade deeper. Not darker as in a new color, but back to where it was before the summer lifted it, with the warmth taken down so it sits inside the palette instead of arguing with it. On colored hair, that is a toning question, and the answer is usually a gloss: a translucent coat of the right tone over the whole head that puts the reflection back and brings the ends into line with the roots. On blended gray, it is the same blend the summer has been quietly undoing since July, brought forward a few weeks so the blend is fresh when the wool comes out. On hair that has never been colored, it may be nothing more than a clear gloss, which changes no color at all and returns the shine that three months of sun took.

That's it, and it takes less time than choosing boots. The general case for men and color, that it should enhance rather than announce, is the argument of What the Modern Man Actually Wants From His Hair, and nothing here changes it. September is only the moment the argument becomes visible.

The rest of the head

Two smaller lines belong on the same list. The scalp has had a summer too. Sun on a part line and on any place the hair is thin leaves it dry and often faintly flaky in September, which reads as dandruff and isn’t. A gentler wash and one week of leaving it alone usually settles it. L'Oréal Professionnel Scalp Advanced Anti-discomfort Dermo-regulator Shampoo is that gentler wash, made for a sensitive rather than oily scalp. A scalp that is still angry in October is a different conversation.

And the fragrance swap the first article made, from citrus to cedar and vetiver and leather, is not a vanity. A fragrance sits in the hair as much as on the skin, and a summer scent on a fall coat is the same mismatch as the brassy ends, only noticed by other people first. The Man in the Mirror: Skincare, Grooming, and the Quiet Shift Nobody's Announcing made the case that men now maintain themselves without apology. This is what that maintenance looks like in the one month a year when the wardrobe changes faster than the man does.

What to do with this

Put the summer away, as the magazines said. Buy the coat. Then look at the hair in the same mirror, wearing the coat, in daylight, and ask one question: does the color above the collar belong to the same season as the color below it? If it does, the edit is finished. If it does not, the answer is a half-shade and a gloss, and the coat will look the way it did in the shop.

Effortless Color For The Real You.
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