When you film weddings it’s very easy to get addicted to buying cameras, lenses, drones, and whatever else came out this week. Today I want to talk about clothes instead. Yes, pants and such. Because what you wear will do more for your quality of life across a twelve hour day than most of the gear will.
I’m in Texas. Today, mid-November, it was 85 degrees, which to me feels chilly, because it’s usually in the mid-90s. We get high temperatures about 95% of the year plus roughly two weeks of freezing, so a lot of the outdoor weddings I film are comfortably over 100.
Faced with a choice between heat stroke and adapting, I went looking. Everything below is just stuff I bought, use, and think works.
Shoes
At my very first wedding I wore Converse. Terrible decision. They’re completely flat, there’s no arch support, and after eight to ten hours I genuinely thought I was going to die. Never again.
Then I tried dress shoes, the ones I wore to my own wedding. They’re comfortable enough, but they’re built for looking good in photographs, not for crouching, kneeling and chasing angles all day.
What I actually wear now is Supras, specifically the Skytop. They’re a skate shoe, they look vaguely like Air Jordans, and they are stuffed with foam and cushioning.
The general rule: black athletic shoes with real cushioning and support. Nobody looks at your feet unless you turn up in bright white basketball shoes, which is a different signal entirely.
Socks
Yes, socks matter. You’re on your feet for eight to twelve hours and your legs get tired.
Get compression socks. They look like ordinary dress socks except they run all the way up your calf, and they keep proper blood flow going in your legs. They stop your legs getting so tired, and as a bonus they help with varicose veins, which I had genuinely never thought about before.
The one downside: they go up to the knee, so in a hot climate that’s more fabric than you might want.
Pants
Never thought I’d talk about pants on this channel, and here we are. These are Nike golf pants, made from the same dri-fit material as athletic shorts.
They breathe beautifully and they look completely professional. You can wear these to a wedding and nobody will know you’re comfortable, or that you can feel every breeze going through your trousers, which is wonderful.
Nike make them for men and for women. Mizzen and Main and Ministry of Supply also make an athletic dress pant, though I haven’t tried either, so don’t quote me.
Underwear
You thought I’d skip this. So did I. This is comfortably the strangest thing I’ve talked about on this channel and I hope it stays that way.
It matters, especially in the heat. I use MeUndies, which I heard about on a podcast, and they are genuinely as breathable as they claim. ExOfficio make a good alternative, and even Hanes and Fruit of the Loom are finally getting into the category.
That is all I have to say about that.
Shirts
I used to wear all black, on the theory that I’d disappear from photographs. What actually happened is that I stood out more and looked like a waiter.
Now I go for a general wedding guest look. Not too fancy, not too underdressed. I don’t want to arrive in a tuxedo when everyone’s in polos, and this being Texas there are weddings where people show up in overalls and John Deere caps. I’ve seen it. The goal is that nobody registers me as staff and I read as another bearded guest wandering around.
The shirts are Mizzen and Main, and the code JOHNSON3 takes $50 off three dress shirts. They look like a normal dress shirt and they are not. They’re made of the Nike dri-fit sort of material, so they breathe and a breeze actually cools you.
The bigger trick is the stretch. There’s a ridiculous amount of it, which matters enormously when you’re reaching over your head or twisting into a position no cubicle shirt was designed for.
And neither the shirts nor the pants wrinkle. Mine are on hangers, but when I travel I wad them into a ball and it makes no difference. Look at the Spinnaker collection in particular; it’s stretchier and more comfortable than the rest.
Will You Still Sweat?
Definitely. But you won’t feel like you’re about to die, which is what happens in normal clothes.