An old friend of mine is visiting Vegas this week, and he’s been teaching me about fashion. Yesterday we went shopping together at the Forum Shops in Caesar’s Palace. I tried on different clothes while he explained some of the basic principles of fashion to me. We plan to go out again this evening. It’s been a very eye-opening experience for me.

For many years I shunned fashion completely. I’ve long considered fashion to be a complete waste of time, a pointless distraction for those whose temporal and financial abundance greatly exceeds their intellectual abundance.

This attitude is fairly common in the computer gaming industry where I worked for many years. Even if I was doing a presentation at a tech conference, “modern schlub” was perfectly acceptable. Nobody seemed to care how anyone dressed. Perhaps the only guy in that field I thought had any particular fashion sense was Dave Perry of Shiny Entertainment, but he was a rarity.

When I got into professional speaking, I learned to expand my wardrobe beyond ripped jeans and T-shirts. I added some conservative suits to my closet, but I didn’t wear them often.

My attitude towards clothing was based on comfort, functionality, and suitability for a particular occasion. As long as I didn’t have to deal with annoying social resistance to what I was wearing, I really didn’t care about what I wore. Since I worked for myself, I certainly didn’t feel I needed to impress anyone.

Another factor that made me shun fashion was my colorblindness. I don’t perceive colors the way most people do, so there are certain aspects of fashion that are difficult for me to comprehend. Even people’s skin looks different to me than it does to others. I’ve sometimes wondered what it would be like to be non-colorblind for a day. It would probably freak me out that human beings were suddenly different colors than I was used to.

When it comes to buying my own clothes, I often feel like I can’t trust my own eyes, so I typically play it safe. Most of my wardrobe consists of black, shades of gray, and some earth tones. When I’ve tried to take risks with color, I’ve usually failed, at least based on the feedback received from others. This seemed like a problem I couldn’t solve on my own, and I had little motivation to deal with it, so I basically stopped trying and retreated into my colorless comfort zone.