Habs’ Gorges makes a fashion statement
SARTORIAL EXPERT HE IS NOT, but defenceman is just happy to meet with fans
“If people are coming to me for fashion advice,” Josh Gorges was saying, “they’re coming to the wrong person.”
And the Canadiens defenceman laughed at the very thought.
Gorges spent a couple of hours late Tuesday afternoon mingling with shoppers and fans at the RW&CO. store in Place Ville Marie, not dispensing sartorial wisdom as much as autographed pictures.
The man knows his strengths, and the greatest one in a situation like this was his gift of gab, an effortless ability to put star-struck kids, adults and, most importantly, young women at ease.
Gorges wore jeans, a red, white and grey checked shirt and a charcoal sweater straight off the store’s shelves.
Truth be told, he had been in on Saturday to pick out a few things that put him in the product of RW&CO., a Canadian contemporary fashion retailer that dresses men and women in “things that make you look good and dressy but casual,” he said.
“Alex Burrows (of the Canucks) did something like this appearance out in Vancouver and they were looking for someone to do the same sort of thing in Montreal,” Gorges said, tracing his involvement.
“Alex threw my name to them, they called and asked if I’d be interested and I said, ‘Absolutely. I have a lot of spare time on my hands.’ ”
The appearance came together quickly with hockeyhelps.com, which represents Gorges’s off-ice interests, producing an RW&CO. news release announcing that Montrealers would be invited to “shop alongside” the Habs defenceman.
“They’ll have to ask someone else in the store for advice,” Gorges joked the night before his appearance.
“I think I’m just there to hang out, meet and greet, take some pictures and sign some autographs.
“As far as I know, I’m going in to help promote their store.”
Which is precisely what he did.
“I always think these things are a good way to hang out with a bunch of fans,” Gorges said. “You get to meet people who have a story about why they’re fans. You always hear from one who says they’re the Canadiens’ biggest fan and you want to know why that is, because a week earlier you’d heard someone claiming the same thing.
“It’s fun to meet and interact with people who watch you play but who you never get a chance to meet.”
In professional hockey’s large barn of free-spending, magnificently attired clothes horses, Gorges is not, well, Secretariat. He freely admits it, and he’s entirely comfortable with his own style.
“I’m not a huge shopper. I don’t know much of anything when it comes to clothes,” he admitted.
Though he says he owns 13 suits, that total including a few destined for giveaway, Gorges is stumped when you ask him his jacket size.
That’s probably not unusual, given a pro hockey player’s unique body type. Square-shouldered, broad of chest, narrow-waisted and generously beamed with thick legs, most haven’t a prayer of fitting the six-inch drop between jacket and pant size in a standard suit, or even the eight-inch drop of an athletic cut.
“I haven’t gotten a suit off the rack since I’ve been in the league,” said Gorges, who will begin his eighth NHL season when/if the lockout ends.
“I go in, they size me up and they make it. I don’t even ask them what size it is.”
He does, however, know he wears a Size 33 or 34 in jeans, the item he says is the toughest fit for a hockey player.
“Ask anyone and they’ll tell you the same thing,” Gorges said. “Most of us have regular waist sizes compared to a regular guy. But our butt and legs are twice the size of a normal person. The jeans will fit around the waist but will be so tight on the legs that you can’t even walk in them. So you either go up a waist size or just suck up how tight they are.”
And startlingly little of Gorges’s 6-foot-1 physique is in his legs, limbs which blocked almost every one of his league-leading 250 shots last season. He’s got just a 32-inch inseam, and even that sometimes requires hemming.
Gorges says he has almost exactly the same leg length as 5-foot-7 captain Brian Gionta.
“Josh has short legs but
“My fiancée is trying to get me looking a little more grown-up.”
JOSH GORGES
a long torso,” Gionta confirmed. “Weirdest thing …”
Gorges was laughing again: “The guys are giving it to me all the time — I’m all upper body. It doesn’t help me skating out there, that’s for sure.”
If he can’t tell you his jacket size, Gorges can tell you when he first wore a suit and knotted a tie.
“The first suit was when I played in bantam back home in Kelowna,” he recalled. “We were playing in a tournament and the guys thought it would be cool to act like we were junior players. None of us had suits, so I wore one of my dad’s. It was about 10 years old at the time, double-breasted. A little big? Oh man, it was hanging off me.”
Gorges was 13 or 14, at the counter of his father’s Dairy Queen i n Kelowna, when he first tied a thick Windsor knot.
“Every once in awhile I had to go into the DQ with my dad before I’d play on a Saturday morning, then come back to the store to help out until he finished work,” Gorges said. “My uncle, who was in there with my dad, taught me how to knot a tie so I could work those couple of hours.”
Gorges no longer leaves his ties knotted to hang on a doorknob.
“I was lazy and I didn’t realize what that does to your ties,” he said, laughing again. “But there are still guys at our level who don’t know how to knot a tie. If it comes open, they’ll ask for help and someone will have to tie it for them.”
Gorges says, without elaboration, that there’s been one of those players in Montreal, since gone, during his five seasons here.
Gorges has never worn a bow tie and says he won’t be wearing one for his wedding next summer.
“Some guys can pull off that look,” he said, “and some can’t.”
But Gorges won’t walk to the altar in denim and a Tshirt, the wardrobe of preference to which he could have spoken with authority among his fans on Tuesday at RW&CO.
“My fiancée is trying to get me looking a little more grown-up, if that’s the expression, a little more stylish with some sweaters and nice shirts,” he said. “I’m starting to evolve, dressing more like an adult than a kid.
“But at heart? I’m a jeans and T-shirt kind of guy.”
In a downtown fashion store on Tuesday, in “casual chicwear,” as he put it, Gorges cleaned up pretty well indeed.