Suited Up
Sitting among the dark wood carvings and mounted deer heads of the Berkeley College common room, Ronan Day-Lewis looks out of place. With his gray jumpsuit scrawled in white paint, yellow spectacles, and towering height, he can immediately be singled out from the clusters of Patagonias and Yale sweatshirts. And to anyone that knows Ronan even a little, it is evident that how he dresses is no mistake: he wears this jumpsuit day in and day out, wrapped in a cocoon of symbols and words of his own devising.
He first began painting his clothes last year, starting with a pair of canvas Carhartts. But the jumpsuit was special from the start, a birthday gift from his parents, inky gray like the heart of a raincloud. He confesses, “I immediately knew I wanted to paint all over it. I feel really at home in it, I guess.”
He explains his daily uniform thoughtfully: “Once I like an article of clothing, I sort of grow into it. It almost becomes part of my identity. Maybe I just like having some kind of routine and I feel that most of the time I’m terrible at maintaining routines because I’m really disorganized and scatterbrained. I’m also really neurotic about making small decisions, like what to have for breakfast and what to wear in the morning. This takes away having to make any decisions when I get up. I feel like with clothes, it’s comforting to have one thing that you wear a lot.”
While wearing the jumpsuit daily began as a joke with his suitemates, deeper introspection reveals ties to Ronan’s childhood. “It’s like a uniform. It’s funny because I went to Catholic school in Ireland when I was a kid and I hated having to wear a uniform every day. It’s weird because now I’ve given myself that.” He continues, “It’s really personal to me because what I have written on it has to do with childhood, which also ties into the whole Catholic school thing. It says, ‘In the beginning there was no TV.’ When I was a little kid, my mom was zealous about not letting me watch TV.”
But as revealing as this may be, the clothing is still somewhat illegible. “People will try to read it while I’m walking by and won’t be able to. It wasn’t originally my intention — I thought it would be easier to read.” There’s a silver lining, though. “It actually becomes a way to make connections with people that I would just never have talked to. And also just walking around the city in New York, sometimes people would just comment on it. I feel like people in New York are more comfortable doing stuff like that than in other places. Everyone sort of feels like they know each other there even though they don’t.”
As for Yale’s campus, he says, “I think it’s different partially because people in New York wear such weird shit, and so you don’t really look out of place. No one will be surprised that you’re wearing something out of the ordinary, whereas here…” He trails off. “I feel like a lot of people here do sort of wear similar things. I’m definitely aware that I stand out a lot more here wearing something like this than I would in New York, which is where I’m from. It’s definitely something I’ve thought about.”
When asked if he ever plans to stop wearing the jumpsuit on a daily basis, he responds automatically. “Yes, definitely. I’ll wear it as long as it continues to be fun. But if it starts to become a chore that I feel like I need to keep up, then I’m going to stop.” However, there is no doubt about the near future: “I think it’s going to be good for winter, because of the insulation. So at least for this winter.”
