Warp and Weft, 2.16.24 (Jordan Coley of Jordan Show)
"…watching the movements of an arm punctuated in a French cuff is like watching a knife move through air."
Warp and Weft: I interview people about clothes.
A French cuff is the winged eyeliner of the wrist. The fabric of the sleeve runs down the arm, floods past the wrist, and doubles back to get pinned into shape with the cuff link. The spot where that happens is sharp, and watching the movements of an arm punctuated in a French cuff is like watching a knife move through air.
At the first anniversary edition of Jordan Coley’s Jordan Show, his late night talk show-style comedy show, he got onstage in a really great black suit and even better tie. The first order of business was leading the crowd in a Freelancer’s Prayer, and when he folded his hands in preparation—French cuffs! After the show, I hit Jordan up to talk about that shirt, the way that clothes can establish an authoritative distance, and the way that his cuffs lent themselves to his very-silly-but-very-funny late night host character.
Before we get to the shirt, would it be alright if we describe the rest of the fit?
Yeah, sure, totally.
So, it was a black two-button suit. Pretty classic fit. The shoulders were very sturdy. The lapel was, like, slim-thick.
Yeah. Not a tiny one, but not a big one.
It’s sporty, like a rugby player.
Yes. It's a kind-of-slim suit. It's not a skinny suit, like those awful hug-your-calf ones. But it's on the slimmer side.
Definitely. And then the pants had a pretty decent rise, I would say.
Mmhmm.
The tie was, again, not skinny but not huge. Substantial. And then the shoes. They looked like a moccasin construction. What was going on with the shoes?
Those shoes are a favorite of mine. My mom got them for me at a Goodwill. They're Bass Loafers, not a conventional Oxford. They have the toe of a penny loafer, but they're laced up, you know what I'm saying?
Nice. And the star of the show is the shirt. White, spread collar, the points of the went out and under the lapel, and then there was French cuff.
Yes.
I didn't touch it or anything, but it looked like a kind of cotton situation—maybe like a poplin.
Yeah. I think it is a cotton poplin.
I guess it can go either way. There's a thickness to it, but also a smoothness.
It could be either, because I bought two of the same white shirt. They look identical, but one of them was a different weave. One was supposed to be more summery and one was supposed to be more all-season. I kinda forgot which one I put on that night. I don't really remember if I distinguished, I just grabbed the one that was clean. But yeah, it's a lighter cotton situation.
So the conceit of your show is that it's like a late night show. You have acts, you have guests, you have segments. How does the suit factor into what you were doing with the show?
As we were preparing this show in particular, I wanted to do a character who is self-important, acting as if he's already a big deal, acting as if he's already a celebrity who had this popular show. In reality, I'm doing the show out of the back of a gay bar in Bed-Stuy and my friends are doing me favors. John, my friend who plays the music, he's a real musician who could be paid to be doing this sort of thing but he’s helping me out, you know what I mean? So, the idea was to play to this guy who has an unrealistic idea of who he is, and I think the suit added to that effect.
And how would you say that differs from how you previously approached your show and your image as host?
There were previous shows where I tried a similar thing, and then the most recent show I decided to dress down. I didn't really put too much thought into it: a t-shirt underneath this weird knitted sweater vest and then some slacks. It was more casual, and I think it bled into my performance.
I think what makes the performance of the show interesting, what I liked about this one, was that there is an energy between me and the guests where I'm prodding them with a little bit of mild condescension—which is completely unearned because, you know, I'm just a guy. But the character thinks he's like, Oh, yeah, I know how this industry works. I know you guys and your little jobs, that sort of thing. The previous show I was just chatting with a friend, which can be fun and comfortable, but I think it makes for less of a dynamic show, with less comedic tension.
Having the suit creates distance through formality because the show is in the back of a gay bar, so it’s a chill environment. Plus it was a Sunday evening, so people were probably coming in like, Oh yeah, it’s gonna be chill, it's gonna be whatever. And then here you are in a suit. It’s a sharp departure from that.
I could feel it from the guests who came a little bit earlier. We're doing soundcheck and they were kind of surprised, like, “Oh I didn't get the memo.” And I was like, “Yeah, there was no memo.” There's a little bit of a surprise. It makes them more on-their-toes onstage.
The shirt was really striking to me, so I wanted to focus a little bit closer on that. Preparing for our discussion, I was looking at a lot of different late night hosts. The suit-and-tie is a pretty standard uniform. But typically the collar is more of a point collar, where the ends might sit somewhere between like the tie and the lapel. Most of them use barrel cuffs. What were you thinking with your shirt choice?
I got those shirts for a wedding. I realized I didn't have a reliable white dress shirt. Like a person pretending to know what they're doing, I was like, I think I will want the ones with the French cuffs because like adults wear cuff links, so I need to have that capability. But the collar and the cuffs feel a little more banker than anything else. And the character of the host is a little bit like early-aughts Jay Z and Puff, right? He's like, I'm streetwise, and I'm a businessman, and I know how this stuff works and you guys are lucky for getting to hear my thoughts on anything. Like when Jay Z was wearing all those suits and stuff pretending to be a businessman. He was like, This is what businessmen look like, right? There's an element of that, like somebody putting on a costume.
Typically a late night host leans on the suit because it’s a marker of professionalism. You don't want to be intimidating by doing too much. You wanna make people feel like, Oh, I can relate to this person. But the French cuffs give a bit of flair. It's a bit ostentatious.
Yeah, the suits on the most late night guys, they're white guys who are, like, six feet tall and they're supposed to look “normal.” You know, in air quotes. It's supposed to be normalizing, the suit makes them look like everybody else. But I think the French cuffs give a little bit of, like, TV preacher, man-of-power-in-the-neighborhood vibe. Peacocking.
Now that you've gotten your first year under your belt of inhabiting that character, do you think you're going to continue with the suit?
I like this idea of having a satirical remove, because one of the things that I realized I keep coming back to with the show is humor in the artifice of freelance creative labor in New York. A lot of my guests tend to be people who have these cool careers, who do these cool jobs—photographers, directors, actors—who work on these projects that are very cool and that people know. But it’s all sort of precarious and weird and really subject to how you spin it, to the PR you do for your own career to convince people of your status. The character plays into that, into how we're all playing dress-up in our careers.
When you're wearing the shirt—not even the whole suit, just the shirt itself—having collar points that go that far, that fit underneath the jacket like that, having a French cuff, a little bit of jewelry, a little razzle-dazzle, how does that lend itself towards what you're creating with the character?
It is kind of a dramatic look. It reminds me of this movie called Marathon Man, with Justin Hoffman. The guy who plays his brother has these amazing suits in the film. And all of them have this incredible, late 70s/early 80s, incredibly high collar with dramatic points on the collar. I like that look. It also suits my body type. I’m not a very tall person, so it has a dramatic elongating effect. It gives me some gravity, some esteem, for lack of a better way of putting it. That adds to the fact that you're coming to see a show.
Part of what I wanted to avoid is that there's so much standup in Brooklyn where you see people that perform a version of themselves where it’s like I'm just a crazy little guy that I really don't want the show to be another version of. I feel like there has to be some character, some sort of showmanship, some stagecraft. I want to lean more into that stuff. This isn't Broadway, there's nothing miraculous about what I'm doing, but I want to lean more into that direction rather than the more casual alternative.
What is an outfit detail that you think defines and should always accompany a given genre of person?