C R Clothiers

As a man who spends almost every evening drinking wine, eating microwave dinners and watching sex and violence on television, I am inevitably a victim of the TV commercial. It doesn't seem possible that day in, day out, any medium could be worse than situation comedies, but for sheer vulgarity, improbability and stupefying awfulness, TV commercials are unmatched. I don't object to the ones that exploit sex, as most do.

Although thin may always be in when it comes to body types, that's not the case with neckties. This fall, wide is beautiful. "Wide ties are very in right now and I'll tell you why," said Rick Amundson, clothing consultant at C&R Clothiers in North Hollywood, where ties are from $15 to $30. "The width of the tie matches the width of the coat lapel. In the early '80s, when coats had thin lapels, men wore thin ties to go with it. Both the ties and the lapels are a good 3 inches wide now."

The post-Thanksgiving weekend appeared to live up to its tradition as a Christmas gift-buying jamboree with shoppers continuing to jam malls around the Southland on Sunday. Shoppers were said to be particularly attracted to such merchandise as fancy sweaters, jewelry, men's and women's accessories, leather goods, gift books, perfumes, indoor barbecue grills for the grown-ups, miniature cars for young boys, and Barbie dolls for girls.

There are power lunches, power suits and power neckties. But wait, there's a new concept on the horizon . . . a power center. For the uninitiated not up on the latest newspeak, a power center is not a shelter where recalcitrant consumers are hooked up to electrodes and zapped until all their plastic is melted into an unusable heap.

E ye-popping cleavage, rippling muscle, form-squeezing rags--these are the things that spell s-e-x-y on men and women, or do they? If you've seen the new Guess ad campaign, you know Madison Avenue thinks mega-bosomed blondes are sexy. And what about those Calvin Klein ads featuring men built like thoroughbred horses? Do the rest of us have even a chance of, um, attracting the opposite sex? What is sexy, after all?

Thousands of residents attended the annual Camellia Festival last weekend, generally the most exciting event in this quiet town of 31,000. But as he circulated among the crowd, Faye Lee was feeling anything but festive. He was collecting signatures on a petition demanding that the city drop plans for a shopping center that would require demolition of 20 homes on the south side of Elm Avenue.

Who pays the commercial or industrial real estate broker's commission? If you answered "The seller, of course," you may not be completely correct. The documents to a traditional real estate transaction call for the broker's commission to be deducted from the seller's proceeds. But what's the reality?

I once knew a student of ceramics who gave pots to his friends as gifts as one semester progressed but later came around and said he had to have them back. His explanation was that he intended to smash them into unidentifiable pieces so that no one would ever see such inferior examples of his work.

Is it true the necktie is a phallic symbol? That might explain why for generations men have taken pride in the tying of them, and why women, who couldn't think of any other male garment they hadn't already lifted, put them on when they went after the right to vote. Since then, women have climbed into boxer shorts and skivvies, probably correlated with their right to stop picking up those items off bathroom floors.

You're a guy on a budget and you don't like to shop. You don't even like to read about shopping. But you need to buy some "professional" clothes for work, so let's cut to the chase: To build the best career wardrobe for the least amount of money, many men are better off buying their suits, slacks and sport coats at established, full-service department and clothing stores--but only when the garments are on sale.