Dillo Day is around the corner, and with or without a nighttime headliner, the festival of debauchery will take place Saturday. This week, we’re here to tell you how you can maximize your fashion for the biggest party of the year. After all, the person you’re in love with won’t stumble into a prolonged, awkward hug with you if you’re not looking your best. Fortunately, there’s a throwback basketball jersey for everyone.
Rohan Nadkarni: The perfect Dillo Day throwback is a mix of a few factors. The jersey needs to be old. Your Lamar Odom Lakers jersey isn’t a throwback, but your Rick Fox Lakers jersey totally is. The type of player you choose to wear is up to you. Some people want obscure players, while others want previous-generational superstars, but either way you go on this one is acceptable. Most importantly, you want a jersey with a memorable color scheme, and preferably a logo no longer in use. So I’m offering up my suggestions on which jersey can make for the perfect Dillo. How about a Charles Barkley Suns jersey from the early ’90s? Chuck took the Suns by storm when he arrived in Phoenix and carried the team to the NBA Finals, where they fell to the Bulls. But the Suns’ purple jersey with the sun shooting across the midsection is a classic, and you can still represent Northwestern’s colors in the process. Barkley’s lack of NBA title parallels with NU’s lack of b-ball success, and you can spend the entire day calling yourself “The Round Mound of Pounding Shots.”
Gideon Resnick: Basketball is a beautiful sport with a history richer and more expansive than J.P. Morgan’s trust funds. So when the word “throwback” is brought up, I, like most people only think of one magical day at Springfield College in 1891. Dr. James Naismith (aka the Polish Hammer and in some states “The Pompeian Humidor”) created the game we call basketball for a group of unruly male students at the Springfield YMCA in Massachusetts. By 1936, the game had caught on like wildfire — or cocaine in the 1920s — and had been accepted as a sport at the Olympic Games. Dr. Naismith didn’t need any Nike shorts or flashy jerseys to dominate the basketball court. The man rocked a brown three piece suit and spectacles, looking like a mixture between the Cheshire Cat and T.S. Eliot, the poet who created the abomination known as Cats. Try something different this Dillo Day and throw on your best Principal Feeny.
