As a man given to excess in all things, Chess King is precisely the kind of men's clothing store you would think I could really get behind. And if this were still the 1980s, the retail chain's heyday, the probabilities of this happening would no doubt increase by several orders of magnitude for one simple reason: Chess King is the only men's store in history where the clothes, even while just hanging there on the rack, looked as if they came with an eight ball of cocaine stitched into the label.

That's an observation, not an endorsement. And the legal system is on my side. Specifically, corpus delecti. We are, after all, talking about the 1980s. And of all the stores lined up side-by-side in the grim, stone-faced cinder block tombs of American shopping malls circa 1984, few embodied that decade's dizzying high-white excess of aspirational self-delusion than Chess King.

At its peak, Chess King was over 500 stores strong and routinely pulling more than $200 million a year out of the velcro wallets of young men all across the country. That's an extraordinary degree of success for a chain of stores where it was often impossible to tell whether an article of clothing was supposed to be worn as a shirt, a pair of pants or used as a windsock attached to the trunk of a Renault Le Car.

Whether Chess King's success was in spite of that, or because of it, we may never fully know. But what is clear is that as Americans entered the heart of the 1980s, we were more than ready for a plenitude of crapulous indulgence.

And indulge we did. The nut of the thing, however, is that for the first time in our history, it wasn't just about the act of indulgence, it was about the look of it. Think about that. It's one thing to lay about like Caligula, drinking Haoma and participating in a government-sanctioned orgy, but quite another to purposefully try to look as though you just came from one.

And so in an age of visual and stylistic excess, the chain of thought goes something like this: Maybe I'll wear a T-shirt today. Of course, if I'm going to wear a T-shirt, I might as well go with something sleeveless. And if it's sleeveless, it might as well be a half T-shirt that's cut just above my navel. And look, if I'm going to walk out of the house with a sleeveless half-T-shirt on, then by the Hammer of Thor, it might as well be mesh!