Casual conductor

If not for T-shirts, Eckart Preu wouldn’t have much to wear.

The 35-year-old Spokane Symphony music director’s closet is stacked high with them.

They’re light, comfortable and easy-to-wear when waving your arms around for hours during rehearsals.

But, more than that, they’re a small reminder of how far Preu has come.

Growing up in Communist-led East Germany, Preu couldn’t find T-shirts. Only button-ups.

“As soon as the wall came down, all the stuff we could never buy came in,” he says. “I like T-shirts because I could never wear T-shirts.”

But there’s one T-shirt you won’t see him in. It’s a gift from members of a youth orchestra he conducted — a black shirt inscribed with one of the music world’s most hackneyed jokes:

“How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” the shirt reads. “Practice, practice, practice.”

Those who’ve actually performed at Carnegie Hall, it seems, don’t wear such things.

When he’s not in front of an audience, Preu has a three-word fashion mantra: Keep it simple.

The more basic, the better.

“I have no color preference whatsoever,” he says. “Anything goes. … I really just grab things.”

For a single guy who lives in T-shirts, Preu at least keeps his clothes well-organized.

He has two clothes closets in his long, wood-floored apartment in Browne’s Addition. One, which is really more of a linen closet, has a few drawers and a few shelves of folded shirts.

The other, in his bedroom, is a more traditional clothes closet. It’s where Preu hangs all of his pants and keeps all of his suits.

His concert formalwear – the tux with tails, the white suit coat and other finery – lives at the Opera House.

“These are all my suits,” says Preu, waving his hand across the five or six suit coats in the sparse closet.

There’s the black three-button suit he bought in Athens, the one that fit right off the rack.

There’s the black-and-white-checked suit he likes to wear with a turtleneck.

There’s the charcoal-gray suit with subtle stripes, probably the most expensive thing in his closet, he says.

“That cost maybe $150,” Preu says.

Clearly, the conductor’s no clotheshorse.

But he does have a few flashy pieces in the midst of all those dark suits and khaki pants.

One of his favorites is a Chinese-inspired outfit he bought in Italy. It’s a silky, black long-sleeved shirt with frog closures. It came with matching pants, but that made it look too much like pajamas, Preu says.

So he wore the top with tuxedo pants for the symphony’s last summer concert in the park.

And then there’s the shiny, sapphire blue shirt that Preu bought in Germany. It seems to be constructed of a fabric unlike anything made by man or found in nature.

It stands out of his staid closet like a purple mowhawked-punk rocker at the symphony.

“It’s really a funky thing,” he says. “It’s still waiting to be worn.”

But he swears he’ll get around to wearing it one of these days.

Preu, who has lived in this country for nine years, just recently bought his first pair of jeans.

A friend once told him that Germans don’t know how to wear blue jeans. Preu still doesn’t know what that means, but the statement kept him out of the quintessentially American uniform for years.

“I don’t know what you have to do to wear jeans,” he says with a laugh.

He may have finally picked up a pair of jeans that fit him well, but Preu admits to having major trouble finding pants in this country. All of them are too loose in the legs and too wide in the waist to suit him.

So he buys most of his pants in Europe. And that means he doesn’t get new ones very often, he says.

Tucked back in the closet are the clothes Preu never wears out of the house: A blue fleece sweatshirt and matching sweatpants.

“When I’m here by myself, these are my comfortable clothes,” he says.

So, what won’t you find in Preu’s closet?

Gifts from his mother.

“Most of that has disappeared,” says Preu, resorting to the same metaphor a mafia hit man might use for describing the disposal of a dead body.

“We have different tastes.”

It’s taken Mom some time to realize she should stop sending old-fashioned sweaters and other clothing no-nos, he says.

“(But) I think she understands. She has now retreated to socks.”