STAR QUALITY
glad rags, n., [informal] dressy clothes, especially as worn to a party or social events.
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A crocodile trench coat hangs in a boutique along Rodeo Drive, in a spot of prime visibility, conspicuously lighted.
The skin shimmers in a buttery variation of camel. The construction is meticulous, with edges cut and turned under and sewn by hand, a lining of bonded cashmere. The price is $32,500--in some parts of the country, people pay mortgages on things less expensive.
It’s perfect for holiday parties and nights on the town, the salesperson says. Dress it up with a turtleneck and flat-front pants, a pair of high-polish shoes. A show stealer, he says. People will want to meet you, to ask your name and know where you have been.
This is what passes for formal wear in Los Angeles. No ties, no tails. The grand traditions of dressing up--tuxedos and blazers as polished as their brass buttons--have been jettisoned for the sake of a more Southern Californian convention: The art of standing out in a crowd.
Not that anyone expects us to be New York or Boston or even San Francisco, not nearly that formal, but what have we forsaken in our need to be noticed?
The tuxedo carries a weight of ritual, a deliberate message that tonight is special, a time to celebrate. For every man who arrives in his finery, a momentum builds, an elegant understatement takes hold. All that black and satin facing looks good. And there is something about the way a dinner jacket squares a man’s shoulders, slims him, finishes him off.
“That’s the crux of the problem,” says Maggie Murray, a costume historian at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in Los Angeles.
Murray has observed the slow death of formal gatherings in this city, black-tie invitations relegated to a smaller and smaller subset, to wedding parties, debutante balls and supper clubs. Formal wear holds a special place in the language. “The moment you see a man done to the nines, you have a whole different impression of him,” Murray says. “It’s in the package. Formal wear says he is somebody and he understands what he is doing.”
And he almost certainly does not live in Los Angeles.
This is the epicenter of what designer and author Alan Flusser describes as “the erosion of . . . tradition-bound formality” and an “obsession with celebrity and facade.” The sun shines too brightly for worsted wool and bow ties. The glare of Hollywood burns even hotter.
“Everyone is influenced,” says Miguel Reyes of De Lui in Beverly Hills. “Even if they don’t want to be a movie star, they want to look like one.”
Enter a cotton tuxedo shirt over high-end denim. A sleek leather jacket with the belt fastened insouciantly behind. Playfully striped pants with Jimmy Choo boots. Formal wear bent through the prism of show business.
The semiotics are purely a la mode. This is more than just the casual revolution marching beyond the confines of the workaday world into our festive nights. We are hopelessly restless for a new look, enamored with the cult of personality, in flux. Our style is intentionally oblivious to--if not openly disdainful of--protocol.
Is reptile-patterned velvet too much? How many men do you really want to see wearing a sheer gauze shirt? More to the point, how many men whom you actually know?
And what of the Gucci trench coat, its ultra-slick hide adorned with gold zippers and buckles? Wear it to a cocktail party and you will look like Brad Pitt arriving at a movie premiere, or perhaps the sadistic Baron Vladimir Harkonnen from the sci-fi film “Dune.”
Precisely the point, the salesperson says.
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Interview by Kelly Critchlow; stylist: Michael Cioffoletti; stylist assistant: Michelle Bronson; grooming: Avril Shaikewitz/Cloutier
