The Dashing Man
When Jude Law showed up at this year’s Academy Awards wearing a midnight blue tuxedo from Alfred Dunhill, the London-based men’s luxury clothier, fashion designers, retailers and editors from coast-to-coast almost choked on their lattes.
It was a defining moment--the fashion equivalent of President Bush clearing brush at the ranch in Crawford, Texas, of Mel Gibson nearly coming to blows with Diane Sawyer on national television.
Just as the president managed to cement his image as a regular, shirt-sleeves kind of guy, just as Gibson showed Sawyer that nobody gets between him and the Almighty, Law managed in 30 short seconds to embody what fashion designers and editors have been pushing for the past year: The gentleman is back, and he’s a suave, sexy guy.
Law had taken the traditional, proper, evening party uniform and, in a single red-carpet saunter, not only retired its stodgy allusions but also demonstrated why tuxedos--and, it would follow, all the accouterments and conventions of traditional masculine attire--are still a great idea. They work.
Every man alive, be he tall, dark and handsome, short, stout and pasty, chiseled or gelatinous, looks great--elegant, glamorous and, yes, utterly masculine--in a monkey suit.
And while most working stiffs rarely have the occasion to wear a tux, the wall between the dressed-up workday suit and the weekend jeans and sweat pants hegemony is crumbling fast, according to Mark-Evan Blackman of New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology.
Blackman, chairman of the college’s menswear design department, credits “casual Fridays” with putting the initial cracks in the wall, but he sees more at work here than just men’s sudden realization that “casual” didn’t have to mean “sloppy” and that in a work environment, it shouldn’t.
“With casual Fridays, all of a sudden, your innate taste level was on display,” Blackman says. And once men proved to themselves--albeit under duress--that they could dress well without the safety net of the suit, it was only a matter of time before the Slob Weekend look was headed the way of the Members Only jacket.
We’re experiencing a return to a more put-together elegance, and the postmillennial gent is well-advised to ask himself, “What would Cary Grant wear?” We have yet to surpass Grant’s style legacy: an impeccable suit complete with pocket square and spit-shined shoes, and not a hair out of place. On-screen and off, he always cut a dashing figure.
Which is very different from preening, observes L.A. style icon Peggy Moffitt, who met Grant on the Paramount lot when she was 16. “Here was this beautifully turned-out, handsome man in a sweater with a kerchief wrapped around his neck, in jeans, I think, completely uninvolved in the effect he was having.”
Whether true or not--and we’ll never know--the impression Grant created was that he had put himself together as a sign of respect for you, the person who had to look at him all day.
Fashion photographer and documentary filmmaker Robert Trachtenberg adds, “Cary Grant had this innate, exquisite fashion sense.” Trachtenberg, whose documentary “Cary Grant: A Class Apart” premieres on Turner Classic Movies on June 1, points out that while Grant’s style often is seen as effortless, the actor was acutely aware of his clothing. “He would drive his tailor crazy--the width of a lapel, the length of a sleeve--he was really attentive to every detail of his own wardrobe, and he was even attentive to the wardrobe of the other actors on the set. He took it all in. He had the bigger picture in mind.”
It seems everyone does these days. We are bombarded with an ever-increasing cycle of slick, styled, fastidiously processed “lifestyle”- oriented imagery, which has virtually erased the distinction between fantasy and real life. We all have to think like movie stars. People who 50 years ago wouldn’t have known Hermes from Arrow now know perfectly well which one is “better,” why, and what it will set them back.
“Luxury is working its way down the food chain,” Blackman says. “At one point we thought of luxurious things as things few people could afford, but now people are overbuying based on the amount of money they make. They might be middle class, but they’re saving for products that are way above what we are used to thinking of as appropriate. [The boomer] generation spends much more money on luxury items than our parents’ did and that generation actually had more disposable income.”
Blackman points to the economic climate as the incongruous foundation of the trend.
“When times are uncertain, a display of wealth is somehow comforting to people. It’s not as ostentatious as it was in the ‘80s; this is more insouciant. This generation has seen the excesses, they want to look good, and they’re willing to spend money on well-made, well-designed products.” And so, while fashion may not be turning back the clock per se, there is a move toward cherry-picking from the past as we resign ourselves to the notion that the way things are is the way they are going to stay for the foreseeable future.
For Brooks Brothers, the venerable men’s clothier founded in 1818, which has counted Astors and Vanderbilts as well as Gianni Agnelli and Fred Astaire as customers, cherry-picking has meant reclaiming its identity as a classic, upscale--but not extravagantly so--retailer. After almost a decade of trying to be “relevant,” it appears the company has decided that the best way for Brooks Brothers to stay relevant is to maintain its status quo.
And so, for the past two years, fashion director Glen Hoffs has been poring over company records and catalogs to pinpoint exactly where Brooks Brothers fits into the American scene.
“We’re looking back to the archives,” he says. “And finding that we did, say, an amazing hacking jacket in linen in 1936, and we’re fitting that into a modern story.”
That modern story now includes wool trousers, cashmere or cotton V-necks, Bermuda shorts and, you’ve gotta love ‘em, those ridiculous madras slacks with the embroidered anchors or ducks. Fabrics have become more luxurious--the elite Italian firm Loro Piano is supplying the cashmere for some of Brooks Brothers’ suits. And the cut is generous, to allow for the beefier American male frame.
It’s back to being the kind of place where your dad got his suits--safe and elegant, but sharp.
“There’s a guy who has to wear a shirt and tie every day, and he’s looking for a slight way to update,” Hoffs says. “He wants to be current without being a laughingstock.”
But because said shirt-and-tie-guy may be a bit more self-indulgent than dear old Dad, Brooks offers a top-of-the-line suit in exquisite fabrics, and more affordable suits, in the mid-to-upper hundreds, along with classic cashmere sweaters, polo shirts and those crisp, heavy cotton Brooks Brothers button-down shirts.
“Brooks Brothers to people represents something enduring. It’s not going to change tomorrow,” Hoffs says. “Other brands that represent the same thing, their business has been phenomenal. People are looking for things that are stable.”
Tailor Nick Hart of Spencer Hart (the London company is named after his 5 1/2-year-old son) is hoping that an ultra-luxurious, custom-made suit or shirt with vintage style references will do just that.
Hart’s designs embody the easy elegance that is defining today’s stylish guy. His carefully crafted garments employ the kind of details most men aren’t very familiar with--hand stitching, silk grosgrain braiding on lapels and cuffs, and shirting fabric or silk for linings. “We do a lot of things you’re not even aware of until you’ve worn the suit for a while,” Hart says.
Needless to say, such details and effort do not come cheap. “Our off-the-peg suit, which is 70% done by hand, averages between £1,400 and £1,600 [about $2,500 to $2,900],” Hart says. And a made-to-order suit can cost almost twice that.
What you get, aside from exquisite fabrics and detailing, he says, is a garment that was conceived with your own body and aesthetic as the starting point. While Hart takes his references from American jazz musicians of the ‘50s, he’s going for more than a line-for-line copy of an old look. He wants his clothing to communicate, he says, the “larger-than-life zest for life, the attitude of Louis Jordan or Charlie Parker, Dexter Gordon.”
But there is another force at work here besides the ever-escalating search for something truly special in an Hermes world, something more primal. If the world blows up tomorrow, if your lover leaves you this evening, if you lose your job this minute, at least you’re wearing something that is yours and yours alone.
Any number of guys have your wristwatch, those cuff links, your car--but no one can have, or wear as well, the clothes you have on your back.
Which is why, at the moment at least, so many men’s clothiers are running away from the “fashion” epithet.
Chris Cudahy, director of communications and marketing for Alfred Dunhill, the folks who dressed Jude Law in the stunning tux, says, “The brand’s got to stay true to its roots. We don’t want to be a fashion brand. You can apply tradition and make it work for the modern man.”
Cudahy concurs with Blackman on another point--that buyers are increasingly willing to spend on something they think will be around for a while.
“It’s a trend all over. People are prepared to spend the money if they get the quality. There are staples in your wardrobe and life that you know you’re going to need. You know you will want them for 10, 20 years. It’s easy to go and buy a cashmere jumper for £100 [$181]; if you go spend that extra money you will get something that will age with you,” he says.
What’s most instructive about Dunhill, however, is that the label made its first splash by offering driving coats and goggles (to protect motorists from flying stones and mud). It also takes credit for the “Umbrella Coat,” which kept motorists dry during rainstorms and was the precursor to the wetsuit.
True elegance, you see, is function with a flourish.
