A blog dedicated to the interesting, scandalous, useful and cutting edge in the world of men’s style, fashion and grooming.
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The fabled Campari calendar has been marred by a photoshop leak and, judging from this picture, it looks like Ms. Alba’s hips, waist, and legs were the victims. We feel so used!
We expect this sort of thing from the Vogue cohort, but if the Italians can’t appreciate a full figure, the world is truly mixed up.
Also, they seem to have digitally mussed her hair…
Trim sweaters have been in style for a bit too long, so it’s no surprise that the floppy backlash is beginning.
It’s starting in Italy (as evidenced by this genuinely puzzling Dolce & Gabbana knit) but, according to the latest International Herald Tribune, we can count on it reaching the states in one version or another by this time next year. Hopefully by then it will have shed some of that golden fleece…but even that won’t be enough to change our minds.
If you’ve picked up this month’s GQ, you may have noticed a rare bit of prognosticating in the Editor’s Note. In case you haven’t, here’s the gist: With the help of a few well-chosen futurist, EiC Jim Nelson envisions a future of heavily-bearded, housebound, and impotent American men.
Leaving aside how he gets there, we aren’t sure how the beard ended up with such a bad rap. For Nelson, beards are a cipher for masculinity, not the genuine article, but he’s too heavily invested in his clean-shaven mug to see the truth. The mountain men are only gaining in strength, and the time will come when unkempt masculinity will rise up to displace the clean-shaven ideal that’s reigned for so long. (This may also coincide with all of us losing our jobs.) A few whiskers won’t make men any less virile, even if we need to trade razors for clippers and recalibrate our dopp kits.
Until then, if Nelson wants to see the future, he should visit Maine.
Any time a glossy unveils their New Rules for anything, you know they’re about to get themselves in trouble. And when it’s something as commonplace as denim…it can get ugly.
DETAILS’ just debuted their New Rules of Denim and, to their credit, it stops short of being a complete embarrassment. But you can tell how hard they’re working.
The problem is, denim just isn’t that hard to wear. By now, you know whether the skinny look works for you, and beyond that, there just isn’t that much to it. So to stretch it out for six slides without repeating yourself takes some real journalistic ingenuity.
This month’s GQ had a few nice items, but we have to take issue with this bit of wisdom (on p58, for the curious):
Fingerless gloves have always struck me as too raggedy—fine for a punk rocker or a chimney sweep, but that’s about it. This season, though, Bottega Veneta has turned that notion on its head and is offering cashmere fingerless gloves that are more than chic. I love the idea of a punk rocker (a rich one) in full-on rock garb but with luxurious gloves
When their target buyer is a rich punk rocker, it’s usually not a good sign»
Apparently Esquire isn’t the only print mag getting into the men’s advice racket.
We recently ran into this Men’s Health article offering up “40 Unwritten Rules to Live By.” Leaving aside that they clearly aren’t unwritten anymore, we have to admit we’re a bit disappointed. Maybe they’ve been at this for long enough that all the good unwritten rules were already taken…
Chris Shipman/NYTWe go way back with the New York Times’ David Colman—through his strangely unmotivated obsessions with vests, shorts, and even pants—but we have to give him credit on this one. If you’ve managed to snag some Red Wing boots, it would be silly to let your pants cover them up.
We aren’t sure about those cowboy boots—although Mr. Benjamin might disagree—but this is a general trend we’ve been seeing for some time. The beauty of the shorter pant leg that’s come into fashion over the past few years—we’re looking at you, Mr. Browne—isn’t that it shows a bit of ankle but that it perfectly frames your shoes. Now that the footwear has gotten bulkier, you need to hike your pants up even higher to get them out of the way.
As for where you should draw the line, we’d say galoshes are for rainstorms. But Mr. Colman might disagree…
via Dan Mendell/NYTThe Times has an unusually thoughtful piece by Justin Porter today about skateboarding shoes. Because the skateboarders tear up shoes so quickly, Porter says they tend for flashier, more disposable pairs, even if they aren’t much cheaper. That caught our eye as the opposite of workwear, where the need for durability means more rugged materials like denim, canvas and metal come into play.
Another point is that this makes skateboarders ripe for sponsorship—Porter refers to some skaters being “on flow,” meaning they get a steady stream of free shoes from a particular company—but we aren’t sure this makes their shoes more important. If anything, they’re so disposable that the kids don’t mind making them billboards.
And what good is a sponsorship if your shoes are being ripped to shreds?
This month’s Vanity Fair features a windy trot through the remains of Marilyn Monroe’s estate, in the name of unraveling the “mystery of Marilyn’s death.” There are a few Kennedy love letters, one from T.S. Eliot (!?), and a whole lot of morbid fetishism, courtesy of writer Sam Kashner. (The curious can find a full web-only accounting here.) Of course, the media loves a dead blonde, but this is more unseemly than usual.
Monroe’s death is only a mystery the way JFK’s death is a mystery. When a corpse is found surrounded by sleeping pills, you don’t have to reach too far for the truth. Monroe was an orphan, and struggled all her life with what Arthur Miller described (in a far superior VF article) as “the bottomless loneliness that no parented person can really know”, so her suicide not as inexplicable as Kashner would have us believe. The real shock is how blind most writers have been to her real, human problems.
Have you ever had the feeling that the person you were speaking to was subtly mocking you? Maybe it was nothing tangible, just a touch of aloofness, a sense that everything was proceeding with a slight touch of irony…
Well, now you can get that feeling from a New York Times style piece.
The Gray Lady’s latest offense is about band aids as an accessory, pointing to recent offerings from Marc Jacobs and Alexandre Herchcovitch as examples—the latter recently featured at Opening Ceremony—and taking Mr. Nicholas James Brown as its unfortunate centerpiece.
It looks like we were a little premature when we scoffed at Monocle’s sentimental weakness for their local newsstand.
In fact, they’re getting into the business themselves. They’ve bought up a 20-year-old stand on Charlotte Street in London and are taking things over. It will be the flagship store in what the culture mag calls “a network of branded news outlets around the globe.”
It’s a pretty bold statement about the resurgence of print, vertical integration, and the necessity of community interaction in an increasingly dislocated world. Either that or they just wanted better placement in the displays.
London-based Monocle (which, we hasten to add, is not a lifestyle magazine) has posted a front-of-the-book-style roundup that bears no resemblance to lifestyle journalism whatsoever.
Titled “Things to improve your life,” the multinational list includes Italian bathing clubs (pictured), an austere German day bed and Ambassador’s foot-hugging leather trainers. We’re all for self-improvement—we’re even willing to tolerate the dubious inclusion of Monocle’s local newsstand—but is this really what the good life looks like? We’ve taken our own crack at it with the must-haves on the left here, but we can’t help but think there’s something missing…
Maybe something to help put on all those shoes.
Vanity Fair has posted their somewhat puffy take on the Bruni-Sarkozy affair, including a quick, Trump-free rundown of Bruni and Sarkozy’s exes.
Among the tidbits offered is a fact in favor of Mme. Bruni’s fashion sense: she convinced Sarko to swap his nouveau riche gold watch in favor of a sleeker Patek Phillip model.
Shorts. The final frontier.
Men.style is chiming in today on the growing threat shorts pose to today’s workforce. Previous salvos have come from Gawker, and (our favorite) David Colman of the NYT.
Of course, what men.style only hints at is that, for Gawker and Condé Nast (and we suspect the fashion desk at the Times), office clothing takes on a somewhat different meaning. After all, how can they expect old Coles to write trend pieces about cutoffs when he’s can’t wear them himself? That kind of trendiness is what they pay him for. The same goes for anyone else who happens to be in the trend business—leading to the dreaded Schnabel effect—while the poor folks in the rest of the office are stuck in white button-ups for the rest of their lives.
As the old saying goes, there are three kinds of tie on Wall Street: solid color ties, diagonally striped ties, and ties that set your career back five years.
We shudder to think what they’d make of a shorts-suit.
Apparently The Moment has bondage on the brain.
After the recent round of Milan shows, the style blog of the internet’s favorite punching bag decided to declare a microtrend of shoes with rubber straps around them, “as if that’s all that may be holding the two pieces together.” That’s all very well and good, but why, may we ask, does this qualify as bondage-inspired? Do these Louis Vuitton wingtips remind anyone else of quality time in a dungeon with Helga? Pilates-inspired might be a little closer.
We’d guess Mr. Pask is thinking about something other than shoes.
Apparently the British line A Conference of Birds caught more eyes than just our own.
The line is soon to land at Confederacy, a West Coast store owned by 70s Show vet Danny Masterson. It looks like the DJ/restaurateur is expanding into the fashion scene, with surprisingly good taste in labels.
The store isn’t open just yet—it’s opening doors in August—but it should finish up by the time Confederacy of Birds unleashes their fall line.
There may have been more life in the necktie than we thought.
A Continuous Lean weighs in on the Death of the Tie with a WSJ editorial from professional tie man Alexander Olch. Apparently Olch isn’t worried. He points to rising tie-wearing among the youth, and blames overseas production for the slump in U.S. manufacturing.
Fair enough, but we bet he was open-collared when he wrote that.
Time to brush up on your jai alai skills.
This month’s Esquire features a rundown on the more obscure sports and the Brit-inspired clothes they require. This being Esquire, the labels range from Burberry to Canali to the omni-present Mr. Lauren, but the styles are much more…uniform. White pants, white knits and white sneakers are more or less the uniform from tennis to cricket. Polo isn’t mentioned, but you can probably guess what to wear»
We don’t like picking on fellow legitimate journalists—especially when they don’t work for the Times—but if you’ve walked past a newsstand in New York in the past few days, you might have seen this cover about the secret lives of married men. Or, more accurately, THE SECRET LIVES OF MARRIED MEN!!!
The article is already suffering the wrath of the internet in its online comments section, but we’d like to take a moment to consider the broader social ramifications of running such a cover story in these troubled times»
Did you notice anything odd about the Times Style Section today? We don’t mean chicken-fashion odd - indeed, we mean good odd. Look, when The Grey Lady offers up another David Coleman piece about the resurgence of pants, a “Modern Love” entry on dead babies/girlfriends/husbands or whatever dust bunnies are rattling around Cathy Horyn’s head, we’re always the first ones to take the piss.
It turns out we were a little overzealous welcoming Ryan McGinley to the Varvatos fold. McGinley’s still onboard for the Get Chucked campaign, but Varvatos favorite Danny Clinch isn’t going anywhere.
If we missed Clinch in the Varvatos tent, it’s probably because he was busy shooting these spots with Cheap Trick for the John Varvatos Collection, which hit newsstands in a few weeks. And if we may say so, the loose cap/tux combination has never looked so dashing.
Sorry, Danny and John. We want you to want us.
There are a lot of pages to be filled out there, and only so many ways to make a runway show sound interesting in print. And when their notebooks run dry and writers decide to put that education to use, things get…interesting.
This time, the culprit is the New York Times, who spiced up an article on a Prada show with a Margaret Atwood reference, quaint use of the phrase “men’s wear” and ominous references to social engineering. Most of the offenses are in aid of Village Voice alum Guy Trebay’s extended meditation on Miuccia Prada’s “complex sexual issues.” This being the fashion industry, we imagine she’s in good company. And no, for the record, we had not thought about the deeper social implications of flyless pants.
Just as designers and the likes of GQ try to convince men to get back into three-piece suits this season, the trend-happy New York Times Styles section is taking the contrarian route, advising readers to forego the whole hog and simply sport the vest.
Note to GQ readers: think twice before following the advice on three-piece suits in the January issue too closely. While we’re all for the return of vested interests, proper tailoring is absolutely essential when it comes to adding the extra element. You do not want your shirt and tie peeking out between the vest and trousers, and nor should your waistband be on public view, as has happened to GQ’s unfortunate model pictured here. Without a smooth, uninterrupted vest-to-trouser transition, “the entire elegance of a three-piece suit is destroyed,” as the great Alan Flusser notes. For this reason, low-slung pants, as on display in GQ, do not work on a three-piece, and belt loops have no place here either; side tabs are preferable, and braces are of course the classic choice.
