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A blog dedicated to the interesting, scandalous, useful and cutting edge in the world of men’s style, fashion and grooming.
We’re not much for sartorial backseat driving, but we saw something in the Post this weekend that was just crying out for a correction.
Describing the dandyish tendencies of Wall Street honcho Peter Krause, we ran across this tidbit: “Kraus color-codes his suits to match the band of one of his many designer watches, while his multi-colored ties usually work well with the timepiece’s dial.”
We knew things were getting bad at the Playboy Mansion, but today’s Wall Street Journal suggests it’s worse than we thought. Here’s the takeaway: That logo is about to end up a lot more places, and mean a lot less.
The tides of fashion are complex and difficult to predict, so it’s nice when we get the chance to give a clear, definitive answer.
Which is why we felt we should to respond to Gizmodo’s latest query, Does the iPad Make Man Purses Okay Now? It’s an interesting question, and we’re glad they brought it up. The answer is no.
Not at all.
Not even a little.
We’re always glad to see signs of men getting a little more educated about their clothes, so this Observer piece was what we call in the business “a very good sign.”
Here’s the gist: New York tailors are starting to get customers who aren’t afraid to get into gritty technical details like ankle measurements, tapering and shoulder pitch. In short, they know what they’re doing.
The chaps at the Observer have been noticing a little extra shagginess lately, particularly at the Oscars, where it seemed like every other recipient was sporting a mane.
The writer links the new look to everything from lumberjacks to Billy Reid, but the general 70s vibe is unmistakable. In particular, we’d link George Clooney’s Oscar shag to the Condor-era Redford—which seems to suggest the maligned decade is about to get a revival.
It’s the perfect antidote to the trimmed-and-pomaded Mad Men look that made the rounds a few years back—and for good reason. If you were sporting locks this long in ’62, you’d be lucky to get served in a restaurant. Nowadays, you won’t even offend your barber.
Sometimes it’s helpful to think of trends as a hierarchy. At the top, there’s the far-reaching sea changes that fashion empires are built on. That includes preppy, raw denim, and maybe even Americana if we play our cards right.
Below that, there’s the stuff that lasts a few years and ages gracefully (military, nautical), the stuff that lives on runways and only occasionally sneaks into the more adventurous closets (Navajo prints, drop-crotch trousers), and the stuff that nobody will ever wear outside of a showroom.
And unless it gets a whole lot rainier in the next few weeks, we’re tempted to put the scuba trend towards the latter end of the spectrum.
The chaps at Monocle are in the news again for launching both a Hong Kong bureau and a program on the BBC World News channel—a pair that would overjoy J-school purists, if it didn’t come attached to a magazine that’s looking more like a boutique every day. For those keeping score, Newsweek doesn’t have either.
The line so far is that they funded the new bureau with tote bag sales. Of course, all their revenue goes to the same place, so you might as well say they funded it with blackberry sales, retail money or (gasp!) good old advertising. It’s sort of true, but more than a little unfair.
Still, we’re going to call Good Idea on this one.
The Awl’s Cord Jefferson launched a few shots against preppidom yesterday, singling out J.Crew’s “Plantation madras” button-down and a pair of Ralph Lauren pants in “Old Money Green” as perhaps not the best naming choices in the world.
It should definitely be a wakeup call to a few marketing departments—even if we’d vouch for Mr. William’s niceness, in both the traditional and early 90s hip hop sense of the word—but there’s something else at work here, and it’s worth a little digging to find it.
An insider’s tip: when Christian Audigier starts copying your style, things may have gotten out of hand. Add in a winking style guide or two, and the recent renaissance of heritage brands and workwear starts to look dangerously close to played out—at least from a trendwatcher’s perspective.
The only problem is that workwear was always more of a movement than a trend. Which raises the question of what’s left after the trend pieces dry up.
If our editorial calendar is any judge, you may be putting together a gift list around now. You may also be dreading the flood of gift guides currently swallowing up publications from GQ to Cat Fancy. So in the interests of appeasing Simon Doonan, we’re going to try to walk the line.
We won’t be doing a gift guide per se, but if you find yourself in desperate need of material guidance, you can direct yourself to our continually updated virtual gift guide. We’ve been filling it up all week with gift-worthy posts, past and present, and we’ll continue to do so throughout December. The gear may be familiar, but it’ll also be interesting, offbeat, and available for purchase, which is enough for us.
Happy holidays?
Who’d have thought a few tables of gear would cause so much ruckus?
Last weekend’s Pop-Up Flea (co-helmed by our esteemed editor, Mr. Randy Goldberg) has attracted the ire of some internet denizens, and it was enough to call forth this downright brilliant post from Put This On’s Jesse Thorn, defending well-crafted denim, designer interpretations of classic work shirts, and the Americana movement in general.
We’re not much for dwelling on the negative, but with all the accusations of bad faith, it seems healthy to bring things a bit down to earth.
Valet just did a roundup of scarf knots, ranging from the LA hipster look to the presidential style. Unfortunately, they stayed a little too neutral for our tastes, so we thought we’d toss in our two cents: If you’re breaking out the scarf, you can’t go wrong with the slipknot.
The style has been gaining on the usual wraparounds for quite a while now and, for one reason or another, most of the product shots we saw this year found the scarves pulled through in just this way. The slight asymmetry makes just about any outfit more interesting and, more importantly, the front knot protects the throat better than the single loop or formal half-loop. Valet gives the Sartorialist credit, which is certainly due—where do you think we got the picture?—but this one has been building steam in the preppy crowd for quite some time.
If you were waiting for a cockney-inflected counterpoint to Pitchfork’s recent decade-spanning mega-list, wait no more. NME just unveiled their 100 favorite discs (or possibly downloads) from the last ten years—each equipped with a few perfunctory links and a video—kicking off drunken arguments in pubs, schoolyards and hospitals throughout fair Albion.
The Strokes’ Is This It lands in the top spot, which we must admit is a pretty solid call. But to get you started in your own ranting, here’s a few outstanding grievances:
Did they really put Speakerboxx/The Love Below higher than Stankonia? And Bloc Party higher than either one? How many Damon Albarn side projects do they really expect us to listen to? And if they think we’ve forgotten how much they slagged Kid A when it first came out, they’re wrong.
Enjoy yourselves.
Since Halloween brainstorming is currently underway in walk-in closets across the country, we thought we’d drop a little advice. In terms of big-picture wisdom, we follow Esquire’s tweeted lead: make sure it preserves your looks, involves no makeup and can be quickly removed in passion. (Luckily, our Lord Willy costume fits at least two out of three.)
But in the interest of avoiding faux pas, we thought we might help you avoid some of the riskier costume ideas currently making the rounds. Consider yourself warned»
Sometimes, it’s hard to tell if the Wall Street Journal is kidding.
Take, for instance, their latest style dispatch, aptly titled “Toupee Test.” The fact that the phrase “Hair Hat” is used in the subtitle seems to suggest that they know no one who cares enough about style to read newspaper articles about it would ever consider following through on a wig purchase. But the piece itself is a fairly straight consumer report comparing the fiber density cost and return policies (don’t think too much about that last one) of fine retailers such as Best Wig Outlet, Lori’s Wigsite and Wigs.com. Clearly someone, somewhere is thinking about buying a wig
For the benefit of the uncertain, we’ll offer a bit of contrary wisdom: Don’t. Please. Embrace the donut and you’ll be a better man for it.
It’s a rare magazine piece that seems to be working with too much material, but when you’re dealing with the man behind Ed Hardy, we suppose a little excess is to be expected.
This month’s GQ profile drops what might be the definitive profile on Christian Audigier, the man who gave us the trucker hat, Ed Hardy’s neon panther hoodies and the ugliest wine bottles on earth. Our favorite part: the Quarterly’s Devin Friedman (known to Audigier as “Darren”) reveals that the maestro of Fraunch has employed a film crew to follow him around more or less continuously for the past five years of his life. And yes, that includes a makeup guy.
It makes sense, given that Audigier arguably saw reality TV culture coming earlier than just about anyone else. And once you’ve made an industry out of huffing the exhaust of celebrity culture, there’s no point scoffing at a little self tanner…
Also, he may or may not be co-starring in an action-comedy with 50 Cent.
The Wall Street Journal has been taking on the Times pretty directly lately, and it looks like the style beat is no exception. We’re sure they were both racing for the “Steve McQueen is still cool” story, but credit the WSJ for pulling it in first.
The problem, as you might have guessed, is that he never really went away. Baracuta might be having a revival, but McQueen himself has never really fallen out of style. To the extent that he had a surge, we’re already on the tail end of it. That is, around the time when the big houses stomp in and large scale trend pieces start to water things down. None of it’s wrong exactly, but it’s also hard to pinpoint anything that wouldn’t have been true five years ago…or fifteen for that matter.
The Times Style section has been pretty light on fluffy trend pieces of late, but it looks like they were saving them up for when the honchos went on vacation. The latest hot look: the pot belly. Does this mean James Gandolfini’s due for a comeback?
There’s a teeming collage of pleasantly tubby Brooklynites for the unimpressed, but the bellies are all more likely to be the result of lapsed gym memberships than a new avant-garde style statement. And naturally, no style piece would be complete without a reference to the president, via the speculation that Obama’s flat stomach has inspired the hipster’s contrarian streak. (Doesn’t Barack have enough on his plate without having to answer for Williamsburg’s paunch?)
The overall gist seems to be that hipsters have been letting themselves go. It’s good to know, but alongside a fat-baiting JC Penney tirade, perhaps a little inconsistent. Maybe bellies are fine as long as they’re in Brooklyn?
Vanityfair.com just executed what might be the best foreign policy/fashion bifecta ever to grace the slideshow form. The subject is Muammar Quaddafi, and his various bizzaro style choices—ranging from absurdly rococo kufis to HIStory-era MJ uniforms. Never has a world leader looked so much like a homeless person and remained in power.
The piece might seem a bit breezy considering how repressive Qaddafi’s been for the past 40 years, but we bet there are dozens of Libyan newspapermen who would kill to be able to write this piece. He’s deserved a good deflating for decades now, and it would appear that Graydon Carter has given it to him.
We don’t want to spoil it for you, so we’ll just single out this picture as worth a look. It’s actually one of his more understated outfits, but it might be enough to qualify him for a new kind of watch list…
It would appear the neckerchief is once again at the throats of the stylish populace. Don’t say you weren’t warned…
The Cut just shined a spotlight on a new line of western cravats out of Brooklyn, and took the opportunity to call “trend.” Of course, Mr. Ford was on this particular tip long before Williamsburg caught on, and Robert Downey Jr.’s Zodiac look included a well-placed foulard before just about anyone. But we’re crying foul on this particular retro kick for one simple reason: the weather.
The Brooklyn-based gentlemen of leisure are using the neckerchief to protect their neck and collar from summertime sweat. It’s rooted in function and comfort, making it a much better idea than most trendspotters realize. The problem is, it’s August, and while it’s still gross out there, nobody’s going to be gearing up for a neckerchief purchase until next spring. There’ll be a lot of options waiting for them after the thaw, but it’s a little early to start making predictions.
The New York Daily News chose today to delve into the treacherous world of the man bag, and the results were every bit as spectacular as you would expect. It looks like they wandered around Union Square for half an hour with a camera man, but great photosets have been put together with less. Especially when they contain pictures like this one.
This gentleman’s Leonello Borghi pack is pretty much the murse personified. From the outsized proportions to the flamboyant fringe, it’s what every straight man worries about when he sets out bag shopping. It also makes the gentleman in question look like he’s trying to smuggle a baby sheepdog onto the 6 train.
To be fair, the photoset does show off some handsome, non-ridiculous satchels from Filson, 3.1 Philip Lim and Banana Republic, but they all get upstaged by the fearless lunacy of Mr. Borghi. Shine on, you crazy bag man.
The phrase “style icon” gets thrown around quite a bit, but it’s important to make sure you really mean it. Otherwise you run the risk of leaving the house dressed like this.
So we were a little troubled to see Lenny Kravitz getting the style icon treatment from AskMen. We’re sure he’d make a great male model and we admire his mother’s stage work, but can’t we all agree that this is no way for a grown man to dress? Like the flying V guitar, Lenny’s look is way too flashy to be trusted. Even when he isn’t sporting something as embarrassing as this, he exudes a level of lounge-lizard sleaze that should be enough to scare off any self-respecting gentleman of style. It’s gear like this that gives L. A. a bad name.
This morning’s Style section boasted a remarkably detailed summary of something that’s been going on behind the scenes for years now: the ongoing Japanese love affair with American preppy style. ACL gets a little much-deserved love, Daiki Suzuki gushes about Thom Browne’s Japanese style, and all is right with the world.
Kanye West is one of the pricklier style icons out there, so it’s good to have a guide to exactly what he’s after. (Other than, you know, the blog.) And if his latest Ten Essentials are to be believed, a lot of it boils down to this seersucker dinner jacket.
In Mr. West’s words: “I could wear it in Hawaii with a t-shirt, I could wear it in New York with a dress shirt. It embodies everything I like to be and do in fashion, riding the line between luxury and casual. It speaks volumes.” We hate to say it…but he’s right.
Wearing a t-shirt under a suit jacket is hardly a sartorial feat, but when it’s this jacket, things get a lot more interesting. And there’s something to be said for taking an amazing item and wearing it in every context imaginable. If we’d just dropped a couple grand at Lanvin, we’d be excited too.
The decline of the celebrity interview has been fairly well-documented, but just when you think the whole enterprise is too hopelessly compromised to convey an honest human moment, Esquire comes along and drops something like this.
The piece is the Christopher Walken edition of their ongoing “What I’ve Learned” series, and it might be the best thing ever to grace their pages. (That’s right, we’re looking at you, Talese.) Walken’s screwball banality cuts right through all the false modesty, PR calculation and good-natured cant that usually makes this kind of writing such a minefield. Ponder this gem, for instance:
Sometimes I look at this watch and I think, There’s some guy that puts these little screws in there? There is something about it.
Or better yet:
I used to love Danish. My father used to make a Boston cream pie. You never see that anymore. Very good.
Truer words were never spoken.
This handy graphic is from the WSJ’s latest dispatch on the state of men’s underwear in America, and it should bring you more or less up to date on your options.
Back in the day, the hip style used to alternate generations: Bogey’s boxers gave way to Kerouac’s briefs, and so on and so on through Risky Business. A few more options might give way to a bit of anxiety, but more options are almost always better. And in the end, it’s between you and whoever’s likely to see you out of trou.
You’ll be fine as long as you stay away from the one on the right.
Spring is definitively here, and the minds of fashion writers everywhere are turning to thoughts of khaki…
The Wall Street Journal just posted a seasonal ode to the neutral hue (via SwipeLife) and it got us thinking about the risks and rewards of the beige life.
Of course, a light khaki suit is always nice to have when May rolls around—and clearly it’s pretty alluring in a women’s swimsuit—but that’s just the beginning.
Apparently Monocle’s exclusive Woolrich Woolen Mills jacket isn’t quite so exclusive after all.
In fact, if you’re willing to settle for a black version (instead of Monocle’s Navy and Olive), you can get exactly the same jacket stateside for $50 less. It’s a bit surprising, since all their previous goods were whipped up just for them. We guess Mr. Suzuki didn’t want to waste any good ideas.
So we guess Monocle’s contribution was picking out a couple fabric swatches?
There’s been a lot of talk about Colossal Clothing over the past few days—not to brag, or anything—but as sometimes happens on the internet, a few folks have gotten things twisted up. Salon, you’re officially on notice.
It’s not a sister brand, a brother brand, or any other kind of relation to our beloved American Apparel. The Colossal folks are renting American Apparel’s factory, but the designs and clothes are all their own. And, much as we love him, Mr. Charney isn’t calling any kind of shots at Colossal Clothing.
And in case you don’t believe us, take a look at Colossal’s website. Notice any hot girls in tights?
Case closed.
Refinery29 just posted an item entitled The 12 Most Stylish Album Covers of All Time, and we have to call them out on a few slip-ups.
Exhibit A is Thriller. Anyone sporting Jacko’s get up these days would be closer to the American Idol outtake reel than a spot on MTV. But “P.Y.T” is amazing, so we’ll let it go. Adam Ant is a bit harder to swallow. Guyliner and face paint may be taking off among the tweens, but we doubt it’s anything Refinery wants to endorse.
And as far as sins of omission go…whatever happened to Roxy Music?
Print may be in bad shape, but the listicle is perfectly suited for the internet age. No matter how thorough the research is, there’s always a few bones to be picked…
For instance, we were impressed by the dent fashion folk made in Crain’s latest “Top 40 Under 40” list—including the Mme. Obama-approved Jason Wu and Steven Alan’s new chief executive Ed Rosenfeld—but what happened to the menswear crowd?
It’s been a while since we heard anything from Rick Owens, but apparently Men.Style hasn’t forgotten last decade’s Marc Jacobs. They stopped by Mr. Owens’ Parisian flat to condense his style wisdom into ten simple rules.
As you might have guessed, some of them are better than others.
For instance, ponder this one at #4: “When a suit gets middle-of-the-road it kind of loses me—it has to be sharp and classic and almost forties.” We were with you until the 40s part, Rick…
Men.Style just posted another of their ridiculously influential trend reports. This time around it’s titled “The New Severity,” and while it’s all new enough, we’re not buying the severity part.
As usual, the slideshow tries to trace the common threads between this season’s runway shows, items, and architectural projects, but when it comes time to tie the whole thing together, they come up short. Everyone who’s looked at a stock ticker recently is feeling severe, but all the Condé crowd can come up with on the runways is that there are a few more acute angles going around, and there’s an awful lot of gray and black. But…isn’t there always?
And if this Duckie Brown jacket projects anything but Old Vegas opulence, we’re certainly missing it.
We managed to get our hands on an advanced copy of next month’s T Magazine—courtesy of Friend Of Kempt, PR guru and devil-about-town Steve Rojas—and we couldn’t help but notice one of our favorite labels getting the star treatment. Actually, make that three of our favorite labels.
T’s designer spotlight features old favorites Commonwealth Utilities and Seavees, but the big surprise is Corpus, a weatherproofed nautical line that landed at Barneys this month, and is just starting to show up in glossy mags. Of course, it’s well-timed with the nautical trend, and we’re building up our raingear supply just like everyone else—but it’s still pretty impressive that they nabbed the pole position.
Naturally, if T had asked us, we might have had a few more suggestions…but there’s always next issue.
It’s been brought to our attention that Esquire’s best dressed man, Kenyatte Nelson, is in fact a brand manager for Proctor & Gamble, rather than a lowly PR rep.
We’ve got a few brand managers here at Kempt, so we’ve got no snarky quips in their direction, but if Nelson’s really holding the keys to the kingdom…can he do something about the logo?
Maybe something a little less freemason-y?
If you’ve leafed through the front of this month’s DETAILS, you might have seen the usual bunch-of-stuff section titled “Investment Pieces.” It’s not a bad angle—they certainly need to address economics in some way—but they don’t seem to have told their writers about it.
The result is a few safe staples mixed into the same trend-driven stock they’ve always specialized in. Luckily we’re here to separate the wheat from the chaff…
Times style writer and noted pants proponent David Colman has a fairly fine-tuned trend detector—so fine tuned that a strong breeze will sometimes set it off. But his latest target has us a bit confused. By Colman’s lights, the hot new trend for ’09 is…butt-hugging pants.
Of course, this is the Times, so they end up using terms like “backside display,” but the slideshow of a fully restrained model makes it pretty clear what the trend in question is. A personal trainer even stops by to testify to the increased popularity of squat lifts. The real question is…can they be serious?
The celebrity profile is wearing pretty thing these days, but luckily Esquire has come up with the kind of Pop Art idea that ade their name in the 60s: use the same language to write gushing profiles of random, everyday people. What was that about 15 minutes again?
The result is Esquire’s profile of the Best Dressed Real Man in America named as the most sartorially accomplished non-model/actor/designer/musician. His name is Kenyatte Nelson, he’s a pharmaceutical rep from Cincinatti, and this was the only way he was ever going to get a profile in Esquire
It’s a long-running joke that Esquire and GQ publish the same “new rules for men’s style” every year—the sartorial equivalent of Cosmo’s “487,000 Ways to Please Your Man”—but we’ve never minded too much. The rules tend to be genuinely overlooked lessons, like that fit matters and a well-dimpled tie is never wasted. We just wish they’d stop telling us how new it is.
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.
