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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This month’s GQ has a primer on presidential style, and while we knew about LBJ’s glasses and Kennedy’s trim suits, we were surprised to hear about Harry S Truman’s penchant for skinny tartan ties.
Not too shabby by today’s standards, which got us thinking. It took a while, but maybe the man from Missouri’s time as a style icon has finally come.
One of the great 50s pinups is in critical condition and getting the pre-obituary treatment today.
Although she’s far from a household name, Bettie Page will probably look familiar to any Dita Von Teese fans (and probably anyone especially taken by Ms. Joan Holloway). After a notorious string of pin-up shots in the 50s—which managed to inspire equal amounts of fervent admiration and moral outrage—she disappeared promptly from the public eye for a life of religion, marriage and missionary work, never to be professionally photographed again.
But as anyone interested in the early Playboy days can tell you, her legacy is still very much with us.
If you’re committed to gentlemanly behavior, it can be difficult to properly tell someone off—no matter how richly they deserve it.
So we found this vintage Sinatra story particularly interesting as a master class in the virtues of quiet, drunken forcefulness. The story comes from Mario Puzo, who had displeased his Blue-Eyedness by using his life as a model for the Johnny Fontaine character in The Godfather. When a stumbling mutual acquaintance introduced them, Puzo got an earful of what can only be described as impeccable wrath.
If you’re looking for the lesson, here it is: don’t swear, use arcane slang, and throw in as many veiled threats as you can. Also, shouting in public places is encouraged.
We draw from a lot of sartorial wells, but it’s easy to lose touch and, if we’re really honest, it’s been a while since most urbanites saw buffalo check in its natural habitat.
If you were wondering, this is what it looks like. (And yes, that’s a Kalashnikov she’s carrying.)
Rogues Gallery pointed us to these local Maine characters. The woman is Carolyn Chute, an occasional militia leader who has just written a novel about “living off the grid in rural polygamist Maine.” Her well-bearded husband is an illiterate gravedigger.
Welcome to New England.
We’ve been scanning our latest tumblr obsession The Impossible Cool for a while, and we’ve detected a couple of patterns.
First, in addition to the usual actor suspects—Mr. McQueen, Mr. Clooney—there’s a healthy spattering of genuine genius, including Robert Altman and our personal favorite, Mr. Kurosawa. For all the cross-cultural fun we’ve had over the past twenty years, it’s easy to forget he was the first one importing American staples like the shoot-em-up western to eastern shores.
Second, they’re almost all sporting shades.
via benhastenIn honor of Halloween, we thought we’d take a look at one of the cinema’s most stylish monsters: the ever-underrated Bela Lugosi.
The Romanian B-movie star may seem like an unlikely icon, but there’s more to him than meets the eye. You may not be going for the Dracula look, but a bit of mystery never hurt anyone and Lugosi used it so well he ended up with a string of hits and a permanent spot in film history.
And if you’re wearing a costume tonight, you won’t find a better example of how to wear it with style.
Jacob Silberberg for IHTFor all the love—and occasional tough love—we throw The Sartorialist, it’s easy to forget that street style has been around for quite some time.
The Times has a pair of pieces reprinted in the International Herald Tribune today on Bill Cunningham, arguably the progenitor of street photography—at least as far as newspapers are concerned. Cunningham started snapping during World War Two, aided by a well-oiled bicycle and an eye for clothing. Editors had space to fill and Cunningham had content that wasn’t just another society ball.
His files are still mostly unpublished, spanning 60 years of spontaneous style and just waiting for a glossy retrospective from some lucky publisher. But for now we’ll have to rely on Cunningham’s more recent descendents to keep us up to date.
Paul Newman has seen a lot of ink since passing away on Friday, but we can’t help but add a little more. It’s hard to think of a more endearing movie star, or a more stringently moral one.
He was also the last star of his kind, bridging the gap between Old Hollywood’s contract players and today’s twenty-million-dollar free agents. More than James Dean or even Marlon Brando, Newman shaped the movies he was in around his own persona, the loveable, beatific loser. He made Hollywood more concerned with the heels of the world and less comfortable with the folks who run things, whether that meant the prison guards of Cool Hand Luke or the corrupt judges of The Verdict. There have been other movie stars—even other outsiders—but one way or another, they’ve all been copies of the same genuine article.
Not everyone gets to be a two-time MOTH, but with his Benjamin Bixby line finally hitting stores, we think Andre Benjamin (or 3000, if you prefer) may be on the verge of becoming a full-fledged style icon.
Part of his charm is the sheer oddball unlikeliness of his style. Who would think that the next big defender of preppy-dom would come from the world of hip-hop? Who would think that the space-invader hallucinations of the Stankonia years would morph into depression-era traditionalism? Celebrity clothing lines are usually inoffensive at best, but Benjamin is dodging those clichés the same way he dodged the clichés of late 90’s rap: with actual ideas.
Kate Moss has led a colorful life, to be sure, even by supermodel standards. Once she even took time out from all the drinking and drugging to get treatment for sex addiction. But out of all the men in her life, the one snog that still gives her goosebumps just to think about came courtesy of Frank Sinatra—who was an octogenarian at the time.
Our friends at UrbanDaddy put us onto this late 60s picture of Miles Davis—currently on sale in limited edition at New York’s Morrison Hotel Gallery—and it made us reconsider the man as an unlikely style icon.
For one, those sunglasses were custom-made, and should look familiar to anyone who’s walked around Los Angeles in the last few summers. (Then again, you probably mostly saw them on women.) Even if the afro-futurist look hasn’t caught on outside of a few Atlanta natives, Davis’ ideas about style deserve a lot more attention than they get.
Two years after the great James Brown’s passing, Christie’s is selling off the Godfather of Soul’s most prized possessions this Thursday in an auction featuring everything from his multiple music awards, well-worn hi-fi, and metallic green vinyl sofa to childhood mementos and photographs.
The big ticket items are his custom electric organ and baby grand piano at est. $20,000 - $30,000 and $15,000 - $20,000 respectively, along with dozens of jumpsuits in denim, polyester and other flammable fabrics (and all the colors of the puke rainbow) in the $5,000 - $7,000 range.
However we were entranced by a couple of the collections Big Brown amassed, including the keys to 11 cities he was presented with over the years (est. $2,000 - $3,000), and especially this assemblage of 83 pairs of shades he wore during countless concerts and debauchs - a steal at only $1,000 - $1,500. If only they could talk…
Politicians are notoriously bad dressers—that’s a government salary for you—but if you’re enough of an icon, it doesn’t take much effort to become a style icon too.
After all, it’s called Kennedy chic for a reason.
The first contender to embrace the slim generation of suits (while his opponent is giving off slightly different signals), it’s no surprise that Obama’s a favorite for the GQ and Esquire crowd. Unlike the rest of the C-SPAN fodder, Barack manages to make suits look good. (Not so hard, really—but like we said, it’s a low bar.)
The style arbiters at the New York Times’ T Magazine have revealed what was behind the artful dishevelment of recently deceased pundit William F. Buckley Jr.: dressing up was simply beneath him.
Buckley adopted the blueblood uniform of The Millbrook School, the sort of upper crusty institution where the preppy look was born back in the day, they write, and never grew out of it.
This past week saw the exit of one of our personal, favorite style icons. The storied New Zealand adventurer Sir Edmund Hillary, the first man to summit Mt. Everest, champion of the Nepalese people and Knight of the Most Nobel Order of the Garter, died at the respectable age of 88.
A new must-see exhibit for any serious sartorial scholar just opened in Rome celebrating the lush life and times of the late, great Fiat chairman Gianni Agnelli, one of the most stylish men who ever walked the Earth. Titled “Gianni Agnelli: An Extraordinary Life,” it features over 250 photos, some of them never seen before, plus rare film footage and a documentary. It’s at the Vittoriano Complex until the 30th, after which it travels to Turin and Milan.
Duke Ellington dubbed him the “Maharajah of the Keyboard” and Count Basie said he played “the best ivory box I’ve ever heard,” while Ray Charles simply called him “one motherfucking piano player!” Oscar Peterson, one of the all-time jazz greats, died at the age of 82 over the holidays, and we here at Kempt can’t help but be saddened by the passing of man who provided the soundtrack to some of our most memorable moments.
Even with his slicked-back hair, brown turtlenecks, polyester everything, devil’s ‘stache and—uh—man jewelery, Goulet somehow seemed above it all—classy and confident no matter what (a lesson we could all learn.) Through his forty years of service as the self-effacing epitome of the velvet-lapelled cabaret singer, Goulet made the world his lounge.
For a proper obit, visit the New York Times
For an even greater tribute, slink on over to YouTube
—G.B.
