The Best Dressed Men Of The Summer

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The Best Dressed Men Of The Summer

Words by Mr Stuart Husband

10 August 2016

From Mr Nicholas Hoult to Mr Vito Schnabel, the style icons setting the standard this season.

What to wear when, as Mr Cole Porter had it in “Too Darn Hot”, “the thermometer goes way up/And the weather is sizzling hot”? The answer: slip into some snappy summer-casual. The exemplary dressers gathered together in this smokin’ edition of On The Town braved the heat without sacrificing a single therm of style. Sockless and sleeveless, and always effortless, these were the men – and the outfits – that kept their cool, while many around them were in danger of losing theirs.

As Mr Karl Urban’s Dr “Bones” McCoy would doubtless say to Mr Chris Pine’s Captain James T Kirk if he were to encounter him in this striking ensemble, “It’s summer-casual, Jim, but not as we know it.” Mr Pine’s outfit straddles that frontier where summer-casual becomes, well, smart. Cut, colour and proportion are all more than enterprising. Witness the way the polo is buttoned to emphasise both the contrast collar and its slim fit compared to the rakish vivacity of the pleated, turned-up trousers. The sockless loafers are the final sprezzatura touch. Mr Pine is now ready to boldly go from Comic-Con adulation to cabana-at-the-Four-Seasons relaxation.

Mr Eric Rutherford may be in demand as a model (silver-fox division), but he has a day job as an event planner, and no occasion could have been as assiduously strategised as his appearance during New York Fashion Week in two of the summer’s pre-eminent styles: print and pale blue. Flower power may have last been a thing in the late 1960s, but designers from Saint Laurent to Valentino are ensuring floral print is once again in bloom half a century on, and Mr Rutherford’s camp-collar shirt (another summer sure-fire), with its palms and petals, more than does its bit for sartorial biodiversity. It’s set off beautifully by the chinos, which, appropriately enough, are pure periwinkle.

We’re used to seeing German model Mr Johannes Huebl resplendent in the finest bespoke tailoring that Europe has to offer, but when the occasion demands – and what better occasion could there be than MR PORTER’s recent New York Block Party? – he can throw caution, and his seven-fold tie, to the wind and rock the summer-in-the-city look to perfection. This being Mr Huebl, however, his version of dialled down is most people’s idea of nattily spruced up – draped chambray shirt, artfully rumpled tee and dazzling white jeans, which thankfully escaped a dousing in fish sauce from our on-site Tacombi taco truck. If you want a little Riviera-on-Rivington action this summer, Mr Huebl’s is the style to pick up on.

Mr Nicholas Hoult is playing Mr JD Salinger in forthcoming movie _Rebel In The Ry_e, and here, at a photocall at Italy’s Giffoni Film Festival, he seems to be channelling a little of the loner-and-rebel attitude of Mr Salinger’s most famous creation, Holden Caulfield. One of Holden’s many aperçus was “I like it when somebody gets excited about something; it’s nice”, and we’re very excited about Mr Hoult’s just-so, no-nonsense ensemble: a button-down Oxford of impeccable rumple and perfect length, a pair of chinos of unimpeachable fit and iconoclastic stance and a pair of high-tops of immaculate scuff. Timeless style? To quote Caulfield again: “Certain things should stay the way they are. You ought to be able to stick them in one of those big glass cases and just leave them alone.”

On paper, the constituent parts of Mr Simon Porte Jacquemus’ look are summer normcore: navy blazer, white T-shirt, jeans, desert boots. But what elevates the whole thing to another realm (quirk-core? Idiosyncra-geddon?) is Mr Jacquemus’ fashion-designer eye for drape and proportion (he has his own eponymous menswear label). Thus, the deconstructed blazer, with its high buttoning and raised pockets, speaks of seasonal ease and glass-of-rosé-sur-la-terrasse repose, while Gallic elan is added with an aeroplane tail-style pocket square and a jeans turn-up capacious enough to store his wallet, house keys, smartphone or notepad and pen for jotting down those ideas – “playful tweaks on summer staples”, for instance – that can later be brought to triumphant fruition.

Exotic prints, as we at MR PORTER keep saying, are a big story in menswear right now. And few come more exotic than the hummingbird motif emblazoned on the camp-collar shirt-jacket that Tinie Tempah wore to the Absolutely Fabulous premiere, a movie in which he has a fleeting cameo (along with Mr Jeremy Paxman, Ms Orla Guerin, Mr Jean-Paul Gaultier, Dame Edna Everage and, for all we know, Mr Noam Chomsky and President Vladimir Putin – unless they’re being saved for the sequel). We like Tinie Tempah’s choice for a brace of reasons. 1) As a black-tie substitute, a black-chinned hummingbird takes some beating. 2) If paired with block colour pieces, such as Tinie Tempah’s jeans and sneakers, it’s allowed to sing (and will undoubtedly inspire a lot of tweets).

Do you need us to tell you that Mr Warren Elgort is the scion of a gilded Manhattan family, his father being the celebrated photographer Mr Arthur Elgort and his brother the up-and-coming actor Mr Ansel Elgort? Not if you read our interview with the trio some weeks ago in The Journal, and not if you study this picture of Mr Elgort, a former college tennis champion and current screenwriter and documentary filmmaker, at a Missoni launch in the Hamptons. Consider the casual WASP-y nonchalance with which Mr Elgort wears his belted plaid jacket, pressed shorts and tan loafers. He’s ready to sink a few sundowner highballs, or make a cameo in the latest styled-up East Coast fable from Mr Wes Anderson, without breaking much of a sweat either way.

Art dealer and curator Mr Vito Schnabel certainly has the secret-service-guy-out-jogging look nailed as he embarks on his morning constitutional around New York City’s West Side Piers. We like the dark-toned, wired-up, first-responder stance (and what’s he listening to on his earphones? “I Spy [For the FBI]” by Mr Jamo Thomas? “CIA Man” by The Fugs?). Mr Schnabel could be in deep-but-dapper cover for a couple of reasons: he’d prefer to cede the limelight to his girlfriend, Ms Heidi Klum; or he’d like to draw as stark a comparison between himself and his father, the perpetually pyjama-clad artist Mr Julian Schnabel, as is humanly possible. Either way, with the Games in full swing, Mr Schnabel is in no danger of getting lapped.

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