THE JOURNAL
Men wearing suits in France, 1994. Photograph by Mr Gueorgui Pinkhassov/Magnum Photos
A few years ago, the luxury department store Barneys surveyed men to find out how they decide which clothes to buy. They found that most men simply want to dress “correctly” given their environment. “Many felt there was some terrible abyss they’d fall into if they wore the wrong shirt with the wrong tie,” said Mr Simon Doonan, who then served as the company’s creative ambassador. “I think it’s a function of the idea of good taste/bad taste, which is a very 1950s thing.”
The irony is that many of those mid-century rules about correctness in dress have long disappeared, and people have more freedom than ever to dress however they choose. Ms Cathy Horyn noticed this when she wrote a 2015 New York Times article about “the post-trend universe.”
Previously, fashion was dictated from above by magazine editors who would declare, in all sincerity, that the things they promoted yesterday had now become a bore. But now, according to Horyn, editors have little power, as consumers can create whatever aesthetic worlds they want through carefully curated social media feeds.
Instead of moving in lock-step with the fashion industry’s dictates, they can pluck from different aesthetics – workwear, streetwear, classic or the avant-garde – and even mix them if they please. “[T]he ability to find styles that actually suit one’s body and personality is cause for celebration, offering [people] so many more forms of self-expression,” Horyn wrote.
Yet, in the seven years since that article was published, menswear has cycled through some significant trends – Mr Hedi Slimane’s skinny rock aesthetic, the fusion of streetwear and high fashion, and the recent revival of wide-legged pants and The Talented Mr Ripley’s retro-styled knitwear. For a time, if you visited any major city centre, half the men under 40 wore black lambskin double riders, à la Slimane. Now everyone is in chore coats.
To be well-dressed means dressing appropriately for a setting. To be stylish, however, means mastering the art of dress and injecting some personality into your choices. So, how does one dress originally?
“Your clothing should convey something about you – culture, belonging and identity, whether real or aspirational”
The best anecdote I can give is Mr Evander Berry Wall, a wealthy New Yorker who earnt his fortune the old-fashioned way – by inheriting it. Shortly after he died in 1940, Time magazine described his tumultuous life as drifting “from race track to race track, from hotel to hotel, from gambling casino to gambling casino, with a miscellaneous society that included the Duchess of Windsor, the Grand Duke Dmitri, the Aga Khan, King Alfonso and ex-King Nicholas of Montenegro, ‘a magnificent old darling’.”
Wall wore winglike capes, wide-legged trousers turned up several inches at the cuff to show off his white spats and varnished shoes, and voluminous coats cut from startling horse-blanket plaids. He decorated his high detachable collars with lush ascots, of which he reportedly owned 5,000. Wall had the French bespoke shirtmaker Charvet produce matching ascot sets for him and his dog, a chow he affectionately named Chi Chi, so the two could look like a couple while dining together at The Ritz.
Wall lived like the aristocratic salonnières of Parisian high society, who were his neighbours when he moved from France during the belle époque. Those exotic golden birds of French society changed their clothes upwards of eight times a day, so they could pose in innovative outfits while being captured by portrait photographers such as Mr Otto Wegener or Mr Félix Nadar.
Wall, too, loved to be seen in different clothes throughout the day. When the financier Mr John “Bet-A-Million” Gates wagered that Wall could not go through 40 changes of clothes between breakfast and dinner, the American dandy rose to the challenge. He appeared at a racetrack one day in one elaborate ensemble after another until he ended the performance by arriving at a ballroom in flawless evening attire (he was met with wild applause).
During the Great Blizzard of 1888, he won a sartorial competition against fellow dandy Mr Robert Hilliard (“Handsome Bob”) when he confidently strode into a bar while wearing gleaming patent leather boots that went up to his hips. After the competition, journalist Mr Blakely Hall crowned Wall as the “King of the Dudes”.
Few men have the gumption, means, and lifestyle to support the sort of originality that Wall displayed. But it’s remarkable how much Wall’s style communicated something deeper about himself, and that tells us something about how to dress originally.
Wall led the life of a dandy socialite. He spent much of his time dancing in exotic locations, gambling at horse races and indulging in bodily pleasures (“My idea was that life was worth enjoying. I liked the struggle, racing, gambling,” he once stated). He claimed to have brought the foxtrot to Spain, played poker with US Generals Atterbury, Russell and Bliss, and once nearly had to fight a duel.
By the time he died, Wall had squandered much of his $2,000,000 inheritance from his grandfather and mother, leaving his heirs with only $12,608. It’s difficult to imagine such a character in conservative dark worsted suits and silk foulard ties. No, Wall couldn’t put on anything other than the gaudy clothes that carried him throughout his life. By the same token, a Harvard engineering processor may look “original” in Wall’s clothes, but his style would be a miserable failure.
“The path towards style starts with imitation until you can find your groove”
Men who are just beginning to pay attention to clothing will frequently approach the act of dressing in the same way that a painter might approach a canvas. They want to put together a visually appealing outfit, so they figure out what shapes and colours go together – blue with green, black with brown, or horizontally striped socks to echo the stripes on a shirt. But it’s better to think about outfits as a kind of visual language and the act of dressing more like writing a sentence.
MIT linguist Professor Noam Chomsky is famous for his phrase "colourless green ideas sleep furiously”, which is an example of a sentence that is grammatically correct but semantically nonsensical. A “good” sentence is more than just following grammatical rules; it considers how different parts interact to create meaning. Similarly, your clothing should convey something about you – culture, belonging and identity, whether real or aspirational.
In this sense, learning how to dress originally is like learning how to write in your voice. First, you learn how to communicate something using vocabulary, grammar and syntax (or through your wardrobe, using clothing, shoes and accessories). A navy sport coat teamed with grey woollen trousers communicates professionalism and dependability, whereas a black lambskin double-rider worn with jet black jeans and black side-zip boots has a restless energy.
Next, just as a budding writer may take inspiration from more skilled authors, you may take style inspiration from stylish dressers online or in your physical community. Perhaps you’ll see combinations that give you ideas for how to dress down tailoring, such as wearing a linen suit with espadrilles. Or maybe you’ll see how you can team sportswear with more formal elements, such as sweatshirts tucked underneath oversized topcoats.
As with many other skills, the path towards style starts with imitation until you can find your groove. This means being mindful of how you can communicate something with your outfit, imitating a look here or two, and then building up enough confidence to use your voice, so you express something that feels natural to you. You can’t adopt someone else’s wardrobe any more than you can convincingly mimic their manner of speaking, but you can learn how to dress better by paying attention to others (just as you can learn how to write better by reading literature). The key is to treat dress like social language and learn how to create more beautiful sentences, not randomly festoon outfits with creative but haphazard elements.
Ultimately, an outfit will be beautiful and original when it’s culturally legible and communicates something more profound about you. As the German-American composer Mr Lukas Foss once said: “Most people think an artist tries to be original, but originality is the last thing that develops in the artist.”