The Best-Dressed Men Of August 2018

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The Best-Dressed Men Of August 2018

Words by Mr Samuel Muston

12 September 2018

From Mr Jonah Hill to Mr Ryan Gosling – the chaps who wore it well this month.

August is not the easiest month in which to dress well, what with the roiling heat, unremitting stickiness and statutory requirement to plunge into bodies of water at all hours of the day. It tends to bring out the inner slob in even the most fastidious. Do I really need to wear a jacket? Can I definitely not wear board shorts to that restaurant? The opportunities to slide are as endless as the days are long. So, as you read the list of the month’s best-dressed men, do so with admiration in your heart, because these men have battled the warmth and won the sartorial war.

G-Eazy, the 29-year-old rapper from Oakland, is actually called Mr Gerald Earl Gillum. But don’t let that put you off, for Mr Gillum really knows how to dress. Here he is at the MTV Music Awards in New York a couple of weeks back. Traditionally speaking, most people look terrible at the MTV Awards (any event with that colour carpet is always going to have its cross to bear). Mr Gillum doesn’t, despite traversing the off-piste terrain that exists between smart and sloppy. The shawl-collar midnight blue suit is very smart indeed, but he takes it down a peg or two with the T-shirt and bracelets. He makes it look, well, Eazy.

Mr Justin Bieber often looks like he is chewing a wasp, so it is nice that he looks more like a cat that’s just burgled the creamery here. And why would he not? I mean, he is leading his freshly minted fiancée, Ms Hailey Baldwin, out of the restaurant Dan Tana’s in West Hollywood by the hand. Reason enough to be cheery. Truth be told, he could be any young Angeleno with an Amex and a tan, only much better dressed. With chinos, presumably lovingly pressed by the domestic help, the camp-collar shirt and just-so necklace and trucker cap, he looks like the essence of the scumbro – and we like it.

Here, Mr Rami Malek looks like that genre of 1950s gangster who went round seducing film starlets – ice cool and ready for a rumble. It is the one-hand-in-pocket walk and the pugilist’s jawline that does it. Of course in the real world Mr Malek is a gentleman and a Golden-Globe-nominated actor, which goes some way to explaining the full Valentino look, which becomes him like a glove. And a glove made in mid-century downtown New York, possibly by someone smoking a cigarette and listening to Mr Thelonius Monk.

This picture is entitled “Jonah Hill out and about in New York.” And he does, at first sight, seem to be dressed with the negligence of a man out to buy a newspaper or collect his dog from the groomers, or whatever it is the actor and Mid90s director does of a Friday afternoon. But, reader, look a little closer and you see that the negligence is ours: he is dressed rather exquisitely, if discreetly. The shirt, for instance, is by hell-raisers’ clothier of choice, Wacko Maria, which was launched in 2005 by ex J-League footballers Messrs Keiji Ishizuka and Atsuhiko Mori, and those shoes are a pair of Prada Cloudbusts, the footwear of choice for the terminally cool. He is a man who means business and that business is #fashion.

If there is a cooler man in Christendom than Mr Sheldon Shepherd, we’d like to hear about him. The Jamaican-born actor and writer is here at the UK premiere of his film Yardie at the BFI on the Southbank and he looks like a king. Let’s start with that blue shirt with the cutaway collar, which he wears as if he was born in it – how becoming it is. Then that long, beautifully cut jacket, which you have to be very tall to pull off, heading south to front pleat trousers that are just wide enough and the final touch of the suede shoes. He becomes the outfit – and indeed the outfit is very becoming on him.

Is Mr Bradley Cooper a real person? Does he live by bread, like us? Breathe the same air? Because he looks like one of those US cartoon men made in the Cold War to show the superiority of the capitalist economic system. Here he is at the Venice Film Festival looking – what is the word? – oh, yes: unfeasible. Square of jaw and shoulder, his dinner jacket hangs off him with an élan that seems to reproach the gods; the trousers, too, are beautifully fitted, emphasising his broad shoulders. Even the slightly askew bow tie looks charming. Mr Bradley Cooper just doesn’t play fair.

Mr Aaron Rose is not angry. He is merely disappointed. It’s the tilt of the head, I suppose, and the artfully nonchalant hand in the pocket: he looks like he is just about to reprove you for knocking off school before the final bell. Perhaps he is smiling within though, because the artist and director is attending the opening reception of Now And Then: A Decade Of Beautiful Losers, a movement he was central to. Anyway, mood to one side, he has the blasé artist look down to a tee. The slightly battered sneakers and broad trousers and cardigan with hat could, in the wrong hands, look arch and silly. But Mr Rose owns them with the commitment of Mr Larry Gagosian and his Basquiats.

A few years ago, the arrival of Mr Ryan Gosling at a do was what we imagine the second coming to be like: all fanfares and screeching. But now the ardour has mellowed, a little anyway, as has the man himself, who no longer seems to dress as the late Mr James Dean but has ground his own style niche. Here he is at Venice with a distinctly 1970s look going on – it is the broad lapels of the suit that does it, and the colour, of course, which nicely draws out the burgundy of the tile-print shirt. He looks like a man comfortable in his skin and immune to all the screeches.

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