There’s no heat in my apartment today (it’s a Christmas miracle!) so I’ve been hanging around my home in a Donegal tweed suit, Fair Isle sweater, wool scarf, and wingtip boots. It’s ridiculous, but I’m kind of a fan.
Half Mandrill, Half Mandela
RSSPosts tagged with "clothes"
Even professional surfers who live in beach huts in Bali have great-uncles who die back in Fresno. And great-aunts who’d feel bad if their grand-nephew showed up at the funeral in khakis and a polo shirt from his catholic high school’s uniform.
Read the rest of Mr. Thorn’s quality rant about why a man should own at least one suit.
Senior and Junior.
The Fairbanks.
The films of Douglas Fairbanks Sr. kinda saved my life.
Jr. was pretty cool too. (Is that an astrakhan wool lapel?)
J. Press York Street.
As someone who grew up in a neighborhood where these colors and patterns weren’t a witty cultural reference, but rather a matter of life and death, I’m pretty uncomfortable with this. The combination of preppy elitism and set tripping isn’t cute, it’s a little bit gross.
Oh man. Extra, extra seconded. The fuck.
I could never be a thug; they don’t dress this well.
This Day In History …
This Saturday, September 15th, marks the end of what used to be known in the United States as straw hat season. You see, in the early 20th century, it was considered socially unacceptable to wear straw hats past this date. If you ignored the rule, you’d be ridiculed at minimum. At most, you’d have your hat knocked off and stomped on by youths. This was actually a well established enough tradition that newspapers would publish warnings of the impending arrival of the fifteenth, so that people would remember to switch to felt for fall.
On September 13th of 1922, however, two days before the official deadline, eager youths in New York City decided to get a jump on the tradition. They started on Mulberry Street in Manhattan, knocking straw hats off factory workers’ heads before moving onto dock workers. Unfortunately for them, the dock workers fought back, and a brawl large enough to stop traffic soon erupted. The police eventually came, broke up the fights, and made some arrests.
The next evening, more youths went into the streets, but this time armed with large sticks, some with nails driven through the tips. They’d then form gauntlets and compel men wearing straw hats to run through them. Other hoodlums would hide in doorways or behind cars, then dash out, ten or twelve strong, and attack one or two men before fleeing. Along one street in the lower west side of Manhattan, attackers lined up along the car tracks and yanked straw hats off the heads of passengers as the cars passed. Even a few off-duty policemen wearing straw hats found themselves attacked.
Broken hats were strewn all over the streets where such incidents happened, and any hat store kept open late that night was crowded with people needing something new to wear. Most of them opted for something made from felt.
By the end of it, a number of arrests were made, some people were treated for serious injuries, and many, many straw hats were broken. The tradition of hat smashing continued for some years after that, but 1922 is considered to be the worst year of it (though, one man was killed in 1924 when he resisted having his hat smashed). At some point, the tradition of switching from straw to felt died off, and with it, so did the tradition of hat smashing. Today men can safely wear straw hats past the 15th, but they’ll just look seasonally out of place.
If you wear hats, switch to felt starting this Saturday.
(Photo taken from Wikimedia Commons)
What.
A dear friend gave me this photo of her middleschool friends in 1990. One of my fave photos ever.
And can they all be my big sisters?
Those boots. Goddamn.
I heard about Andrew Lock Shoes from Put This On, and I can’t wait until I can afford them.
Douglas Fairbanks
(via updownsmilefrown)
Dat blazer.
The movies of Douglas Fairbanks Sr. kinda saved my life. (Long story.) Also, this is amazing.
The 90s were a dark time for these originators.
People dress up for funerals. Why not dress up to celebrate that you’re alive?
- Gay Talese. (Quote taken from a fun Wall Street Journal article about Mr. Talese’s style)
Put This On Season Two, Episode 3: (New) Traditions
If I could afford to get suits on Savile Row, I’d move to England and never look back. (That is probably not true, but it’s a nice fantasy.)
Hipsters | 1943
A group portrait of two African American couples, circa 1943. Charles “Teenie” Harris, Photographer. Carnegie Museum of Art. African American vernacular photography via Black History Album.
Hey everybody, thanks for ruining a perfectly good word that used to just mean awesome people with your vitriol.
Would I wear a sweater with a picture of a teddy bear wearing Polo business clothes? Or a Polo Golf tie with an illustration of a golfer on it? Or a black leather Polo suit? No way. A jacket that says “SNOW BEACH” on it? Absolutely not.
So why did we feature ‘Lo Heads in our first episode? Wearing clothes that I wouldn’t wear myself, in ways I wouldn’t wear them?
Dressing is a fundamentally discursive act. The most sophisticated dressers are engaged in a three-way conversation - between the creator of their clothing, themselves, and the people they interactive with while dressed. This happens in the context of a broad set of only semi-shared cultural values. The designer intends one meaning, the wearer recombines it, recontextualizes it, and gives it new meaning, and then that meaning is interpreted by the people the wearer interacts with in ways that the wearer could never have conceived.
I think that these guys, deeply immersed in this ‘Lo Heads culture, are incredibly fluent at this discourse. They’re living it. Any of us, no matter what our personal sense of aesthetics, or our personal goals for can learn from their example.
So let’s break it down a little.
The first level: there’s an interesting statement made, of course, when a black or Puerto Rican guy from the hood wears clothes that are self-consciously associated with activities (yachting, skiing, golf) that have powerful ties to whiteness and richness. The guy from the hood is subverting those values. His act is a thumb in the eye to the rich (and white) that says that not only can those symbols of privilege be appropriated by the downtrodden, the downtrodden can rock that shit better.
Dallas describes the Polo-obsessed culture as a function of “Aspirational Apparel.” I think that’s part of it. When you’re “sick and tired of being sick and tired,” as one guy put it, you want to represent something for yourself that’s more than that. But here’s the limitation of that description: this is not a literal act. These are not poor people striving to be as much like rich people as possible. This is a symbolic act.
We asked person after person, “would you get on a yacht?” “Have you ever been skiing?” “Do you like golf?” and to a man, the answer was a laughing “HELL no.”
In other words: these folks don’t aspire to be the rich. They aspire to success, sure, like any of us, but they aren’t supplicating themselves before upper-class white culture, asking to be let in. They don’t aspire to join the club. They aspire to take the symbols of privilege and give them new meaning. To rock them better.
In fact, if the clothes are worn in new ways - think of Dallas’ tie-outside-sweater look - all the better. Like hip-hop slang, the goal is to create an insider’s argot, a way of recombining these symbols of privilege into something with one meaning for people who “get it” and one meaning for people who don’t. Alienating the outsiders is part of creating an insider culture.
There’s also something fascinating to me about the specific preferences that Polo collectors demonstrate. I was wearing a corduroy Polo blazer the night we recorded at Lo Goose on the Deuce (“all eras, all styles welcome,” it said on the invite). Needless to say, there weren’t a lot of other guys there rocking corduroy blazers - despite the fact that corduroy has a rich sporting heritage.
Polo collectors like stuff with graphic and textual representations of the abstract class ideas they’re pursuing. Abstractions of abstractions. Ties with pictures of golfers. Jackets with pictures of skiiers. The Polo Bear.
The Polo Bear is the perfect collectible for Lo Heads. He’s a brand icon who appears mostly on annually-released sweaters. A teddy bear who wears Polo clothes. That makes the Polo Bear sweater a representation of a representation of class, through an icon (a teddy bear) that’s completely non-human, for maximum abstraction.
The reason the Polo fans love Ralph Lauren is that while he has always admired the aesthetics of English schools and Great Gatsby Americana, he himself was a poor, Jewish New York kid. His name and brand were made up from whole cloth. His creations are fundamentally (and shamelessly) inauthentic. Their value is in how perfectly they celebrate an idea of Americanness that is both tied to race and class and somehow self-consciously cut off from it. The premise of his work is that he’s going to grab the symbols and aesthetics and rock them better.
I don’t want to get too semiotic on you, but our clothes have very limited inherent values. Warm/not-warm and keeps the sun off are pretty much it. Maybe some portion of our aesthetic values are in-born, that’s an argument for a different day. Everything else about getting dressed is symbolic. You’re participating in a conversation. Learn to speak the language.
This, a thousand times over. Always rock it better.
The homburg is a beautiful, wonderful hat that I will never be able to wear. It requires a certain gravitas and, frankly, just to be from a time before older shit like this became “retro.” I think that, right now, a man would have to be over 70 to wear the homburg, or maybe a very, very cool 65.
But when, for example, my father hits 70, I think the statute of limitations on being able to pull off a homburg will have gone up beyond his reach. The fedora can still, barely, be pulled off, but I think the homburg will become essentially unwearable in a few decades. Le sigh.
About Half Mandrill, Half Mandela
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