THE GRADUATE: A SARTORIAL EDUCATION
I came across an old New Yorker article by John Seabrook, which had a huge effect on me when I first read it. All old New Yorker stories feel like they came out five or six years ago then you look it up and it turns out it was published in 1998. Good grief, I was an impressionable twenty-two year old—that’s half my life ago!
Seabrook describes his father’s truly historic wardrobe. Bespoke suits made in Savile Row, Hong Kong and New York. It’s interesting to read that a Huntsman suit cost a steep $3000 back then (it’s more than double that now). His father had to smuggle expensive new clothes into his house to avoid detection from his wife, the sign of a true obsessive. Have you ever worn something and when a loved one raises an eyebrow and asks if it’s new? You respond by saying, No, no, this lovely khaki linen suit is something I’ve had for a while, I just don’t wear it much, thanks for asking.
Seabrook’s father was a fierce anglophile and a sartorial classicist. It’s wonderful to read about his clothes for very specific occasions, they describe a different era. He wore plus fours for riding, fur coats for the Princeton-Harvard football game, linen suits for Florida, pinstripe suits for board meetings. It was one of America’s great collection of clothes—and incidentally you can find some of the old suits at Crowley Vintage.
One thing Seabrook makes clear is that his father believed in the effect of clothes and the impact of whatever he wore. “Dressing without regard to clothes at all, occupying that great middle ground between dressed and undressed—dressing just to be warm or comfortable, which is the way most people wear clothes—did not seem to make sense to him”
I love this idea. If you’re going to wear clothes let them express you in some way. There is nothing neutral, nothing meaningless, no defaults. That takes energy and a world view, which is one reason a uniform is so useful. That way you look like yourself but don’t have to think about it every morning.
Of course the best dressed men can wear anything and still look like themselves, which is really something that comes with the self-knowledge acquired over time. Until then it’s worth learning and figuring out what’s right for you and what isn’t. Also: give things time. I think it’s easy to give up on something because we’re not used to seeing ourselves in it.
It reminds me of Rudolf Beaufays, a wonderful vintage store in Hamburg. Rudolf, a stately man with grey hair, sat behind a desk turning the pages of the newspaper while his cigarette burned down and ashes covered his double breasted jacket. It was the most elegant, nonchalant thing I’d seen. Then he stood up and it turned out he was wearing shorts, which was rather shocking. Rudolf’s store was so full of clothes that it was hard to navigate efficiently. Generally he would assess your sensibility and start bringing interesting things in your size, which he judged by a quick glance at you.
He tried to convince me that I looked great in a burgundy velvet jacket. I couldn’t do it. I didn’t wear velvet and I couldn’t understand how to pull it together. I think of that jacket often. I wear velvet now a lot and naturally I wish I had it. Rudolf did, however, talk me into my first brown sport coat. An old tweed custom Gieves (before it merged with Hawkes) and I’m so glad he did.
That brown coat fascinated me, it was sort of an irregular faint glen plaid with black. There was even a discreet faint orange stripe in there, which sounds awful but wasn’t. “It’s so Old World!” A delighted Rudolf giggled. Well I liked Old World, I thought. Indeed I had never seen a fabric like it—there is no fabric like it (at least since the 1950s) and I just had to have faith that it would eventually make sense.
It’s revealing to watch your taste evolve over time. At a certain point it might take a break from evolving and that’s alright too. I recently heard somebody say most people think music got bad two years after they left college. That sounds about right. The irony and the greater truth is that you look back on your younger self when you thought you had all the answers and realize just how much you still had to learn. A good education never ends.
Photo: John Seabrook and his father