GQ described New York-based haberdasher Duncan Quinn as “rock ‘n roll meets Savile Row,” which well captures its combination of traditional tailoring with flashy colors and patterns. Izzy is particularly taken with this fleur de lis necktie, a bold take on a classical shape. Alas, at $255 only French monarchs are likely to afford it.
In his recently published memoir, The Place to Be, television newsman Roger Mudd writes about a time he was late to Air Force One as President John F. Kennedy was about to leave for a trip. The reporter was forced to take a different staircase than was usual: “To get to my seat in the rear I had to pass through the presidential quarters. There stood the president of the United States himself, with [press secretary Pierre] Salinger grinning and hovering, ready to pounce if I dared ask a question. I dared not. The president stepped aside to let me pass….As I slipped by, I noticed that there were shelves in the space usually used for coats—shelf after shelf of shirts, stacks of freshly laundered presidential shirts. There must have been four dozen of them. Only later did I learn that Kennedy put on a fresh shirt each and every time he deplaned from Air Force One for a public appearance.”
According to a recent scientific paper, artificially enhancing the appearance of male barn swallows, thereby making them more attractive to females, upped their testosterone and even trimmed their weight.
“Other females might be looking at them as being a little more sexy, and the birds might be feeling better about themselves in response to that,” said study co-author Kevin McGraw, an evolutionary biology professor at Arizona State University.
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“It’s the ‘clothes make the man’” idea, [lead author Rebecca] Safran said. “It’s like you walk down the street and you’re driving a Rolls Royce and people notice. And your physiology accommodates this.”
Obviously, one shouldn’t be too quick to draw conclusions about humans from a study of birds, but the underlying mechanism shouldn’t be ignored: How a gentleman dresses affects how others treat him, which in turns affects his mood and even his personality. Izzy, for instance, has noticed that when he is well-turned out in a jacket and tie, strangers treat him better, which makes him more chipper and gracious than he would be otherwise. While it’s an old idea that clothes make the man, this study helps to explain how that can occur even if the man is unaware of what he is actually wearing.
