As a celebrity, it’s part of Wesley Snipes’ job to a draw attention to himself, which he easily accomplished with an oddly angled collar. The non-traditional collar didn’t offend Izzy as much as he would have expected, but the extra-long dimple in the tie had the opposite effect. Is it possible for a necktie to be too silky?
A Milwaukee-area judge has gotten hot under the collar due to a prosecutor’s wearing an ascot in lieu of a court-mandated necktie. While the judge might be extreme in threatening the lawyer with contempt, his Honor is correct that an ascot must be seen as an informal piece of clothing. While donning one in court might not amount to a full-blown violation of the canons of legal ethics, the real question is why the prosecutor would want to accentuate the girth of his already hefty neck. His goatee was a smart choice, however.
Izzy wasn’t aware that there was a Project Runway Canada (insert toque and lumberjack shirt here) until he learned that this guy, Saskatoon designer Evan Biddell, was the winner.
While his “snakeskin” shirt is repulsive in itself, it’s his hair that truly boggles the mind—because, really, if your barber has one seizure, are you really going to let him keep cutting?
Combining roller disco, Larry Bird, and set design from Star Wars, this 1982 ad for Chardon jeans has something for everyone, except those with sartorial taste. Izzy can’t deny that the music is pretty cool, though.
Note how briefly Bird flashes on screen. Despite being immensely popular at the time, the basketball great was unfortunately cursed with a face made for radio, and a voice made for telegraph.
Izzy thinks there’s nothing objectionable about going gray. But yellow-gray is a color he finds hard to stomach. While it’s great to have a full head of hair at any age, sometimes, as in the case of Sam Elliott, less would have been more.
While Tom Cruise’s and Katie Holmes’s matching helmet-hairdos are frightening in themselves, their similarity to that of the homicidal psychopath in No Country for Old Men is truly hair-flattening. Izzy has read that the Coen brothers based Javier Bardem’s Prince Valiant hairstyle off of a 1979 photo of a brothel patron. Surely it’s no accident that it gives his character the silhouette of the Grim Reaper.
While wearing stubble is generally a terrible choice for older men, one that makes them look like they’re in the midst of an involuntary hospital stay, Tommy Lee Jones’s combination of mustache, soul patch, long side burns, and stubble gives him an especially bedraggled appearance. And to quote Mad magazine, that tie is bleccch.
David Lynch, the director of such mind-bending movies as Mullholland Drive and Blue Velvet, achieves a hair-raising bouffant that is exceeded in height only by the paint-brush-like hairdo of clown-prince Bello Nock. Architectural in its majesty, Lynch’s style might be called “the windblown aristocrat.” Those of us suffering from both baldness and envy should agree that the filmmaker has more hair than any one gentleman deserves.
Behold this page from the 1975 J.C. Penny catalog, which deserves to be seen fully blown up to get the full effect. While it’s easy to knock disco-pimp fashion, whether it’s the butch decolletage or the high-waisted polyester trousers with crotches cut too close to home, at least the clogs benefitted the shorter manimal (like the model on the right). As bad as these outfits are, truly beyond the pale are those cuffed bell-bottoms, something Izzy had never seen even in his worst disco nightmare. The only way this advertisement could have been any worse were if it had been scratch-and-sniff.
The Financial Times just published an article about the growing success of grown-up men’s magazines, paying particular attention to Men’s Vogue, which is edited by Jay Fielden (pictured above in a dapper silk-knit tie):
One of Mr Fielden’s most artful sleights-of-hand has been his treatment of fashion. He has banished male models from the editorial pages and instead outfitted subjects such as tennis star Roger Federer and survivalist Bear Grylls in clothes that are stylish but accessible. It is a Trojan Horse strategy of sneaking fashion into the magazine on the backs of interesting, well-rounded men whom other men might care to read about.
“Fashion is not a word that translates well to men in America,” Mr Fielden says. His readers are more comfortable with the notion of “looking good”.
While getting rid pouty male models is all well and good, Fielden seems to conflate “fashion” with “looking good.” Fashion, as women’s magazines demonstrate, is about constant change, with a focus on what’s “in” for this or that season. To be fashionable requires the ability to buy lots of new clothes with the “right” labels. It’s not the word “fashion” that most American men have a problem with—it’s the very idea. They may care about looking good, even having style, but that’s something entirely different from being on the sartorial cutting edge. Unless that distinction is kept in mind, Fielden’s magazine will likely have a hard time finding its audience.
Things really are different in Canada, at least when it comes to choosing spokesmen for high-end haberdashers like Harry Rosen. The journalist in the advertisement is Malcolm Gladwell, of The New Yorker and Tipping Point fame. (He donated his fee to charity.) While it’s easy to make fun of Gladwell’s unruly hair, having a visual trademark can be a useful thing for a would-be writer-celebrity.
Why would Ewan Mcgregor ride a motorcycle from Scotland to Cape Town, South Africa? Some say for charity, others say for the thrill of it. Izzy thinks it was to get that hair.
