In one of Izzy’s favorite episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm, the neurotic protagonist is highly annoyed by extra trouser fabric bunching up over his crotch. But the “pants tent,” as Larry David calls it, is a phenomenon that occurs only when he sits down, which makes the ill-fitting crotch on these Banana Republic trousers even more inexcusable.
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If Jay-Z is a mixmaster at combining patterns, Matthew Broderick is totally whack. Not only do the dimensions of the stripes and checks clash, but the colors create a big stew of ugly. Even more shabbily, Broderick’s thinning hair is unkempt, his jacket is too wide at the shoulders (note the pucker), and his saggy taupe corduroys ensure that he looks all washed up. How could Sarah Jessica Parker let him go out in public like this?
Sure they’re not in season, but when you come across a pair of golden yellow corduroy ski pants from Prada, you go for them. Assuming you have the guts to wear them on the slopes, that is.
Bill Cunningham, the famed New York Times street-fashion photographer, has created a new audio slideshow, in which he notes that pocket squares seem to be making a comeback, especially on men who aren’t wearing neckties. As a proponent of judiciously chosen ornament, Izzy thinks this is happy news.
Speaking of the joys of people-watching, as the weather is increasingly conducive to walks in the city, it’s worth remembering some lines from Walt Whitman:
Keep your splendid, silent sun;
Keep your woods, O Nature, and the quiet places by the woods;
Keep your fields of clover and timothy, and your corn-fields and orchards;
Keep the blossoming buckwheat fields, where the Ninth-month bees hum;
Give me faces and streets! give me these phantoms incessant and endless along the trottoirs!
Give me interminable eyes! give me women! give me comrades and lovers by the thousand!
Let me see new ones every day! let me hold new ones by the hand every day!
Give me such shows! give me the streets of Manhattan!
Now here’s a t-shirt message Izzy can subscribe to: a gentleman in a tweed suit, high collar, and spats demonstrating civilization to an attentive boy, dressed with restraint. And the slogan is both perfect and true. The artist is Edward Gorey, who was famed for his vaguely ominous illustrations of Victorian and Edwardian subjects. But there’s nothing discomfiting here, except maybe the boy’s stiff collar.
While reading the obituary for publisher Simon Michael Bessie—who edited writers including Daniel J. Boorstin, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Kenneth Tynan, and Elie Wiesel—Izzy came across this passage about Bessie’s attempt to track down John Cheever, the novelist and chronicler of a vanishing WASP world:
As Susan Cheever recounts it in a memoir of her father, “Home Before Dark” (1984), Mr. Cheever had offered the novel to Random House in 1954, but the publisher turned it down. In despair, he rented a house that summer on Nantucket Island, took his family there and continued working on the novel. One day, as Cheever was staring out the window, a sailing yacht appeared in the harbor and dropped anchor. A man in white flannels and a double-breasted blazer was rowed ashore in a dinghy and announced in the voice of a literate aristocrat to the small crowd that had gathered to greet him, “I’m looking for John Cheever.”
“It was Simon Michael Bessie,” Ms. Cheever writes, “a senior editor at Harper & Row, and he had come to buy ‘The Wapshot Chronicle.’ ”
It’s worth noting that although Bessie was not himself a WASP, he clearly knew how to dress the part.
As a general rule, Izzy enjoys white or off-white suits (even those with black buttons), but the tailoring of this one being worn by REM’s Michael Stipe just seems a bit off. Is the jacket too long? Certainly the sleeves are. Izzy does, however, like the tie, with its width continuous all the way up. And there’s nothing amiss with Stipe’s lack of belt, which creates an especially clean look. Plus, why attract attention to your waist is there’s no need to?
This scene from the 1989 flick Teen Witch contains what is surely the wack-est rap battle of all time, which doesn’t mean it’s not also the most unintentionally hilarious. To make matters even worse, the painfully white “tough guys” are dudded up in 80s trends—acid-wash jeans rolled to the knee, clip-on suspenders (also seen on Cameron Frye in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off)—that deserve to be exorcised from the collective unconscious.
For the fashionable human cannonball.
If women love a man in uniform, they must surely lurv a man in half of one, at least when he has the hard-earned, eminently practical figure of a firefighter.
This gentleman in Milan is doing so many things right, it’s hard to know where to begin. There are his narrow, short trousers which show off the sensational antiqued shoes (Berluti?). And it’s not every day one sees a pocket square in an overcoat. But the gloves, cradling a cigar, are really what set the outfit apart. If there’s one accessory any dandy must absolutely possess, it is a pair of canary yellow gloves.
The top’s all business, while the bottom’s all set for the ski slopes—circa 1985. Could DSquared² be targeting the undervalued Swiss newscaster demographic?
Incidentally, shouldn’t DSquared² be pronounced “DSquared squared”? Just sayin’…
