Feminine Fashions columnist Kennedy Fraser wrote in the New Yorker forty years ago that a perfectly plain white silk shirt and perfectly plain black cashmere pants are not style. They are good taste plus timidity or fear. For feminine style requires boundary pushing.
Perhaps the modern exemplar of feminine style is Daphne Guinness, the woman in the photo. If I were ever to assemble a best dressed list, she would be on it, for her clothing combines a restrained palette with smashing-the-envelope textures and shapes. And what a challenge that must be for her escort.
You see, I was thinking about Ms. Guinness and those of her ilk in relation to how a man should dress to accompany a stylish woman. After all, pedal to the metal extravagance is rarely effective for any pair - look at photos of Mick and Bianca Jagger when both were young and dressing to impress. All that complexity is dizzying. There is a reason that the peahen is dull next to the peacock, for both look better when only one shines.
When the observer's eyes finally leave the dazzle of the female of a pair and turn to her companion, they are best rewarded with quiet familiarity. This was the reason for the long running success of first the tailcoat and then the dinner jacket, where a man could distinguish himself by the cut of his clothing or the quality of his dress set but little else (and it was also the reason for rejection of the dinner jacket's uniformity by publicity seeking males of all persuasions).
Now this is not an argument for drabness. A man's clothing should be the best he can afford, well cut and interesting in its own right. But it should not be remarkable relative to that of a stylish woman.
Vive la différence!
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5 comments:
Wil, your taste is once again impeccable!
What a beautiful woman.
"And what a challenge that must be for her escort."
Her escort these days is Bernard-Henri Levy who favours white shirt open down to the chest with a dark suit, Hollywood-celebrity style.
The real challenge is to find a photo of him wearing a tie.
The contrast between Daphe and her male entourage is clear in this picture. Not much chance for a man to stand out against her.
I doubt this advice is actually needed for those to whom it would be relevant. The cultural norm of our society is overwhelmingly opposed to sartorial extroversion and exuberance in a male. This goes way beyond the question of whether someone reads Suitable Wardrobe and cares about the nuances of black tie rules. The only males who even think of dressing flamboyantly are the ones who are already sexually, culturally, and aesthetically deviant, who would be gratified rather than not to know that their costumes don't meet your approval. The mention of Mick and Bianca is telling - they were part of a decade and a cultural moment when the gender norms were being reinterpreted. That moment has been passed by, of course. Interestingly though, for the bulk even of Western history, males have been as lavishly decorated as women - it's only when you focus on select parts of the 19th and 20th centuries that we find this image of the muted, sombrely dressed male contrasted with the dazzling female - and the opposite pattern to what we find in the animal kingdom.
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