Quotation: I Think I'm Turning Japanese

"Analysts estimate that 20 percent of all luxury goods are sold in Japan and another 30 percent to Japanese traveling abroad - meaning Japanese buy half of all luxury goods....

The Japanese love of Western luxury goods is a relatively recent phenonmenon, In the 1960s and 70s, the Japanese economy flourished, giving birth to a newly flush middle class that wanted to live a more ostentatious life. Grand homes or vast real estate holdings - generally the most blatant way to enjoy as well as exhibit one's riches - was a near impossibility in the densely populated nation of Japan, Instead, the Japanese chose to show their wealth by dressing richly, and, for the postwar generation, Western luxury items such as leather goods, silk scarves, furs and jewels were the ultimate status symbols."

-Deluxe: How Luxury Lost its Luster, by Dana Thomas

The photo, from Cobbler's Laboratory, is of a bespoke Fallan & Harvey tweed suit made for a Japanese customer.

Quotation: Masculine Elegance

"Masculine elegance being synonymous with conservatism, a well-dressed man should NEVER WEAR:

- flashily striped suits.

- shirts in aggressive shades.

- jewellery, including metal bracelets - not even a gold band on a wrist watch (which is correctly worn only in the daytime).

- trousers that are too tight when slender ones are stylish, or too wide when the fashion pendulum swings to the opposite extreme. The same principle is valid for hats, coat lapels, overcoat lengths, etc.

- a polka dot tie with a striped or plaid jacket.

- a handkerchief that literally floats from the pocket, or one that exactly matches the necktie.

- suede shoes in the city, or a cloth cap, both of these accessories being reserved for country wear along with their companions, the tweed jacket and corduroy trousers.

- on the beach: printed shorts and ultra-short shorts (if he is no longer under twenty years of age), socks and closed shoes. The seashore is the only place where a gentleman may wear sandals or espadrilles."

-A Guide to Elegance by Genevieve Antoine Dariaux

Quotation: Tailored Suits

"Putting on a beautifully designed suit elevates my spirit, extols my sense of self, and helps define me as a man to whom details matter. Well-tailored clothing is a celebration of precision. When I'm wearing one of my custom suits, I'm in harmony with my highest ideals, my worship of great workmanship. In this period of globalization and outsourcing, of voicemail vacuousness and shopping on the Internet, there are few things more gratifying to me than standing in a clothing shop getting a second or third fitting from a tailor who is personally and pridefully engaged in what he's doing."

-Gay Talese in Vanity Fair

Quotation: London, New York and Hong Kong Suits

"The material in all cases will be identical since bespoke tailors the world over procure their suitings from the same English sources, the great woolen merchants of the English Midlands and the equally esteemed weavers of choice fabrics in Scotland. There are almost no other sources of luxury cloth if you except the brief rash of Italian silk suitings which found such favor with American gangster types that they never made an appreciable impression on the market.

In London and in New York the workmanship in each case will be identical; painstaking, expert handcraft performed by an ancient guild whose numbers are shrinking alarmingly in a mechanized world of cheapness and shoddy. The product from Hong Kong will be as skillfully cut and designed as the other two, since Fenwick or any other Hong Kong bespoke tailor will undertake to duplicate any suit that you wish them to use for a model, but the findings, that is to say the stuff inside the pockets, the thread with which the garments are sewn and the buttons attached, the lining, unless you specify a high grade silk at a small extra charge, and the coarse materials used to stiffen shoulders and lapels will be of quality inferior to that used by reputable men's tailors in New York and London."

- The Big Spenders by Lucius Beebe

Photograph courtesy of Desmond Merrion

Quotation: The Real Hat of the Old West

"A strong case can be built by any perceptive historian for the derby and not the Stetson as the authentic hat of the Old West. The Stetson was almost unknown outside the Texas ranges until it was popularized around the turn of the century by Remington, but a short time spent in any photographic file of the Old West from Chicago to San Francisco in the '70s, '80s and '90s, including those regions where firearms were conspicuous and the stagecoach had not yet been supplanted by the steam cars, will show the hard crowned derby in florid and almost universal abundance."

-The Provocative Pen of Lucius Beebe, Esq.

Quotation: Chinese Laundry

"In '49 and the early 1850's ... San Francisco enjoyed a labor shortage of acute proportions. Every able-bodied man had headed for the Mother Lode diggings and the few women who had come out from the East were not the washwoman type. The heathen Chinee had not yet been imported from Canton to beoome the universal laundryman and getting a ruffled shirt washed and starched was next to impossible. In this pass, the pioneers hit upon an ingenious solution.... Since buying new shirts and sundries was cheaper than hiring a washwoman at $100 a day, the Argonauts let their personal laundry accumulate for twelve months and then sent it out in a clipper ship bound for China where it could be washed and ironed for next to nothing. It came back a year later, and for some time it was established California practice to send laundry across the Pacific and get it back next year."

-The Big Spenders by Lucius Beebe

Quotation: Tell Them Who's Boss

"My late husband, David, and Fred Astaire went to the same little Italian tailor in Beverly Hills, up on Little Santa Monica. One day David came in to pick up a new suit, and there was Fred. The tailor comes out of the back room with Fred's new suit on a hanger and hands it to Fred. Fred takes the suit off the hanger, rolls it up, and throws it against the wall. David said, 'What are you doing?' And Fred answered, 'The way to wear clothes is to tell them who's boss in the beginning. Then they fit you.'"

-Danvi Janssen quoted in Fred Astaire: his friends talk, by Sarah Giles

Quotation: Khaki

"In the trade from India to the West, textiles were essential. Madras, pajama, and the Kashmir shawl travelled the route that, for the British, came to define richness or, by acronym, posh: Port Outward, Starboard Home. Khaki was derived from the yellow-saffron dust that inflected the naively white uniforms of the colonials and shrewdly became their regulation color. Even today, "khaki" is strictly a color in the United Kingdom and "chinos" designate the pants. The color and the cotton trousers made their voyage to France, England, America, and around the world, even arriving in one country a shade darker than another (notably the preference for a darker, salade-Nicoise-tinged khaki in France.)"

-Richard Martin in Khaki: Cut From The Original Cloth

Photo courtesy of Gap, Inc.

Quotation: Scottish District Checks

"It was in the emptiness caused by this drift that the sportsmen of the richer South discovered the possibilities of the wild Highlands as a place for sport. The chieftains and old owners drifted to Edinburgh and to London and found that they could not support their old state when transplanted to the far wealthier society of the South. They found many of the nobility and gentry of the South, led by the Royal Family, willing to rent or buy their vacant mountains, moors and rivers. Thus was established a new race of masters of the Northern Lands. One of these new Ladies of the Manor, as her grandson said, was worried because she had no right to a tartan. It was the long-established duty of the Chief to clothe his retainers. There were shepherds looking after the sheep that had gradually spread throughout the Highlands, and these shepherds wore the old traditional plaids of the Borders from which they had come. Those plaids were usually four yards long and were worn wrapped around the body. In the folds a lamb or a lassie could be sheltered. These plaids were most often a small black-and-white check. Our lady saw the shepherds, and to seperate her men from the sheepmen who were not part of her family, she thought of the device of putting a scarlet check on the shepherds' plaid. In this simple way young Miss Balfour started a movement that spread right across Scotland and finally produced the great and varied series of designs we now know as our District Checks."

-Our Scottish District Checks by E. S. Harrison

Quotation: Cleaning Shoes

"There is more involved in the process of cleaning than at first meets the eye. Though it is a slight exaggeration to say, as has been said, that the process takes two months, none the less a pair of shoes may be polished for half-an-hour a day for quite long periods - a month of boning and polishing would not be exceptional. This has an added, and incidental, advantage: like wine, calfskin improves with keeping and, in fact, hunting boots may well be kept in the shop for six months or a year to mature.

It is the boning with a deer bone that takes the grease out of the leather - especially out of waxed calf which would not otherwise take the polish. Because of the time needed to clean and polish waxed calf this has lost much of the old popularity it enjoyed when a man had a lot of servants; now that he may perhaps have no more than one - and probably has to clean his own shoes in the bargain - boxcalf has largely taken its place. But this is by no means an unworthy makeshift: it may be so highly polished that to an uninstructed eye, gazing from a distance, boxcalf is hard to distinguish from patent leather."

- Makers of Distinction, by Thomas Girtin

Quotation: In Benjamin's Care

Alex's shoes - dozens of pairs, each handmade by Lobb, each with a hand-carved shoetree with Alex's name engraved on a brass plaque - sat in neat rows, brought to gleaming perfection by Benjamin's magic touch. Alex's shirts - hundreds of them, from Sulka, or Knize, or Harvey & Hudson, cream silk, gray sea island cotton, pale-blue and off-white voile, each shirt monogrammed, each one with buttons on the cuffs (Alex hated cufflinks), each handsewn to measure - were stacked in specially made drawers, wrapped in individual cellophane envelopes. Alex's black silk socks, his faintly checkered gray silk ties, the Irish lawn handkerchiefs (double-size, so fine they would float in the air if opened and dropped, delicately embroidered with Alex's initials), the handmade silk undershorts and the starched pique evening shirts, all these things, and much more, were in Benjamin's care.

-Charmed Lives, by Michael Korda

Quotation: Really?

"Japan doesn't have any competition in fashion at the moment - it's doing something so different, the way it did with hi-fi. This is fashion thoroughly informed by traditional aesthetics: aji, which might involve fabrics where the incongruity speaks of the congruity of the whole; the idea of sleeves filled with nothing; the idea of colored space, as in the Edo Kabuki."

-Donald Richie quoted in Scenes from the Fashionable World, by Kennedy Frasier

Quotation: Men in Gray Flannel Suits

"And the men in gray flannel suits, now in their fifties, still look pretty good when you see them on the commuting trains. Some of them will stand up to give a lady a seat, if she's pretty enough, and they will open doors for ladies when they are walking from one car to another. When called a male chauvinist pig, a man in a gray flannel suit looks confused. He's supporting a wife, a former wife, maybe a mistress and three daughters in college, in addition to his mother in a nursing home. On weekends he does the dinner dishes. What more do women expect of him?"

What Shall We Wear To This Party, by Sloan Wilson

Quotation: Personal Style

"Personal style is about having a sense of yourself and of what you believe in, which is basically self-confidence. When you have that confidence, you can wear whatever you want and project something personal about who you are and how you feel. Dressing, then, can be an adventure. You dress for the role you are playing on a particular day."

-Ralph Lauren by Ralph Lauren

Quotation: Men Influencing Fashion

"Few individual men have influenced fashion since Beau Brummell, for ridicule and scorn often reward those who turn off the modern highway of conservatism. Perhaps only those in positions of power or who possess great social prestige can defy fashion successfully. The Duke of Windsor, when he was Prince of Wales, defied convention. He wore straw hats instead of the customary Englishman's felt hat in summer, loud checks and suede shoes, and resented stiffly starched shirts for evening. With a real goût de scandale he would appear at a formal reception in lounge clothes. If the ordinary man today were to appear in some of the unorthodox hats and highly coloured tweeds that the Prince modelled he would doubtless become an object of ridicule."

-The Glass of Fashion by Cecil Beaton

Quotation: Overdress for a Party

"The elevation of comfort above all other considerations, the flawed belief that informality equals conviviality, and downright laziness have resulted in a contradictory and illogical dress sense that would stump the most mondaine of time travellers beaming into a modern dinner party as he observed the crazy cocktail of sartorial semiotics about the table.

However, the tide - at least outside the shellsuit-wearing brigade - is turning. This is because of two fundamental human instincts that have been overlooked by the slobs. One is the ancient need of people to decorate themselves, which started long before the first murmuring of civilisation and continues today. The other is our very natural wish to please others, be admired by our peers and attract a mate. Add to this the security that a few unwritten rules can bring, and the enduring need for dressing up becomes clear

The first step is to forget the old British adage that it is ill bred to be overdressed. This guideline has outlived its shelf life, as it was conceived in a period when it was the accepted norm to dress up for any activity more than gardening. At this time overdressing meant being got up in a flashy, overly elaborate or embarrassing way and took no account of the modern invasion of sports-inspired clothes that has enslaved whole swathes of the nation into sweats and trainers

Now it is advisable and good manners to err on the over- rather than the underdressed when invited to a party. This is because by being seen to make an effort you are paying your host or hostess a great compliment, as well as making yourself look your most attractive. After all, the short time required for getting yourself dressed is negligible compared with the hours the hostess may have put in preparing the party."

Debrett's New Guide to Etiquette and Modern Manners, by John Morgan

Quotation: Style

"Style is rarely glimpsed in times like these, which at best encourage its humble relative, good taste. While style and taste have been known to intermingle in the past, the currently widening gap between them reminds us once more of their fundamental enmity. The world of the merely tasteful - trim edifice of bourgeois conformities, with narrow slots to be filled and straight lines to be toed - is bound to barricade itself, in the end, against style, which is individual, aristocratic, and reckless."

- The Fashionable Mind by Kennedy Fraser

Quotation: Count D'Orsay's Example

"I very much enjoyed learning about him, his contemporaries and his way of life. I must also confess to a little bit of what might be called method-writing: inspired by D'Orsay's example of scented gloves I have taken to dabbing my watchstraps with Caron's Coup de Fouet and I've even purchased a white buckskin greatcoat, of which I am sure the count would have approved."

- Last of the Dandies: The Scandalous Life and Escapades of Count D'Orsay by Nick Foulkes

Quotation: Brummel's Rules

"By 1801, the Brummel look was required uniform for Almack's - which meant his evening costume, consisting of white cravat and waistcoat, dark blue or black tailcoat and black knee breeches and stockings or tight black pantaloons. A 'solemn proclamation' went out from the club that only 'silk stockings, thin shoes and white neckclothes [were to be] invariably worn.' Wider trousers, or any addition of color, were unacceptable. Brummel's rules for men's attire at Almack's began to pare down men's evening wear to the formal black and white that has remained, evolving by the end of the 19th century into the even more structured 'white tie and tails.'"

- Beau Brummel, Ian Kelly

Quotation: The Look

"'Over his white shirt and perfect neckcloth, Brummel wore a pale or white waistcoat - or 'vest' in the parlance of the tailors of the period and in modern American usage. The waistcoat hid a small addition to a gentleman's wardrobe that is often forgotten in the annals of fashion history and Brummel's place in it: braces or suspenders. These are absent from the wardrobes of the previous generation ... Without them, the severe line along the thighs and lower legs was impossible, as belts were both inimical to the style and unflattering to the majority. Brummel wore breeches or pantaloons in the morning, in soft stocking-woven fabric or often soft leather, All this pale and white palette was thrown into sharp relief with two items in dark colors. A dark jacket - always deep blue - was cut away at the front to form tails, for ease on horseback but also to increase the apparent length of the wearer's legs. Black Hessian boots - from Hesse in Gemany - completed the ensemble. These were walking or riding boots with a tassel at the front that served to distinguish them from turn-top riding boots, which briefly had about them the taint of Napolean. The perfection of the cut and sculptural strength of the style were communicated with even greater clarity and strength by the sober palette."

- Beau Brummel, Ian Kelly