Style Icon: Willie Brown

Before he became Mayor of San Francisco, style icon Willie L. Brown Jr. served for 30 years in the California State Assembly, half of that time dominating California politics as its Speaker. The photos in this post are in a rough chronological order covering the last twenty years.

Brown loves clothes, and has more than 100 suits in his wardrobe, including the light gray three button that he wore on a visit to Hong Kong. In his recent biography, Basic Brown: My Life and Our Times , Brown devotes several pages to his dress. One of his recommendations is that the first advisor chosen by a man starting a political career today should be a wardrobe consultant.


That's because he believes that public figures should be aware that they are on camera around the clock, and ought to pay constant attention to how they look (a lesson that the current Mayor, Gavin Newsom, has taken to heart). Brown, who often wears blazers like the one in the photo, frequently changed his clothes four times a day in order to be dressed correctly for each occasion. I do not at all doubt his belief that the photos of the one time he looked bad would be certain to be the ones chosen for publication by an unfriendly editor.


Are there flaws in his look? Of course. I wish, for example, that he didn't tie a half Windsor. But overall, Willie Brown adds considerable style to the City of San Francisco, which can use all it gets.

Style Icon: Diego Della Valle

Style icon Diego della Valle is, among other things, President and CEO of Tod's, maker of the iconic "gommino" driving shoe with 133 rubber pebbles on the sole. His signature look is comprised of Caraceni suits, the adopted idiosyncracies of L'Avvocato Gianni Agnelli (including the way he wears his watch outside his shirt sleeve and his necktie outside his vest), and a pair of his company's shoes on his feet.

I'm not sure about the shoes but the rest of him is usually impeccable.

Style Icon: The Rat Pack

The recent passing of Joey Bishop marked the last of Frank Sinatra's Rat Pack. Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Dean Martin, Peter Lawford and Bishop were a talented and raffishly stylish group that defined Las Vegas for a decade or more.


Sinatra and Lawford in particular were always well dressed, with a bit of silk in their jacket pockets.

One of the best ways to catch a glimpse of the Rat Pack is to view the original (1960) Ocean's Eleven. The Pack played themselves while they played their parts. And they did it with, for want of a better word, class.

Style Icon: Hubert de Givenchy

The fashionable pairing of designer Comte Hubert de Givenchy, one of the world's best dressed men in the second half of the twentieth century, and the actress Audrey Hepburn helped make Hepburn an enduring international star.

For all that he was elected to the International Best-Dressed List Hall of Fame in 1970, Givenchy was typically photographed in a dark suit, plain shirt and a discreetly dark necktie a la Cary Grant in Hitchcock's film North by Northwest. The only other style I've seen in his photos is a casual version of the same clothes: dark dress trousers, a plain dress shirt and a dark crew neck sweater.

Givenchy shows us that a man can be every bit as well known for his good taste over time as he might otherwise be for consistent outrageousness in his dress.

Style Icon: Luca Di Montezemolo

The Marquis Luca Cordero di Montezemolo, Chairman of Ferrari (nice job, no?), is one of the few men on this year's best dressed lists to actually warrant inclusion, in my opinion. Of course, he learned much from Gianni Agnelli, the acknowledged master.

It's been worn millions of times, but the photo shows that the basic combination of a navy suit and a white shirt can still be effective when properly deployed.

Style Icon: Ahmet Ertegun

The death of Ahmet Ertegun (to Eric Clapton's right in the photo) last year at the age of 83 opens for competition the position of hippest geriatric on the planet. Ertegun, who founded Atlantic Records in 1947 in an office in a derelict Manhattan hotel, was a world class dandy, impeccably dressed in blue blazer, grey flannels, tasselled mocassins and silk-knit tie. He was reknowned for his taste in music as well as his Patrick Ewing lifestyle (former NBA star Ewing had 15 extra minutes of fame for his statement that "We make a lot of money but we spend a lot of money.")

Ertegun told one reporter that his reputation early in life was partly a facade. "The truth was that I lost my drivers license so I traded my Aston Martin on a Rolls Royce and hired a chauffeur and, even though I didn't have that much money in the bank, when I'd go to El Morocco the columnists would refer to me as `the Turkish millionaire.'" But it wasn't all facade all the time. Ertegun lived in a townhouse on East 81st Street in New York, had a house in the Hamptons and another in Turkey.

Early in Ertegun's career, George Frazier wrote that he bought his ready-made suits at J. Press and had them re-cut by his alterations tailor. He wore bespoke later in life and was also a clothing collector reported to have kept a suit that had been made for A. J. Drexel Biddle by E. Tautz of London in 1923 simply because he enjoyed looking at the sewing (I can relate to that). His glass fronted shoe cabinet held more than a hundred pairs of shoes. John Lobb Paris was his favorite make.

A firm believer that it is better to burn out than to fade away, Ertegun was one of a kind. "I used to drink a bottle of vodka a day, every day, for about 40 years and it never occurred to me it'd kill me," he said. It didn't. He died from a concussion suffered at a concert.

Style Icons: Charlie Watts

Charlie Watts, drummer for the Rolling Stones, is on Vanity Fair's international best dressed list and deservedly so. Charlie dresses the opposite of most men. When he’s working, he’s wearing a colored cotton tee shirt and trousers. On his own time, when you see him on a London street, he’s wearing a Savile Row suit sans necktie. And they are very nice suits, with a relaxed, comfortable feel to them, in solid colors like khaki and pastels in addition to standard English pinstripes. It’s a look that has taken him a couple of decades of dedicated shopping to perfect and it works well for him.

One of the things I admire about Charlie's style is that, unlike George Clooney, he usually manages to avoid the unfinished open collar look whether or not he's wearing a necktie. Charlie wears shirts buttoned to the neck, mock turtlenecks, and, one of my personal favorites with an open dress shirt, a scarf tied in a loose four in hand with the end thrown over the top of the knot. Out of the ordinary and familiar at the same time, it's a well dressed look that's been used successfully for 75 years.