43 Favorite Quotes about Men’s Style

Being a lover of style as well as quotations it is only natural to have a list of favorite style quotations:

(In no particular order)

1. ”A well-tied tie is the first serious step in life.”
- Oscar Wilde

2. “Being perfectly well-dressed gives one a tranquility that no religion can bestow.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

3. “The difference between a man of sense and a fop is that the fop values himself upon his dress; and the man of sense laughs at it, at the same time he knows he must not neglect it.”
- Lord Chesterfield

4. “One pretends to do something, or copy someone or some teacher, until it can be done confidently and easily in what becomes one’s own style”.
- Cary Grant

5. “The man who, as is often said, can get away with wearing a trench coat over his dinner jacket, or an old school tie for a belt, is the one who in fact understands best the rules of proper dress and can bend them to suit his own personality and requirements.”
- G. Bruce Boyer

6. “If people turn to look at you on the street, you are not well dressed, but either too stiff, too tight, or too fashionable.”"
- Beau Brummel

7. “Real luxury is understanding quality, and having the time to enjoy it.”
- G. Bruce Boyer

8. “Style is the answer to everything. A fresh way to approach a dull or dangerous thing. To do a dull thing with style is preferable to doing a dangerous thing without it. To do a dangerous thing with style is what I call art.”
- Charles Bukowski

9. “It is both delusional and stupid to think that clothes don’t really matter and we should all wear whatever we want. Most people don’t take clothing seriously enough, but whether we should or not, clothes do talk to us and we make decisions based on people’s appearances.”
- G. Bruce Boyer

10. “Style is the perfection of a point of view.”
- Richard Eberhart

11. “To attain style in dress, you must look perfectly happy and relaxed in your clothes which must appear part of you rather than a wardrobe you have just donned.”
- Hardy Amies

12. “Precision in dress is the neurotic refuge of the perpetually insecure.”
- G. Bruce Boyer

13. “Dress up your sportswear and dress down your formal wear.”
- Luciano Barbera

14. “A fashion is nothing but an induced epidemic.”
- George Bernard Shaw

15. “Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.”
- Henry David Thoreau

16. “The style of studied nonchalance is the psychological triumph of grace over order.”
- G. Bruce Boyer

17. “Fashion is what you adopt when you don’t know who you are.”
- Quentin Crisp

18. “I can go all over the world with just three outfits: a blue blazer and gray flannel pants, a gray flannel suit, and black tie.”
- Pierre Cardin

19. “Some people think luxury is the opposite of poverty. It is not. It is the opposite of vulgarity.”
- Coco Chanel

20. “Trust not the heart of that man for whom old clothes are not venerable.”
- Thomas Carlyle

21. “Clothes and manners do not make the man; but when he is made, they greatly improve his appearance. “
- Arthur Ashe

22. “Any man may be in good spirits and good temper when he’s well dressed. There ain’t much credit in that.”
- Charles Dickens

23. “No woman really knows anything about men’s clothes. How could she? After all, she’s conditioned to obsolescence, to the principle that things go out of fashion. Well-dressed men know that nothing worth-while is ever outmoded, that a superb tailor’s work is ageless.”
- Finis Farr

24. “I often take a brand-new suit or hat and throw it up against the wall a few times to get that stiff, square newness out of it.”
- Fred Astaire

25. “Know first who you are, and then adorn yourself accordingly.”
- Epictetus

26. “Style is when they’re running you out of town and you make it look like you’re leading the parade.”
- William Battie

27. “To be noticed without striving to be noticed, this is what elegance is about.”
- Luciano Barbera

28. “All dress is fancy dress, is it not, except our natural skins?”
- George Bernard Shaw

29. “He who goes against the fashion is himself its slave.”
- Logan Pearsall Smith

30. “Do the clothes suit you? Do the clothes suit the occasion? Do the clothes suit each other?”
- Richard Plourde

31. “It is totally impossible to be well-dressed in cheap shoes.”
- Hardy Amies

32. “To appear well dressed, be skinny and tall.”
- Mason Cooley

33. “There’s no such thing as a designer of menswear—it’s only history. The suit around the world is based on the english suit, which began in about 1670.”
- Hardy Amies

34. “Clothes are inevitable. They are nothing less than the furniture of the mind made visible.”
- James Laver

35. “‘Tis hell to a man of spirit to be contradicted by his tailor.”
- Richard Garnett

36. “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.”
- Gay Talese

37. “The boor covers himself, the rich man or the fool adorns himself, and the elegant man gets dressed.”
- Honoré de Balzac

38. “Looking good and dressing well is a necessity. Having a purpose in life is not.”
- Oscar Wilde

39. “A man must face the world with sprezzatura. It literally means detachment, but a better way to think of it is quiet confidence or low-key style. The most forceful statement is understatement.”
- Luciano Barbera

40. “To adapt a phrase from Le Corbusier, the suit is a machine for living in, close-fitting but comfortable armour, constantly revised and reinvented to be, literally, well suited for modern daily life.”
- Cally Blackman

41. “To achieve the nonchalance which is absolutely necessary for a man, one article at least must not match.”
- Hardy Amies

42. “Looking good isn’t self-importance; it’s self-respect.”
- Charles Hix

43. “A man should look as if he had bought his clothes with intelligence, put them on with care, and then forgotten all about them.”
- Hardy Amies

Links: Preppy Swede, J.Press, Packing…

• Preppiest Swede visits the preppiest American. (manligheter.se)

• J. Press goes slim. (ivy-style.com)

• Packing tips. (yankee-whisky-papa.blogspot.com)

• Inspired by Mr Porter. (parisiangentleman.co.uk)

• Gaziano & Girling bespoke. (therakeonline.com)

• Review of Septieme Largeur shoes. (thefineyounggentleman.com)

• Drake’s Spring/Summer jacket preview. (thesimplyrefined.com)

• Ties made from 40-year old silks. (getkempt.com)

The Tetbury Tailor

Call me a London snob, but I am rarely optimistic about shopping in the shires. It’s not that the shopping establishments outside the capital are poor, it’s just that I never seem to find anything. Shopping in large county towns is bad enough, but when it comes to country villages and tiny market towns, I lose any hope of seeing something worth my while. Though shopping is never the reason for my visits to these places, I feel slightly dismayed by the sight of a quiet, near-shopless village street.

You can imagine my delight then on encountering The Tetbury Tailor in the Gloucestershire village of the same name. A tiny market town near Cirencester, Tetbury is in the heart of the Cotswolds. Like many other places in this vicinity, it is a smart and well-kept place. There is, like many Cotswolds towns, a chocolate box character to it, although I mean that as a compliment and not pejoratively; after all, it’s fair to say considering property prices and the demographic of the area, ‘chocolate box’ is pretty desirable.

I stayed for a wedding held nearby, but I wanted to have a wander around to ensure I got my weekend’s worth. A Highgrove shop dominates one of the main streets (Prince Charles’ country retreat is not far from here), catering for the tourism in the area, though not distastefully. Antique shops are also here too, good ones, and there is an excellent cheesemonger (with a royal warrant), not to mention a splendid rug merchants with Indian artefacts and antiquaries from the sub-continent and elsewhere.

Plenty of the smarter stores here have photographs of HRH wandering around on a previous visit. There is a sense of quiet grandeur in this place, which is palpable when the shopowners holler friendly greetings in tweed three-piece suits; miles better dressed than their ‘sophisticated’ metropolitan counterparts. The Tetbury Tailor is no different. In a covered arcade, the Burlington of the Cotswolds, Keith Leaver – formerly of Gieves & Hawkes - runs an extremely smart shop.

Greeting with a smile and a handshake, Keith took us to the menswear side of the arcade (the other is dedicated to womenswear). As should be the case, the shop was filled with the sort of garb essential to country living – exceptionally smart country living. A rainbow of shirts, moleskin trousers, luxurious cords, glorious Bladen tweed jackets and paisley ties. There were Cheaney shoes, D.R. Harris toiletries and Corgi socks. This wasn’t an outfitter for country bumpkins; this was a store to rival most in the centre of London.

Offering ready to wear and made-to-measure suiting, you cannot quite believe you are still in the tinyness that is Tetbury as you flick through the swatches, admire the displays and chat to the affable Keith, who was keen to test his guest’s knowledge of style. “Who made your jacket?” he asked of my tweed check. “Well, it’s Ede & Ravenscroft…” I began. “It’s too short” he cut in confidently. Like all good tailors, he did acknowledge when I told him I was warned of the cut by the tailor but wanted it to be that length; “I understand. If that’s the way you wanted it.” In my experience, tailors all have opinions (and sometimes, they are very similar) but the best recognise when a customer won’t listen to their aesthetic edicts, despite the tailor’s superior experience.

Keith is not only a man with an eye for cloth, he is building a brand. Some of the merchandise is branded, tastefully, with two dolphins; the town crest of Tetbury. When I asked him about his business, his success with building custom, he seemed a man content but also showing great ambition. He knows tailoring, and he certainly lets you know how much he knows; anyone who was in the shop with me would have witnessed his keenness to impart knowledge, explain terms and offer advice. As the website states, The Tetbury Tailor “brings a taste of Savile Row and a flavour of Jermyn Street to the Cotswolds.” If there was one emporium to encourage my view of bucolic living, I think this is it.

Links: Gabardine, Polo Coat, Drakes…

• Why we don’t see more gabardine suits. (maxminimus.blogspot.com)

• The polo coat. (gentlemansgazette.com)

• Drake’s Spring/Summer ’12 teaser. (drakes-london.tumblr.com)

• Pay attention to your quarters. (putthison.com)

• The everyday kit. (thesimplyrefined.com)

• Why you are not hors categorie and will probably never be. (postmoderngentleman.com)

• History of the belted-back trouser. (ivy-style.com)

The Pocket Watch Chain

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a man in possession of a fine antique pocket watch is in want of a fine antique chain. Readers of my blog will note that I was very fortunate to receive the former as a Christmas present last year; a happy event that has initiated a search for the latter. I own a perfectly good chain – an eBay bought modern knock off – which is certainly functional and not entirely unsatisfactory, but is simply not in the same league of beauty as the timepiece.

What I have discovered on my search for the perfect chain – which is, after all, the most consistently visible part of the pocket watch accessory – is not only that antique watch chains are highly valuable and desirable pieces of jewellery, but also that there is an incredible variety of styles for a great range of budgets. This shouldn’t be particularly surprising considering that, at one stage, a pocket watch was an essential accessory for gentlemen of all incomes.

Before it became the eccentric bauble for formal dress that it is today, before the wristwatch became the timepiece of choice, the world was full of chains and fobs, swinging from woollen waistcoats; there were solid gold and silver chains for men of state, shipping tycoons and oil barons; plated versions for ambitious clerks, junior barristers and bond salesmen. There were round links, square links, mixed links; large fobs, small fobs and funny fobs.

As with any incident of extraordinary variety, I have found selection difficult. Not being an astute collector, my eye is drawn to what I perceive to be the most attractive, not the most unusual or most valuable; I have passed over solid silver Victorian chains of unappealing bulk but been enraptured with mid-20th century plated knock offs. The greasiest and least appealing part of any transaction for precious metal for me is the weight/cost ratio; a heavy solid silver or gold chain will always command a premium, no matter how indelicate or basic the design.

Link design is one of the most important points of consideration. The vast majority of watch chains use graduated curb links which interlock with each other when laid flat. However, I consider the most appealing design to be one described, nebulously, as a ‘fancy’ chain; long rectangular links alternating with twisted knots. Although a good number of these chains are Art Deco, some are incorrectly labelled as being of early twentieth century design; this type of chain was actually very popular in the late 19th century.

Fortunately, many of these chains are plated and therefore considerably cheaper than the standard curb chains which, when a solid silver ‘Double Albert’, can often be nearing $1000. Adding a fob to the chain is an option, although for some the chain is enough of a decoration.