Lino Ieluzzi – Al Bazar

“Style is not fashion, it’s something we have inside”

Lino Ieluzzi, owner of clothing store Al Bazar in Milan is a well dressed gentleman with a unique style. He is colourful, elegant and oozes charisma - something the actors in Hollywood can learn from. It looks like he loves life just as much as he loves clothes. Mr Ieluzzi is simply a star.

Video of Lino in his store:
http://men.style.com/video/store-tours/milan/3000759001

Images by source:
http://stylemens.typepad.com/fashion__sartorialist/2008/06/18/index.html
http://www.albazarmilano.it/stile_gb.htm
http://men.style.com/gq/fashion/slideshow/v/061807SART
http://thesartorialist.blogspot.com/2008/03/lino-on-video.html
http://www.kishidadays.com/yanchamen/archives/2009/02/000660.html

This is guest post by Cristoffer N. from Sweden who currently blogs at http://welldressed.blogg.se/ about well dressed gentlemen all over the world.

Power Dressing, a Charvet Interview and the Wall Street Journal

• Interesting to see that power dressing is making a predictable comeback in uncertain times.

• The original article is here.

• Some fascinating questions put to Jean-Claude Colban of Charvet.

• Worth skipping to page 5 for a discussion on when bow ties have been tucked under collar points as well.

• Sometimes, a look is obviously not made by the clothes:
http://www.thesartorialist.com/photos/1259RobertRWeb.jpg
http://www.thesartorialist.com/photos/1259diorTheSartorialistWeb.jpg

• There were a lot of retrospectives on Bond style during the latest film marketing, but this one’s worth a look

• Coming full circle, this blast of colour in men’s fashion is also worth a look in WSJ.

Milan, Stockholm and Red Socks for Cycling

• Right on, Sleevehead. Design in men’s shoes is not the problem. High-quality manufacture at an affordable price is.

• The first of what will hopefully be several interviews on the London Lounge.

• And here’s the book in case you’re interested. Not a bad little summary.

• The Sartorialist in Milan is over. Worth a review of them, though.

• And if you move over to Sweden, you can see how Scott has taken inspiration from his own photos, going for a bright-blue scarf that was first seen on a plaid gentleman in Milan.

• Plus-fours and bright socks are so practical for cycling. Why didn’t we think of that before?

• A chart on events and dress does teach you a lot about traditions, but it seems a little over-restrictive.

The Wrong Standfirst and a Repeated Typo. Wow

An interview with the guy that Jeremy Piven’s character in Entourage is based on? This might be interesting. Hang on though, the standfirst reads:

“As the reality TV bandwagon rolls minously on, producers are looking for ever more inventive ways to draw in their audience with tales of the vacuous, young and rich. Yet one current offering, The Hills…”

Is this about The Hills or about Entourage? Actually, didn’t I see a piece about The Hills a few pages ago? Yes I did. And it has exactly the same standfirst.

The editors of Man About Town, the magazine in which both these articles appear, have repeated the same standfirst on two stories. That’s got to be embarrassing. And I don’t have the biggest vocabulary in the world, but I’m not sure that minously is a word. Did they mean ominously? Wow. The mistaken repetition actually reproduces a typo.

This may seem petty, but it’s more depressing.

I’ve come to accept that there is almost no good menswear journalism in print. I can cope with that – I buy the odd magazine now and then for the adverts, the photo shoots, the pictures. Just like I buy Italian magazines for the pictures, not the words.

But to have writing that is not only sycophantic and entirely un-journalistic, but also riddled with errors you’d be embarrassed to find in a college rag. That’s sad.

Flick through the rest of the magazine and you’ll find several more typos without trying. Plus a good number of articles that read like adverts.

There’s an ‘in-depth’ analysis of Louis Vuitton that reproduces a history of the company and an outline of the entire empire. It tells us that “today the activities of the Louis Vuitton company are mind-boggling in scope, encompassing leather goods, accessories, ready-to-wear…” But at no point does anyone ask whether this is a good idea. Whether one philosophy can ever tie all of that together. How a brand deals with fakes. Indeed, it doesn’t ask any interesting or intelligent questions.

The one-page feature on Berluti talks about how the bottier has expanded, but never goes into how you maintain construction consistency when your brand grows from a shop to a worldwide chain. The closest we get is:

“You have the DNA of the designer, the DNA of the brand and the DNA of the customer. You need to avoid any inconsistency between them. When Olga is creating for Berluti, it is her blood. Her blood cannot lie. When someone asks if this pair is consistent, she says ‘I cannot do anything else but Berluti, because I am Berluti.’”

In that it’s your name, love, yes.

What does that answer tell you? What does it even mean?

In case you’re still interested, after my rant, the menswear writing in print that I do rate is: the introductory article to GQ Style (but no more of the magazine); Fantastic Man (though there’s precious little style in it); GQ’s style guy Q&As; the Esquire Big Black Book (now every six months, hurray!); the men’s issues of the style supplements to The Sunday Times and The Sunday Telegraph (again, only every six months).

A Drop of Inspiration Every Day

This is a wonderful time of year. Yes, last Monday was meant to be the most depressing day of 2009 (cold, short days, post-Christmas and the middle of the month). But the runway show season has started.

Not that I get to go to the shows. Nor that I find the shows themselves that inspiring – not consistently anyway. But I love Scott Schuman’s photograph’s of ‘the off-runway scene’: what all the people attending the shows are actually wearing.

This year’s selection started on Saturday in Milan. I recommend going to the link below and starting at the beginning.

http://men.style.com/fashion/blogs/sartorialist/2009/01/17/index.html

My personal favourite from this collection so far is Gianpaolo Alliata, striding across the paving stones in a double-breasted blue blazer, brown tie and white handkerchief. Below, he wears dark-grey trousers, ever-so-slightly short, and chocolate monk straps.

A masterclass in simple yet effective dressing. There is zero pattern on display, which you’d think would make the outfit appear dull, uniform and without highlight. But the cut is precise – cut above all, fit above all, the Italian maxim – that it all seems supremely balanced and packaged.

I also love the portrait of Lino Ieluzzi. Posing next to a picture of himself in bandana and navel-exposing shirt, Scott rightly points out that Ieluzzi doesn’t take himself too seriously. Which is wonderful attribute to have in a stylish man, akin to someone who always seems perfectly attired yet never adjusts his pocket handkerchief.

Select them with care and then forget all about them, as Amies would say.

Particularly fascinating about Ieluzzi is that his style is still identifiable several decades later. Even without the super-tight trousers or big collar that very specifically date the photograph, there is consistency in the approach to clothes.

The simple colours. The open-necked blue shirt. The cocksure pose and the wispish hair. Little has really changed – he’s just grown into a style that is more mature and less of its era.

As always, it is interesting to see how particular people dress at particular shows. The monotone man going to Costume National. The Burberry couple that look like they are actually in a Burberry advert.

I can’t wait for the Ralph Lauren show – the people Scott shoots there actually seem more RL than the models on the catwalk. As if the dream that Lauren tells everyone he is selling has been filtered down through a dozen different personalities.

I also recommend subscribing to the RSS feed available on the same page. It’s a little drop of inspiration every day.