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.

Flannel, Boxing Your Shoes and More Flannel

• The Sartorialist is quite simply on fire this week in Florence. If you like Italian style and smart men’s clothing, these images should set your pulse racing. First, the simplicity yet sheer style (brown suede in winter!) of this pair.

• And next, the real pop of finishing touches in gloves. Notice the narrow flannel grey trousers in both pics as well.

• Casely-Hayford has a lot to suggest to more traditional menswear. The clean lines are just that touch experimental.

• Uniforms and trad. An interesting exploration.

• And you thought putting shoes in a shoe box was a simple operation. How wrong you were.

• Plus, if you live in New York don’t miss the opportunity to get some Gaziano & Girling at great prices.

• Spot the dandy indeed. Argyle socks with flannel. Now.

Menswear Myths, Fact and Fiction

How do I know that the Blucher shoe was developed by a German general who wanted to create a boot his troops could easily remove and still be sturdy on the march? How do I know that UK menswear outfit Daks is a compression of ‘Dad’s slacks’?

I know only because other people have told me. Several people, and I’ve read it in books. But I’ve never done anything to verify either of these facts independently.

In fact, I go one step further and actually repeat these facts in my blog and other features, purely because several sources say the same thing. Given that my blog and features are now one of those sources, this is a self-fulfilling exercise. It is circular perpetuation.

This reliance on scant evidence is highlighted when you are told two contradictory facts.

For example, the Windsor knot is named after the Duke of Windsor. As anyone in the UK will know, there are lots of Dukes of Windsor. This one was Edward VIII. The fact sometimes related is that the Windsor knot is named after Edward because he tied his ties that way.

This, I’m pretty sure, is false. He actually just liked a thicker knot so had his ties made thicker and tied them with a normal four-in-hand. It is called a Windsor knot because it looks like the knots he often tied, which did fit into Windsor collars (a wide spread collar), also named after him and more suited to the thicker tie knot.

Only one or two fairly trite sources will give you the first version. But there are more opaque myths. The four-in-hand knot, for example. In three separate books I have read that the name originates from: the tie knot worn by drivers of coaches with four horses, referring to the four reins they held; the tie knot worn by the four-in-hand club, which was connected to such coach drivers; and the knot itself, which looks rather like reins when hanging loosely from such a small, tight knot.

Now any or all of these may be true. It may be that coach drivers that used four horses formed a club called the four-in-hand club and thought their ties looked a bit like their reins. But then, only one of them may be true.

How do I know? What method do I have other than looking up lots of sources and relying on mathematics?

In one of these books I also read that the stripes on an American club tie go in the opposite direction to a British tie (a man’s right shoulder to his left hip in America) because those making ties in the US forgot to take account of the direction of the stripe when they turned the silk over to cut it.

This contradicts the story I am usually told, that Brooks Brothers launched ties with an opposite stripe to deliberately be different to British ties.

That second one is probably right. But how do I know?

My point is this: online journalism is an easy way to perpetuate urban myths through sheer repetition. It is something we have a responsibility to monitor, just like those volunteers at Wikipedia.

The Sad Route of Brooks Brothers

“You know I’ve never been in Brooks Brothers. I always see it there but I’ve never had quite enough curiosity to venture in.”

So said a colleague of mine as we were walking down Regent Street earlier this week. We ended up walking in, browsing through the rather sparse sale and walking out again, a little bit disappointed at the selection and the small discounts.

It reminds me of the sale that Marks & Spencer made of Brooks Brothers, for $225 million back in 2001, at a significant loss to its original purchase price of $750 million. Apparently the chain made a loss in the first half of that year to September of $3.7 million.

It’s a sad history for the icon of American apparel from then to its relative obscurity in the UK now. But then, most of the references that people make to Brooks Brothers are to do with its iconic status, rather than anything particularly inspiring or interesting they have seen there.

The brand certainly represents good value, at least in the UK, as you can buy better quality goods for far below the prices of trendy high-street chains like Reiss or French Connection. And it isn’t as embarrassing as M&S itself.

Their socks, in my personal opinion, are particularly great value. In the sale they are £6 each yet definitively luxurious in the cotton and handiwork employed.

Yet in the UK I think my colleague’s reaction to Brooks Brothers is prescient. He was vaguely interested in a large, American brand that he had heard of somewhere, somehow. But never enough to bother to go in. No advertising, campaign or recommendation had given him that last push he needed to walk through the doors.

The employment of Thom Browne as the designer of a new line in Black Fleece was brave, and ambitious, but it doesn’t seem to have done it many favours, at least outside the US.

The contrast with Abercrombie & Fitch is stark – although I can and will say many awful things about the quality of A&F merchandise, you can’t fault their marketing. The first store opened in the UK, on Savile Row, to much fanfare and had queues around the block during most of these sales. You get very irritated at tourists on Bond Street asking you where Abercrombie is; but there is sneaking respect for such a runaway business success.

So I hope very much that the new owners of Brooks Brothers revitalise it here and bring us bigger and better things in American prep. But I can’t say I’m surprised at its fall from grace.