#stevegottschling

[nomanwalksalone]

COOKIN’ WITH LEDER

by Steve Gottschling We’ve already told you why we’re fond of Frank Leder. He inspects every garment himself, he references humble professions usually overlooked by designers, and he wants you to know that whatever your job title, deep down you're actually a chimney sweep from Germany.

But here’s a secret - the best thing about Leder is that all of his garments double as cooking supplies.

Imagine: you’ve just moved into your new house in a new development with new neighbors. Half the neighborhood is under construction, with neither a grocery store nor a Bed Bath and Beyond in sight. Your kitchen is stocked with the following: nothing. But a cat has been kind enough to freeze to death on your property, and parked beside your front door is a moving box labeled FRANK LEDER.

It might as well be labeled HOPE.  

You rummage inside the box and pull out this season’s Frank Leder toggle coat. The toggles, as you well know, are made from binchotan, a type of charcoal used by Japanese cooks to prepare dishes like unagi or yakitori, or just to drop down each other’s backs as a really funny prank.

One by one, you remove the binchotan coals from the ropes that bind them and set them aside in a pile. 

Meanwhile, the cat is thawing on your counter but you have no surface to cut it on. You dive back inside the box, pull out a Frank Leder great coat, and drape it over the counter. Boom. Cutting board. If you’re worried about cutting through the coat, don’t. The fabric is thick, much thicker than that child's windbreaker you used last week when you turned your goldfish into sushi. Have you seen little Charles since he ran home shivering and sobbing? I hope he's alright. 

Now for some knives. Of course you don’t own any, so you use the next best thing: grab a pair of Frank Leder’s wool flannel pants and remove the suspenders. You'll need to hold the ends of one suspender and pull them taut.

Then, saw through that cat-steak with your suspender. The robust flannel texture will surely cut the meat unti--- OH MY GOD IS THAT A FIRE? That's right, the friction from the flannel has started a fire.  

But you're an optimistic thoughtful person, the kind of person who owns lots of Frank Leder, so what do you do? You start cooking right there, in the middle of your kitchen, on top of your Frank Leder great coat. You toss your binchotan coals into the fire. Your neighbors smell your burning kitchen and summon the fire department, whom you promptly shoo away. Using your hands because Frank Leder doesn't make silverware, you grab your cat-steak, charred and covered in flannel fuzz, and chew it in peace. 

Did you know that not long ago, a bird flew into the engine of a small aircraft headed across the midwest, causing it to make an emergency landing in the Nevada desert? The passengers and crew landed safely, and upon exiting the plane they set out to build their own desert society from scratch. Everyone was dressed entirely in Lanvin. They all starved to death.

[nomanwalksalone]

ALONE WITH STYLE 

by Steve Gottschling

You know what would be great? If the key to fixing adult life’s nagging loneliness had nothing to do with actual people. And I don’t mean drilling your mind Sarah Palin-style into the wells of social media. What, arguing for three hours about cropped trousers on that menswear forum didn’t leave you socially satisfied? I mean ridding your body of all lonely traces without any communicative aid at all, as if loneliness were just a big pimple you could puncture at will.

It seems strange that, after over two centuries of industrialization tearing communities apart, no one has found a foolproof way to make meaningful connection something you can do by yourself. By now, I should be able to juice-cleanse away my sense of isolation while I watch American Idol reruns and wait for that recipe from my Microwave For One book to finish cooking. Sorry guys, I can’t meet you all for dinner tonight. I’ll be at home nursing a bottle of Social Drank™.

Thankfully, in the absence of magic juice, we have the social sciences. Researchers have long known that wearing symbolically-charged clothing doesn’t just broadcast your station in life to everyone you pass, it can change the way you feel about yourself even when your only companion is a photo of your dog because the real dog ran away. In 2012, a study from Northwestern University showed that subjects who wore labcoats answered test questions with greater concentration than those who wore painters’ coats. In a 2007 study, respondents reported feelings of competence and authority while dressed in garments they considered formal.

As these studies clearly suggest, all it takes to stave off loneliness is to dress like a social butterfly. Let’s envision the outfit: a suit with a lighter, more inviting fabric! Shoes made from a suede that says “come here everyone and feel my shoes!” Socks in a shade of orange that, if your friends were moths, would compel them to circle you in a beautiful spiral of confusion as they slowly starve to death! If scientists told their subjects to wear these things, they wouldn’t be able to collect any data. The subjects would have disappeared behind a swarm of all their new friends.

I’ll wait a moment for you to make your purchases. Feel free to bookmark this page and come back when the clothes arrive. They’re here? Good. Notice how you sit a little straighter, hold your head higher. You pour some wine and strike up a rousing conversation with the tiny cactus beside your computer. You smile knowing that if anyone else were here, they would love you. “You talkin to me?” you ask the mirror. “What took you so long?”

Ten stories below, crowds rove along the sidewalks, unaware of your new outfit. Had they stopped to look up at your apartment building, they would have noticed you standing against the window, lifting and lowering your trouser cuffs to expose your orange socks. The lone onlooker who knows morse code would have recognized the sock-flashing pattern as “Be-My-Friend.” They would have watched as you sank to the floor, disheartened by the sea of blank faces, to untie your suede shoes before rubbing them repeatedly against the window. What would have appeared to everyone as a silent scream would just be you inviting them to touch the suede.

Next time, we’ll stick to the juice.

[nomanwalksalone]

WHAT TO WEAR TO: THE GREAT AMERICAN CHEESE SURPLUS

by Steve Gottschling

Men’s magazines often focus so intently on their readers’ self-advancement that they forget how much of a public service menswear can be. Your stack of GQ magazines might have told you all about proper fit, for example, but they probably neglected to mention the ways your wardrobe can save the livelihoods of a bunch of cheese farmers you have never met.

The Wall Street Journal reported last month that, thanks to the strengthening US dollar, fewer overseas buyers are importing our cheese, leaving stateside cheese farmers with massive stockpiles that have proven impossible to move. Farmers face financial ruin unless someone steps in to stabilize demand. But who will shoulder the burden?

Storing the surplus won’t work. Only some types of cheese can be frozen for long periods, and even then, those cheese wheels will watch from their freezers as the farmers outside lose their houses and their savings. Some of you might know what it’s like to grow up with financially struggling parents. Imagine the cheese feeling that same helplessness, except multiplied by its lack of arms, legs, and any vital organ not made from coagulated milk. We only achieve real success when we give the cheese what it wants: fresh air and a taste of adventure.

We must therefore squeeze cheese-eating into every facet of our lives, to bring it with us on life’s little journeys. Luckily, menswear’s abundance of pockets makes this easy. Most men’s lifestyles simply do not require enough objects to fill every available pocket. Even if we asked the stuffed-pocket fetishists at Everyday Carry to line up against a wall for a rather fascist pocket inspection, we would probably spot one or two internal jacket pockets still sewn as shut as the day they left the factory.

In other words, while women let out a sigh of relief every time they spy a pocket hiding amongst a rack of dresses, pockets for men are like New York luxury condos. They were certainly designed to be used, the owner might remember buying a few of them, but no one can guarantee they were ever actually inhabited.

Now that summer is peeking into view, and wearing a jacket invites either sweat or the suspicion that the wearer is secretly The Punisher, our cheese-eating mission grows more challenging by the day. But no one said public service is easy. Here is your NMWA-approved outfit for keeping cheese demand steady:

Eidos Field Jacket. Four pockets on the outside. Two on the inside. To maintain your tailored appearance, store the bulkier blocks of cheese in the lower pockets and fill the upper pockets with the shredded and grated varieties. This allows the cheese in the upper pockets to mold to your chest and give off the appearance of well-developed pectorals.

Monitaly Herringbone Pants. The usual four pockets, plus two extra pockets at the thighs. Stuff these with tiny wrapped gouda cheeses. You can toss them to anyone on the street who looks like they deserve it.

Sage de Cret Pocket T-shirt. One tiny pocket. This is where you store your best gruyere. Save it for when the bouncer at the club has wrinkled his nose at all the fivers you passed his way. Seriously, cheese bribes are the best bribes.

[nomanwalksalone]

LAUGHING AT THE ROBES

by Steve Gottschling

Pollsters are so busy asking Americans about the presidential primaries that they’ve neglected to collect any data on something far more important: the national mood toward wearing robes in public. Going by the celebrity gossip pages, however, it seems a formidable bloc of Western clothes-wearers has agreed that stepping outside wrapped in a robe represents poor taste, a questionable game of hopscotch between private and public life.

But as with everything in 2016, things are not so simple. Men have discovered ways to blur what previously seemed like an uncrossable line, and neither gossip mags nor the fashion press can figure out how to handle it.

First, let’s illustrate the gag robeflex this garment inspires. Typing “spotted,” “wearing”, and “robe” into Google returns a small pile of news sites who gasped loudly enough at the sight of a famous man in a bathrobe that they had to write an article about it. Nick Jonas seen in a robe on the set of his latest movie! The Prime Minister of New Zealand enrobing himself after a dip in the pool!

The robe has enough headline-grabbing power to lift commoners to minor internet stardom. Just ask the University of Southern California student who was featured in Buzzfeed for launching the anonymous twitter account “Bathrobe Crusader” or the equally anonymous robe-clad gentleman who caught reporters’ attention in the lobby of a Canadian club, where they had gathered to cover another story entirely. You don’t need a name for internet users to love you. Just a robe.

But why do we Westerners see robes as so remarkable, so compromising? The reason isn’t modesty. A belted robe excels at hiding the wearer’s naughty bits, unless everyone he passes stands one foot tall or finds knees particularly naughty. Had any of the above gentlemen worn a t-shirt and shorts instead, they would have revealed more skin but attracted none of the attention. Is the mere symbolic association between robes and private, just-showered leisure enough to send journalists rushing to their keyboards?

Making matters more curious is that the media, when presented with a robe-like garment intended for outdoor use, tends to group that robe anyway with its distant indoor cousins. When the paparazzi spotted John Mayer at an airport with a vintage Tibetan robe slung over his shoulder, sites like Buzzfeed rummaged through their Chest Full of Metaphors and came back with, you guessed it, “bathrobe.” And when a certain store called No Man Walks Alone debuted its own robe-coat from the Korean brand Document, the dearly departed blog Four Pins recommended it with one caveat- you’ll have to invent excuses for explaining the coat to your friends and family, who will likely wonder why you neglected to change into proper clothes.

It’s tempting to cry “double standard!” in the face of all this hesitation. Why can’t the same fashion editor who slipped into sweatpants and athletic shoes this morning to pair with his tailored wool topcoat welcome robes into the public sphere with the same confidence that he extended to his athletic garb?

But this is different. Western humans have taught their offspring that Robes = Netflix long before modern athleticwear was even invented. To dare suggest that a man in the United States can leave his home wearing a robe as if it’s no thang is to mark a steep departure from centuries of  sartorial conditioning. In the late 1700s, public robe aficionado Benjamin Rush wrote:

“Loose dresses contribute to the easy and vigorous exercise of the faculties of the mind. This remark is so obvious, and so generally known, that we find studious men are always painted in gowns, when they are seated in their libraries. . . . It is from the habits of mental ease and vigour which this careless form of dress creates, that learned men have often become contemptible for their slovenly appearance, when they mix with the world.”

If Rush were to teleport suddenly to 2016, how would his choice of attire be perceived? Contemptible? Probably not. Newsworthy? Oh yes. But times are changing, Benjamin. Times are changing.

Photo credit: Eric Hanson for Styleforum, with Jasper Lipton as model.

[nomanwalksalone]

THE INDOORSY BASEBALL CAP

by Steve Gottschling

The baseball cap is an indoor hat. I know that sounds weird. You probably wear yours only when outdoors and remove it when you go inside. Maybe you voiced mild befuddlement when Morgan Freeman attended the SAG awards wearing a black one. But there he was, the brim low on his brow, until Rita Ora implored him to raise it a bit so the audience could see his face, which by then had shaped into something between amusement and annoyance.  

None of the news outlets covering the show could pin down a reason for Freeman’s cap. But the reason is clear: the baseball cap is an indoor hat. And for further proof, we need only shift our gaze to the current lifetime achievement award holder for ceremonial cap-wearing, composer Steve Reich. He wore a cap while shaking Prince Charles’ hand to accept an honorary doctorate from the Royal College of Music. He wore one while accepting his Pulitzer prize in 2009. Wearing caps in large indoor spaces is Steve Reich’s thing.

But unlike Freeman, Reich discusses his cap frequently. In a 2016, he told the Globe and Mail:

“This is my kipa – this is my way of squaring the circle, of being able to be comfortable in the various worlds in which I find myself. In synagogue I have a regular yarmulke on, but outside, I wear the hat. I wear it on stage and I feel good that I can do that – that I've found a solution, a way of maintaining a couple of 1,000-year-old traditions while still not trying to force myself on people.”

Reich’s cap isn’t just celebrity insouciance. It shows how decades of social changes can collide into a single garment. In the 70s, after the counterculture and all the squares it influenced began embracing identities that had been overlooked or suppressed in the West, Reich jumped aboard a wave of renewed interest in Judaism. He enrolled in a religious education class at a Manhattan synagogue. He picked up Hebrew. And then came the cap.  

Reich’s display of faith was coy compared to what happened in the decade prior. In 1962, according to a paper by Aminadav Grossman, the American Jewish Congress convinced the governor of New Jersey to let men wear yarmulkes to court after a judge forced an Orthodox Jew to remove his yarmulke at a traffic hearing. In 1970, after the New York Stock Exchange’s policy of prohibiting the yarmulke prompted a Jewish employee to complain to the City Council of Human Rights, the Exchange reversed course and let workers wear the hat after all. Meanwhile, a meeting among Jewish advocacy groups shows the degree to which students were bringing their yarmulkes to the classroom:

“...over the years the practice of deeply observant Jews in covering their heads during the waking hours, has become firmly imbedded [sic]. In fact, it is apparent that increasing numbers of Orthodox Jewish youth are beginning to assert themselves by wearing yarmulka [sic] in public schools and colleges. This is in sharp contrast to a previous era when Orthodox Jews, sensitive to the hostile attitudes of the Christian world, compromised themselves by removing their skull caps in public spaces.”

But even after so many American Jews fought for the right to wear their yarmulke in public, Reich chose the cap. And that is less a fault against Reich than it is a testament to the cap’s meaning-shifting, comforting ways.

Unlike the fedora, which carries its history like a wet sock, the baseball cap picks up and sheds meanings at will. The same blank cap that helps a barely undercover celebrity thwart the paparazzi could drift onto the head of a fast food worker without disturbing anyone’s idea of peace.

And while baseball caps have always been malleable-- declaring allegiance to both sports teams and military branches-- the design itself is like a telephone booth for the head. The crown is just the right size for the scalp, the brim just long enough for the brow. Nothing protrudes further than it has to, no extra fabric to curl jauntily toward an unconsenting audience unless the wearer swivels the hat himself. It simultaneously reveals part of the wearer to the world, while giving him enough of a ceiling to feel like he can keep something to himself.

None of this, of course, tells us what Freeman is hiding. But whatever it is, we know it is safe.

[nomanwalksalone]

BASIC CABLE STYLE: DEMOLITION MAN

by Steve Gottschling

This month, Cinemax has been screening Demolition Man, which is about as remarkable as saying, “this morning on Facebook someone wrote something unreasonable.” Cable channels are always screening Demolition Man. It’s the television equivalent of a numbers station, Sylvester Stallone's face forever broadcasted into the aether as generations of viewers tune in with varying levels of puzzlement.

But 2016 is particularly apt for giving the 1993 film a closer look, if only because the menswear that roams today’s sidewalks is vastly more diverse than the film’s vision of sartorial sameness. Baggy pants have lumbered back into stores, and yet men who cling to their clingy dungarees need not fear any sort of shunning, as slim silhouettes haven’t budged a bit. Relaxing dress codes mean Dockers can cram right next to polished sweatpants on office elevators without either wearer feeling out of place.

No wonder Simon Doonan spent the end of May giving Slate readers an overview of New York’s “menswear tribes.” The average public space in any fashionable city resembles a sort of Hadron Collider of contrasting looks.

The civilians of Demolition Man’s San Angeles, on the other hand, prefer precisely one shape: their ample, flowing robes. It’s an outfit that costume designer Bob Ringwood intended to protect them from the sun after the ozone layer has collapsed (remember when we talked about the ozone layer?). But while San Angeles stays remarkably melanoma-free, all that healthy skin comes at a price -- no one can move very quickly. They drift in deliberate strides, usually in groups, their layers of fabric flapping around as they enact a futuristic version of every city dweller’s tourist-season nightmare.

But put aside your slow-walker Haterade for one moment, and you’ll notice how peaceful this sort of fabric-induced dawdling can be. For their fifth issue, titled On Slowness, Vestoj magazine interviewed a clergyman who explained the ways his cloak restricts his movement, encouraging a slow contemplative pace:

“The design of the cowl is a large cloak, with long sleeves and a hooded neck hole. It’s a contemplative garment and meant to be impractical – you can’t run in it for instance. It slows you down and you can’t do much in the way of work as a result of the long sleeves. Because you can’t move quickly, it calls forth a sort of gravitas by imposing a sense of gravity on the wearer.”

A city full of people with acres of fabric weighing down their bodies. It’s hard to tell whether walking in stunted strides give them a sense of gravitas, whether it encourages them to think, perhaps, of what their forebearers must have done to create a world where far less impeded UV rays hurtle toward the Earth. Either way, an action movie would never let a moment of thought last longer than necessary, and Demolition Man unleashes two forces that send the berobed civilians scurrying in slow motion-- Wesley Snipes’ shoot-em-up reign of terror and, soon after, the marauding scavengers headed by Denis Leary.

What do these men have in common? Clothing that fits much more closely to their bodies. Snipes’ overalls are hardly form fitting by 2016 standards but still permit enough mobility to make him the most agile man in whatever room he lands in. Leary hides beneath an enormous trench coat but, unlike most of the citizens who line their robes with additional layers of voluminous fabric, opts for slim-fitting underlayers that let him move as quickly as his coatless followers.

Thus, we in 2016 face a crucial choice every time we shop for clothes. We can buy something with dramatic volume, maybe with a dropped crotch, knowing our decision might leave us with slightly shorter strides. Or we can hug our bodies with a fitted garment, lessening our comfort but allowing us, perhaps, to steal the wallet from the nearest slow-walker we come across. Can’t decide which path to take? Try watching Demolition Man a few more times. It will be on TV for sure.

[nomanwalksalone]

SURVIVING YOUR CRITICS

by Steve Gottschling

When a man’s tastes tend toward the idiosyncratic, when he sports a French tuck at the bar where everyone else’s hems hide entirely behind their waistbands, we would like to think those tastes are protected. That he has knitted his various coping mechanisms into an invisible shield that sends all but the kindest words ricocheting across the floor.

But more often, this shield isn’t invisible. It’s nonexistent, and his ability to survive his critics has everything to do with the number of stones flying in his general direction.  

In the late spring of 1876, military tailor Henry Hill purchased Edgar Degas’ L’Absinthe, then called simply Au Cafe, from the Deschamps gallery in London and brought it back to his collection in Brighton. This purchase in 2018 would have been like an executive strolling into his accounting firm on a Friday wearing his new pressed-collar rayon shirt.

Sure, Paris’s Impressionist movement faced in England its share of detractors, like Dante Gabriel Rossetti who called their work “simply putrescence and decomposition.” But much like the colleague who fixates on that rayon shirt while stammering something like “well it’s certainly eye catching,” the country’s broader mood seemed to be a sort of uneasy praise.

Hill expected as much when he titled the work A Sketch in a Cafe for an exhibition in Brighton, anticipating sideways glances at the work’s rough appearance. The glances came as scheduled. The Pall Mall Gazette wrote:

And yet in such material, graceless and unattractive as it is, Mr. Degas finds occasion for the exercise of the most delicate art. He takes these tawdry colors and submits them to a series of the most interesting experiments in tone.

And the Brighton Gazette:

The perfection of ugliness; undoubtedly a clever painting, though treated in a slap-dash manner, amounting to affectation....The very disgusting novelty of the subject arrests attention. What there is to admire in it is the skill of the artist, not the subject itself.

Hill never exhibited Au Cafe in England again. The painting returned to Paris for one more exhibition and then disappeared back into Hill’s collection until his death.

If Hill faced an atmosphere of uneasy enthusiasm, the painting’s next two owners stared down a whirlwind of hostility. By the time Hill died, England saw a rise in upper middle class art collectors who preferred paintings with pleasant, morally righteous narratives. When Christie’s auctioned Au Cafe in 1892, the audience hissed.

Two men, however, did not. Collector Arthur Kay recounts in his memoir A Treasure Trove in Art the moment he stood at the back of the room and watched as fellow collector Alexandre Reid bid on the painting:

I felt it would be wiser to let him become buyer, and offer him a profit afterwards, rather than run him up in the auction. This policy worked; he bought the picture. When I met him he told how some of his friends were chaffing[sic] and abusing him for having acquired such a thing. He evidently thought that he had made a mistake. I offered to relieve him of his mistake for a very moderate consideration, which pleased and satisfied him.

But Kay found scarcely better reactions among his own peers. “At last,” he wrote, “after frequent requests to sell, and wearied by the questionings of those who were incapable of understanding it, I exchanged it in part payment for another picture.”

Two days later, in a move way too many consignment shop clients would find relatable, Kay returned to the dealer to buy it again.

Kay’s real test of devotion began in February 1893, when he exhibited Au Cafe at the Grafton Gallery. The painting appeared under the new name L’Absinthe, almost destined to make critics convulse by drawing attention to the green liquid enjoyed by one of its subjects.

The news cycle lasted months. Arts journalists in various English papers staked their careers on L’Absinthe. D.S. MacColl of the Spectator and Elizabeth Robins Pennell praised Degas’ technique, while the Westminster Gazette’s J.A. Spender denied it had any artistic merit at all. Artists William Blake Richmond and Walter Crane wrote letters to the Gazette supporting Spender.

Kay was exasperated. In a letter to the Gazette, he wrote:

You have asked me to answer a question. How could one live with such a work as Degas’s “L’Absinthe”? For so the picture has been named, but not by me. Mr. Crane says cohabitation is the test which never fails. Perhaps he forgets that it depends on who lives with a picture, and that true connoisseurs should be without prejudice…. I have lived with “L’Absinthe” for many months. It was hung in a position which enables me to pass and see it constantly; everyday I grew to like it better.

But was all too much. Kay sold the painting in April 1893 to a Parisian dealer, this time for good.

As for the owner of the rayon shirt, some say they can hear him clacking away at his keyboard, writing his own screed for the next time someone dares accuse him of working for Magnum PI.

[nomanwalksalone]

TAKE IT AS RED

by Steve Gottschling

I have a suspicion. Just as the French entrust their language to a council of bookish elders, the Americans have one for the colors of their fabrics. And every time they huddle in secret into their windowless room, they agree on one thing-- keep the color red imprisoned in an opaque glass jar. There it waits, sucking breaths from air holes punched in the lid, until the muffled call of a court date, red carpet premiere or some other important event summons it to wield its powers in the service of the wearer.

This fall the jar seems emptier than usual. Hillary Clinton sent reporters rushing for their matador metaphors with her red suit at the first presidential debate, and at the second, a stage full of blue and grey outfits shrank behind the blazing glare of Ken Bone’s Izod sweater, which helped propel the undecided voter to semi celebrity status. Then The Walking Dead made headlines by giving two of its main characters new red outfits, if wearing your own viscera counts as an outfit.

With one color capable of turning mortals into memes, it’s no surprise that menswear writers struggle to make red approachable. Instead they do the opposite, dispensing advice that reads like the labels on prescription drug containers. “Wear in moderation,” they will say. A little at a time until you’re comfortable. But be careful what other colors you trace it with! Most men shrug and stick with blue.

But there’s a powerful argument for letting go of caution and covering every inch of your body in red. It lies in a tiny room in the Sackler Gallery in Washington DC, where an exhibition has placed a Ming Dynasty vase a few feet away from a Rothko painting. Both works, if you haven’t guessed, are red, and together they show that the key to making red compatible with everyday life is not less of it, but more. Way more.

Rothko, painted his piece as part of a series for the Four Seasons Restaurant in New York, a client he viewed with something short of respect. As he told journalist John Fisher in 1970, “I accepted this assignment as a challenge, with strictly malicious intentions. I hope to paint something that will ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who ever eats in that room.” The ceramic artisans of the Ming Dynasty, on the other hand, didn’t quite weaponize the color like Rothko did. The vase would be used before the Altar of the Sun and aid in a sort of spiritual camaraderie.

Neither of these back stories matter. By depriving the art of its context and stuffing it in such close quarters, the Sackler Gallery shifts our focus away from the symbolism and toward the depths of the reds themselves. The speckles of the glaze, the layers of paint. The more reds are stacked on top of each other, the less each instance of red means.

If we really want to squeeze red into more wardrobes, we need to stack our reds even higher and plant them deeper; we need to drown the streets in so much red fabric that no one has time to ponder the individual garments. You actually bought a Ken Bone sweater? Wear it under this Robert Geller bomber for a dowdier but much more topical version of look 26 from Geller’s Autumn 2016 collection. Then tell your friends to do the same. Crowds will look more vibrant. And we won’t have to hear the phrase “power tie” ever again.

Photo: National Gallery of Art

[nomanwalksalone]

IF PLANTS ARE DISAPPEARING, WHY ARE THERE SO MANY OF THEM ON MY SHIRT?

by Steve Gottschling

The academic journal Nature Ecology and Evolution published in mid-June an alarming report on the accelerating rate of plant extinction, but if we’re being honest, they would do better to chuck that report aside and find relief in the current state of menswear.

The report, which was published without consulting the fashion industry, found that every year for the past 250 years, an average of two plant species have gone extinct, while plants discovered since 1900 have disappeared even faster. When questioned about the study, plant researcher Dr. Maria Vorontsova said, “we suffer from plant blindness. Animals are cute, important and diverse, but I am absolutely shocked how a similar level of awareness and interest is missing for plants. We take them for granted, and I don’t think we should.”

If we are to take those scientists at their word, things seem dire indeed. The Wall Street Journal reported last year that widespread disinterest in plants leaves government agencies scrambling for employees who can handle policy related to plant extinction and invasive species.

But these scientists are wrong. Plants are reappearing, in the form of floral fabrics that decorate the bodies of fashion conscious men. As every men’s magazine has by now observed, we are in the midst of a floral shirt revival. More pineapples roam the streets than ever in recent memory. To embrace a man in 2019 is to hug dozens of little trees at once. If wearing a sports jersey is to flaunt your fandom for all to see, then we are bigger fans of plants than we have been in years.

This wasn’t always the case. In 1999, floral shirts’ cachet was less certain, so it made sense for James Wandersee and Elisabeth Schussler to coin the phrase “plant blindness” to describe our habit of shafting plants to the background while cooing over the adorable animals that stomp over them. But if those researchers overcame their own blindness, they would see how legions of men walking out their front doors with seed packets printed across their torsos show that things couldn’t possibly be as bad as they say.

If plant researchers looked up once in a while from their field studies and data, they would see that ecological health has always corresponded with the number of floral shirts existing at a given moment.

In 1957, the government was too busy passing the Federal Plant Pest Act to see the only real plant pest was Frank Sinatra, who with his Aloha shirt had for years been starting fights for no reason with other men in Aloha shirts in From Here to Eternity.

Instead of building the Mauna Loa observatory in 1958 to keep track of atmospheric carbon dioxide, government officials could have gathered around the peeling Fauxna Loa at their nearest tiki bar and, judging by the beautiful bouquet of off-hour office workers doing their best to look relaxed, noticed that nature was well accounted for.

In 1961, scientists were so busy raising the alarm over the invasive miconia tree’s rapid land-grab in Oahu that they failed to observe Hawaii was also being invaded by Elvis and his swarm of gawkers in Blue Hawaii, surely replenishing any lost flora with its rayon equivalent.

And, as the Endangered Species Act evolved throughout the 70s to protect an expanding roster of plants, none of the officials behind it realized how futile their efforts were, as plant life far more colorful and numerous was being promoted in the same period by the evolving career of Jimmy Buffet.

Next year, when the season’s first crop of shirts arrive with little glaciers all over them, we can rest easy knowing the dangers of climate change are also behind us.

[nomanwalksalone]

THE SHOCK OF SUDDEN FLATNESS

by Steve Gottschling

With so many publications declaring the suit on life support, it should comfort the tailored clothing faithful to see how tightly Andy Warhol clings to the popular imagination. Burger King’s ad agency pitched what would become the chain’s 2019 Superbowl ad knowing Warhol had four times the Instagram mentions of Sarah Jessica Parker, Melissa McCarthy, Charlie Sheen, Jason Bateman, and Steve Carell combined. And when Warhol’s burger-filled face aired in February, more people than you or I will ever meet saw a man who somehow made navy blazers look cool.

It's too bad only one Pop Art icon found that sort of staying power. If Andy Warhol flatters our coat and tie sensibilities, there is another artist from the same era who challenges them. Working a few miles from the Warhol Factory in her Tribeca studio was Marisol, the first-name-only contemporary of Warhol whose work revels in the sort of shapes menswear enthusiasts try their hardest to avoid. Flitting freely between sculpture and painting, Marisol’s art is a celebration of flatness.

In tailoring, where elegance is synonymous with graceful curves, flatness feels more like a curse than just another aesthetic possibility. Internet forums are littered with similar stories: a man has entrusted his suit to a dry cleaner, only to find the cleaner has flattened the lapels against the chest. A landscape of sloping fabric now halts at a crease, and the wearer’s claim to elegance and taste, once assured, now wobbles on its perch. And so, a menswear enthusiast walking to his dry cleaner carries the same recessive fear as a New Yorker whose path takes him right beneath a row of second-story air conditioning units.

In Marisol’s world, sudden flatness is the point. Her portraits frequently look as if a genie turned a magazine illustration into a real person and gave up as the transformation began. And that battle between two and three dimensions is where the work draws its power.

A Hugh Hefner portrait in Marisol’s hands morphs into a lopsided monstrosity. Hefner’s face, painted on a hulking block of wood carved like a hammerhead, reaches so far beyond the shallow slab on which his body is painted that he looks as if he wants both to tip over and challenge the viewer to a duel.

Change the shape of the slab, and the whole meaning shifts. MoMa’s placard for Marisol’s sculpture of Lyndon B Johnson notes its “coffinlike shape,” which might recall both Kennedy’s assassination and the staggering death toll of The Vietnam War. The portrait’s shoulders, far more square than any amount of padding can hope to achieve, suggests the artist saw in Johnson a sort of exaggerated, even bloated, self regard.

Marisol’s portraits aren’t all mocking exaggerations. Her rendition of Andy Warhol is comparatively unassuming, a ghostly outline of the artist holding his arms tight against his chest as if to hide inside the chair-shaped confines Marisol gives him. If there’s evidence of her close relationship with Warhol– they partied together after all– it’s her decision to paint him three times, each panel getting its own angle in what looks like a spell of loving fixation.

If surrounding ourselves with expressively flat sculptures does little to muffle the shock of a smooshed lapel, maybe our spring wardrobes will help. This, after all, is Flatness Season. Half of us have switched to camp collar rayon shirts to dazzle the checkout line with our sense of whimsy. Pre-flattened collars have spread to outerwear too, like this Stephan Schneider jacket whose look would not change much if a building’s air conditioning units toppled onto it at once. At best, we can hope that once we reach again for our serious suits, we’ll have forgotten how afraid of creases we used to be.

[nomanwalksalone]

THE DORKS OF SUMMER

by Steve Gottschling

During times of upheaval, those vying for power might be too busy seizing territory to pause amid the wreckage and think about how cool they look. And since last spring, when companies like Bird and Lime scattered rentable electric scooters throughout major US cities without so much as a warning, the journalists assigned to make sense of the situation arrived at the same conclusions. The scooters came out of nowhere. They have clear benefits. And they’re not cool.

Stepping onto one, The Atlantic’s Robinson Meyer found he could easily transverse sections of DC that rested in dead zones not serviced by public transport, but doing so felt like walking outside for the first time after being kidnapped and forcefully outfitted in cargo shorts.

“There are several trees on my commute home with whom I feel a deep and wordless bond,” he writes. “When I must ride a scooter past them, I avert my eyes.”

And for Wired Magazine, David Pearce can’t praise the scooter’s environment-saving potential without weaving in some comments about its dorkiness. “But they're not cool, he writes. They've never been cool.”

Seeing so many wrinkled noses takes me back to a time when new transportation technologies could drop into a city that not just accepted but romanticized them. You might think I’m referring to the Vespa, which rolled out of Piaggio’s factory into an Italy ravaged by World War II and in need of a way to zoom literally out of economic malaise. And still, Vespa from the start bathed itself in the sort of glamour that may rest forever out of reach for the likes of Bird and Lime.

But I’m talking about the scooter. In the year 2000. While dismissing electric scooters as dorky is practically part of newspapers’ style guides in 2018, you can almost imagine John Leland wiping drool from his keyboard as he writes about the Razor for the New York Times:

“As a mode of transportation, sadly, the scooter proved the stiletto heel of the two-wheeled set: great to look at, lousy for carrying laundry to the dry cleaner. Do not be seduced, as I was, by images of dapper men and women in graceful glide, cool breezes slicing through the hot city.”

Already among the glowing reviews, however, was a budding wariness toward the machinations of Silicon Valley. An LA times article written two months before the collapse of Pets.com describes startup workers barrelling atop their scooters to meetings, “liability be damned.”

If liability was an afterthought then, it’s a myth now. By dropping their scooters into cities unannounced, Bird and Lime contributed to a culture already steeped in data scandals and regulation-shirking ruthlessness. Even if they manufactured rideable clouds made of pure sexy, it’s hard to imagine city-dwellers trusting them any more.

Now, Bird and Lime could have paddled against this perception by prefacing their rollouts the way Vespa did-- with a good ol’ fashioned ad campaign. Rather than leaving image-making duties entirely in the hands of journalists, Vespa romanticized its scooters in magazine ads that recall the clean lines and perpetual motion of Italian Futurism. Teetering yuppies tend to look sleeker when rendered in pen.

But dorkiness is like a finger trap: on the rare occasion that 2018’s scooter companies do craft their own images, the grip of dorkdom clenches further. UScooters’ Instagram, as Pearce points out in Wired, tries to surround its stark metallic product with sensuously lit trees with unintentionally comical results.

The best hope for the scooters, in turns out, may be to double down. We’re in the year of the Dad Sneaker after all, and the Fanny Pack Renaissance is going strong. A device that has been branded dorky may still catch on, once the stench of Patagonia fleece has dissipated just a bit.

[nomanwalksalone]

IN 2018, WE DANCE LIKE OUTLAWS

by Steve Gottschling

I’m worried about the state of dancing in 2018. Sure, three months ago New York City repealed its Cabaret Law, which required bars and restaurants to have a license to let their patrons lapse into rhythmic motion. But even now, with some New Yorkers surely testing the new boundaries of where their hips can and cannot sway, there is one constant companion that makes a night out something other than the transcendental blur it could have been.

That companion, of course, is work. To accept a salaried position in 2018 is to befriend a kindly corporate ghost who lives in your phone and asks for your attention at odd moments throughout the evening. It is to feel the pinprick of an unfinished project tickle the back of your mind all Saturday night, a tiny anxiety nudged along by an ever buzzing Slack channel. Then there are the holiday parties, those secret Drake performances and paid model extravaganzas that rub out any remaining hope that partying might liberate us from daily toil, at least as long as the source of the toil foots the bill.

If there is an escape, menswear magazines can’t seem to find it, judging from the articles Esquire and Fashion Beans published about what to wear to a nightclub. Both articles advocate for a sort of minimalist chameleon look, a dark sombre ensemble that gels so perfectly with the room’s level of formality that everyone’s attention drifts away from your clothing and toward your face. Your poor, work-addled face.

But this year, we can try another model for partying, one that might actually let us transcend our unbalanced lives. It comes from a scrappy group of New Yorkers who thwarted the Cabaret Law, oh, until the leader’s murder conviction brought their whole scene to a halt.

In the late eighties, Michael Alig and his Club Kids would hold “outlaw parties” in spaces like Dunkin’ Donuts and McDonalds, none of which expected or wanted to play host to dense crowds of social-climbing youngsters. For years, I read interviews about the Club Kids and their legendary outlaw parties. Then I found footage of one.

A 1989 outlaw party at McDonalds comes across like a leaky liferaft in an ocean of boredom, where the guests use their sheer force of ego to bail out the grey encroaching water. The most impressive thing about it is how much faith they have in their own ability to keep it afloat. Aside from the tinny squeal of a stereo in the corner, loud enough to cue maybe a handful of bodies to dance, the only sound is the clatter of personalities trying to assert themselves as flamboyantly as they can.

Partying with the Club Kids wasn’t, after all, only about the physical pleasures of dancing and drugs. It was about total obliteration of previous identities. Many of the kids came from outside New York, Midwestern cities too cramped for their galaxy-sized ambitions.

And for the hour they’d spend at McDonalds before the authorities sent them scurrying to an actual club, none of them could follow advice like Fashion Beans’ or Esquire’s because there was no dress code to follow, no darkened dance floor to cloak an all-black minimal look. Just a ceiling full of fluorescent bulbs casting into relief the costumes of worn-out selves rebuilding into brighter ones.

[nomanwalksalone]

THE DIY DOUBLET

by Steve Gottschling

The wilderness was supposed to save us. After the 2008 recession tore a hole through the male-dominated manufacturing and construction industries, news outlets proposed that men had eased their existential torment by scanning the bulging discount bins for a look that now registers as all too familiar. Flannel shirts, fitted raw denim, chore coats-- it was all supposed to transport us to a merry hamlet where men had purpose, and all traces of rootlessness joined the sawdust in a dissipating cloud.

Look how that went. Chore coats and selvage jeans shifted from niche costume to default-wear, standing in wearied formation on shopping mall floors so passing customers could try them on and exclaim, “I am a normal person, please don’t be afraid.” 

Now, in the wake of Heritage’s lost promises, you might argue that clothing can’t possibly compensate for years of toxic cultural conditioning and that nostalgia for an alternate hyper-masculine reality veers dangerously close to the Mad Men-era misogyny. But trust me. All we need is a better set of nostalgia-wear, and I know just the thing. Let’s bring back the doublet.

Between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, European men wore over their shirts a garment that somewhat resembles a buttoned blouson, except it doesn’t drape off your torso so much as discards the torso entirely and replaces it with something newer, more virile. The doublet, with its tight fit and often heavy use of padding, differs from modern sport coats in that it leaves little hint of the wiry, anxious body beneath it.

And best of all, recreating your favorite doublet silhouette is simple. All you need is a bomber jacket and an assemblage of accessories from No Man Walks Alone. Let’s explore the possibilities:

 Begin with a slightly longer bomber like this one from Ddugoff. Then take two Porter Tanker Portfolios and stuff each one on either side of the jacket’s zipper, right atop your chest. Zip the jacket, then nip your waist with tiny binder clips. Congratulations! You have recreated the pigeon breasted silhouette of the 14th century, seen here on Jean de Vaudetar, valet of Charles V of France. If that doesn’t balm your quaking sense of anomie, try stacking on a few more Porter portfolios.

If your sense of manliness belongs more in the late 16th century, then let’s turn to the artificial paunch known as the Peascod Belly. Put on a slightly shorter bomber like this one from Robert Geller and pad your belly with the thickest scarves you can find. Your buddies at the baseball game will think you’re smuggling beer. No. Just scarves, and a protruding feeling of existential stability.

You’ve tried both silhouettes, but you still can’t stop your quivering hands from booking a flight to Liberland? Let’s try this: take the poofiest bomber you can find, like this one from Monitaly. Then, using an exacto knife, cut long vertical strips down the arms and the body. Pair with an equally poofy shirt, and boom-- you’ve recreated a 17th century French doublet. The slashed insulation might be useless against the weather, but against a society that no longer grants you unquestioned dominance and privilege, you’ll feel well protected.

[nomanwalksalone]

A DEFINITIVE FIX FOR GOLF’S DRESS CODES

by Steve Gottschling

2020 is the year golf courses will gradually roll out the World Handicap System, which merges six measurements into one convenient way to determine exactly how terrible you are at golf.

This grasp at standardization is so sweeping that it makes especially clear how anarchic golf can be when it comes to something also quite important to the experience of the game– the dress code. Far from standardized, dressing for golf is like tiptoeing across a hostile feudal land where every fiefdom has its own vision for how players should cover their bodies.

Last February, the Professional Golfers’ Association let players for the first time in its history leave their trousers behind and walk onto practice rounds and semi-pro games wearing knee-length shorts. While this sounds like some sort of Bare Calf Revolution, the length requirement makes the PGA slightly conservative; clubs like Saint Andrews in New York have long allowed players to flash onlookers with four inches of skin above their knees. The course staffers scurrying around with measuring tape are a small price to pay for the privilege.

Saint Andrews, meanwhile, requires all shirts to be tucked in. This might seem like a standard rule unless you have suddenly teleported from The Heritage at Marion Country Club in Kentucky, where shirts can stay untucked provided they come with pressed collars and, possibly, pineapples.

The National Club Golfer is particularly fed up. In 2019 alone they published four articles calling for the relaxation or complete end of golf’s dress codes. But while pumping out editorials might convince a stray reader here and there, it’s clear nothing drastic has changed. I have a better idea.

Between 1998 and 2006, interest in golf seemed to soar, so developers, understanding the basic business law that when demand rises, it never ever stops rising, sprinkled the land with courses.

What a great time for that popularity to decline. By the end of the 2010s, courses had shed almost six million players, and as the supply of holes rapidly outpaced the number of people willing to smack balls in their general direction, the excess courses set about languishing unused.

Now here’s the plan: while those abandoned courses spend upwards of a year in limbo, waiting as the city hunts for developers and settles lawsuits, everyone who was once sent home for wearing black socks should turn these courses into Casual Communes.

It starts with a meeting place. All the bedraggled souls will gather near the course at the home of a family sympathetic to the cause. At dawn, after porridge, they will creep onto the course wearing porridge-covered t-shirts and inappropriate shoes, their drivers and putters glinting as the sun rises. And afterward, they will drop their clubs at the clubhouse and play wordless games of cards until night comes and they skulk back to their hideout.

Of course this plan has challenges. To stay silent, commune members will have to mow the green using manual reel mowers or, for a dash of mysticism, scythes. I hear there are bikers and meth cooks lurking about, but once they learn about the cause, they’ll surely see golfing in cargo shorts is more important than petty territorial disputes.

After all, there are other benefits too. The pace of the game will improve, and although no one will say how that happened, there will be rumors of sluggish golfers’ shoes poking out from beneath the sand traps. And the clubhouse can play host to things it never could before, like denim jeans and burning trash. The new handicap system, however, will stay in place. You can’t mess with international law.

[nomanwalksalone]

BERNSTEIN’S FOLLY

by Steve Gottschling

For Leonard Bernstein, the conductor and music director of the New York Philharmonic from 1958 to 1969, every Thursday of the 1958-59 season felt like a sort of purgatory. Too polished to be called a rehearsal, these performances still lacked for Bernstein the sparkly finish of a Friday or Saturday night.

And so, stopping short of making his orchestra haul their tailcoats to such a strange unplaceable event, Bernstein devised a new uniform. A few shades lighter than pure black and with a blazer that buttoned all the way up to a band collar, this outfit was Bernstein’s way of nodding to a lineage of music directors like Arturo Toscanini and Otto Klemperer who also preferred to hug their necks with tightly woven wool.

But introducing a band collar jacket to a room full of Americans is a gamble. The band collar in the US is like a Thursday concert in 1958. A hummingbird without direction, it hovers between meanings, unsure of which one to slurp up next.

On October 8, 1958, New York Times reporter Harold Schonberg captured the orchestra’s reactions as they tried on their uniforms:

“You look like a bellhop at the Astor.”

“Like a bandmaster.”

“Like a field marshal.”

“Like Father O’Malley.”

“Like a space cadet.”

“Like Chiang Kai-shek.”

The confusion spread beyond the orchestra. Guest conductors Herbert von Karajan and John Barbirolli refused to wear the uniform. And out of all the feedback that made its way back to Bernstein, the conductor told the New York Times the following January, only half was positive.

Continuing the long tradition of men standing their ground in the face of overwhelming criticism, Bernstein dropped the whole idea. The uniform, Bernstein announced before January’s final Thursday concert began, would go down in history as “Bernstein’s Folly.”

But as the country’s clothing tastes would later suggest, Bernstein’s real mistake was introducing the uniform a decade early.

Americans in the 60s endured a decade-long session of band collar exposure therapy. Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s meetings with John F. Kennedy beamed the prime minister’s band collar jacket across American television screens until the jacket was no longer separable from his name. In 1962’s “Dr. No,” the jacket appeared on both James Bond and the titular villain. And in 1965, the Beatles in their Nehru jackets performed at Shea Stadium in front of 55,600 fans.

And whereas for Bernstein the jacket functioned as a paper cup phone to the past, in the 60s it absorbed the opposite meaning, satisfying the futurist yearnings of an increasingly fashion conscious crowd. The same jacket whose Indian and Chinese roots gave men with Orientalist appetites a whiff of spirituality was sleek enough to speak to their Space Age techno-optimism.

In 1968, the Nehru jacket’s popularity reached a boiling point. The Washington Post declared on February 10 that “1968 may be the year of the stand-up collar.” And indeed, as mall stores raced to stock the jacket, wearable utopia was one trip to Macy’s away.

Now, long after the trend’s collapse at the end of the 60s, the band collar once again hovers between meanings. When Jack Dorsey wore a shirt with a towering version to his congressional hearing last June, the internet transformed into the digital equivalent of Bernstein’s incredulous orchestra. Quartz compared him to a priest, Esquire to an evil space wizard.

A man from 1968 would be horrified. His favorite collar and visions of a techno utopia, all reduced to the same pile of ashes.  

[nomanwalksalone]

BRITS IN INDIA, PART 2: THE RESISTANCE

by Steve Gottschling

You may recall my last post where I discussed the peculiar dress of the East India Company, one of the most infamous mixers of capitalism and violence before the world gave us United Airlines. I shared accounts of soldiers like Garnet Wolseley and WSR Hodson as they marched across the Indian subcontinent beneath heavy woollen uniforms to fulfill some far-off authority’s idea of national pride.

It was a portrait of stoicism, but more importantly it posed a counterpoint to my own hyper-meticulous dressing style for spring’s wobbly toddler stages. I can forgive myself a little more easily for choosing too warm a jacket when my mind is littered with images of redcoats fainting gracefully.

But my portrayal of Company troops as wool-wrapped martyrs, I’m sorry to say, wasn’t entirely accurate. As is expected for an operation that spanned a whole subcontinent, where dress regulations are easier announced than enforced, the British troops couldn’t quite transplant their national uniform to another climate without one or two garments changing along the way.

Captain FB Doveton, who fought in Burma in the 1820s, puts it nicely in the Asiatic Journal:

“When troops are on active service in the East, great license is permitted in the way of costume; in fact, the Regulations could not very well be enforced where there are no army tailors to supply deficiencies. On such a barbarous and distant service as that in question, it may well be imagined we were soon a most motley group…”

“My own corps ran riot very much in this particular, our colonel not being over[sic] strict as to dress. Many wore trowsers[sic] made of a coarse blue calico used for lining tents (this was my favorite material); others wore white, and some tartan; in fact, every one suited his own taste, and all the colours of the rainbow were son seen in the ranks.”

Part of the reason for this trouser diversity was the garment’s combustibility. Trousers were among the first garments to give way to the rigors of plunder, but an imminently trouserless soldier could choose among local sources for a cheap and lightweight replacement. Your torso would still bake beneath your flannel jacket, of course, but at least everything below the belt could breathe.

Things were hardly more uniform atop soldiers’ heads. Garnet Wolseley, whom I introduced in the last post, wrapped thin blue puggaree around his forage cap for added protection. And Doveton describes his regiment having “a great diversity of taste as to head-dress, some wearing the high oil-skin shako, others foraging caps of various shapes.”

And the shako! Some soldiers hated it. “It had a peak before and one behind, whence the felt crown rose to the altitude of six or eight inches, stretching out at the summit in a style that I might have thought picturesque if I had not found it confoundedly top-heavy,” wrote one soldier in the Asiatic Journal. Many soldiers simply lost their shakos, wearing instead cloth-wraps soaked in water. No wonder the lighter-weight forage cap was frequently the preferred choice.

Perhaps the most relatable regiment of the lot, however, were the First Bengali Fusiliers, who gained the name “The Dirty Shirts” from, as Charles John Griffiths writes, “their habit of fighting in their shirts with sleeves turned up, without jacket or coat, and their nether extremities clad in soiled blue dungaree trousers.” Scores of other regiments kept their jackets on and left battle with no nickname at all.

So fret not, all you who worry about rising temperatures forcing you to shed your outerwear and whatever sense of identity comes with it. Your chance at legendary status is not lost.

Picture: The 1st Bengal Fusiliers Marching Down from Dugshai, by George F. Atkinson, 1857