The · Affected · Provincial’s · Almanack

When it comes to trekking gear, I'm all business: I consider everything I wear to be equipment, not clothing. Everything has a purpose and a contingency: for instance, I own several identical light-toned shirts and trousers, so that I can easily detect the ticks and chiggers that I pick up in dry underbrush. Light blue linen shirts are best during this time of year, since it breathes so well and you can inspect yourself with ease. White shirts reflect too much sun glare for efficient inspection, especially on sunny days. They're also unflattering to ruddy complexions, and can even sunburn areas you'd never think of dabbing with sunscreen (eg., under the chin, behind ears, etc).

This photo was taken this evening with my camera perched on a mossy stump, which it proceeded to topple from after taking this self-timed photo. Brought along a brand new compass for this solo trek. Felt like the first day of school.

Found a half dozen Habenaria integra just past bloom on the riverbank. The light in the cedar bog was beautiful. No rattlesnakes, of course; that sort of encounter would trump talk of linen shirts--barely. They're so rare, but the area I've been visiting this week is in a region where they have been known to be seen, and it looks like an ideal place for them. Maybe this fall, when they start to stay a bit closer to their winter burrows under the cedars.

~W

Went into the city to have lunch with my agent today, and who should be lounging under my arbor upon my return but Little Bastard Hisself, flush with the hubris that comes with an admittedly impressive .564 plant pouncing average for the 2008 summer growing season. He must have been feeling his newly found juice, because it was clear by his insolent posturing that he was challenging me to a walk-off. On my turf! I usually wouldn't entertain such an offer from a cheeky member of the feline race, but he got fur all over my gardenias while I was gone, and I was wearing a new shirt today...( Read more... )

I really enjoy his approach to fashion and style: it's street level, fun, warm and joyful. Well done, Bill.

( Part four of Charles Bird King's portraits )

( Part three of Charles Bird King's portraits )

( Part two of Charles Bird King's portraits )

It's somewhat fitting that a man named Charles Bird King--a name both eminently European yet vaguely Amerindian--would depict the natives of the American East (Creek, Crow, Seminole, Cherokee, Choctaw, Iowa, Fox, Winnebago, etc) at a time when there was a semblance of parity (parody of parity?) between the Old and New Worlds. This was expressed in the dress of natives as well as many whites who lived among them: European brass gorgets and artfully knotted cravats around the neck of a men with painted faces and feathers in their hair. The synthesis is breathtaking: both fierce and fey. It's a damn pity the European influence eventually crushed the Native--this could very well have become our national mode of dress.

( Part one of Charles Bird King's portraits )

A greenish blue Lady P and I attended a FACT fundraiser party yesterday held at Carousel Farm.
( Down the rabbit hole we go! )

One of my absolute favorite periods in male dress is the Regency-Napoleonic era. I like the simplicity of material, the elegance of form, the swagger, and the Apollonian flaunting of the male body. It is both rugged and pavonine.

So: what's in your fantasy closet?

As if trying to look "casual" wasn't just an uglier kind of affectation! To do away with such baseline standards of adult dress is the illusion of freedom, a lame gesture that leads to even more restrictive mores. Adolescent-minded Boomers won't be satisfied until the only socially acceptable way to present oneself is to dress like a six year-old. And when that day comes, none of us will feel free--just undignified and infantilized. Given the choice, I'd rather be coerced into looking like an adult than a child.

Much is made of the idea that not wearing a tie allows for more self-expression, which is idiotic. Not wearing a tie says "I'm not wearing a tie," and little else. Wearing a tie--with its endless palette of colors, knots and patterns--is where the expression lies. Like Wilde said, "A mask says far more than a face."

This general trend will result in less tolerance for self-expression, not more. I already get odd looks for wearing something as practical as a hat or something as innocuous as a pocket square, so I can imagine a time when someone will be beaten up for wearing a tie.

But that's progress for you.

Ace photographer and all-around cutie pie Rose Callahan came down from Brooklyn recently with her dapper, strapping beau Kelly to take a few pictures. That's right: I got The Rose Callahan treatment. And you know what? I loved it.

Rose was sweet and generous enough to allow me to share these photos with you, so please won't you give her some fame and fortune, already.

(Note: All images © Rose Callahan. All Rights reserved, so please don't take any undue liberties. She's good people. You'd like her.)

( The colors just keep on coming! )

Hats off to Rose for making such marvelous images in the face of impossible odds!

~W

With thanks to misfitina.

Jean-Luc and Simone, themselves in impeccably continental suits and bold shirts, looked on with blank, albeit sun-kissed expressions.

The boyfriend/husband, a youngish fellow, stood behind her and looked timidly over her shoulder as she sat on her throne and scowled at the swatches through tangled, unkempt locks. It was clear he was dying to get a bold, colorful pattern, but his "mom-wife" wasn't having it. "You may like it now, but would you actually wear it?" Doing her best to talk him back from the edge of Style.

The young man had apparently visited the suite earlier that day, but returned with this shrewish, frumpy, overbearing, all-too-significant other for a "second opinion"--but from what I saw, it was more like permission. How sad that this guy allowed himself to be so cowed that he couldn't even pick out the kind of shirt he wanted to wear on his very own back!

This conversation was taking place on the love seat next to me, as I was narrowing down my choices between a aqua/plum pattern and a moss green/pink one. It was a little embarrassing, since the woman was clearly a bit too comfortable with treating her husband/boyfriend with thinly veiled contempt.

I felt her glances veering over my way from time to time, as though I were a fly in her ointment. Dressed in my usual bold colors, I was the very antithesis of her pedestrian tastes as well as a threat to the natural order, since I clearly had the audacity to select my own clothes without seeking my wife's approval.

I was exchanging swatch sample books with them, and as they expressed admiration for one of the more timid patterns I'd selected, I hinted to the fellow that if he had a low-key suit, he could easily use more vibrant tones and patterns in his shirts. Style 101, right?

Baba Yaga was not amused. "That's all right--I'm from the design world".

"The Kleenex box packaging district," I thought.

I'd never before encountered this "type" when visiting my shirtmaker Simone, who comes over twice a year from Florence. When I make my semi-annual pilgrimage to his Manhattan suite to select a couple patterns for new custom shirts, I've grown accustomed to being among other independent-minded male clotheshorses. It's interesting that one of these odious creatures managed to get loose in a fifth-floor suite at the Michelangelo Hotel--kind of like a fratboy crashing your favorite hipster dive. It felt as though a haven of mine had been sullied, and a ritual--nay, a sartorial sacrament--that I very much look forward to twice each year was loudly talked over by the attendees. Sacreliege! Uggs in the temple!

However, I've seen this dispiriting little suburban drama play out many times in middle-class or upper-middle haunts, particularly menswear retailers: the man almost invariably selects a bold color, only to be chromatically emasculated by the she-minion of the Pastel Politburo or the Ministry of Earthtones. These spineless wonders are then summarily given their punishment: a tie, shirt or suit that looks "nice". And you know what that entails. And you know what? The men deserve it, the wimps.

I wonder if these women treat their boy-men with such contempt because they resent having to play the role of mommy buying new clothes for junior. Soliciting an opinion as an equal is one thing, but what woman wants yet another responsibility dumped on her? I'd be condescending and curt, too, if I was the wife of a man who couldn't pour milk on his own cereal.

The old saw in our culture is that men shouldn't know how to coordinate an outfit for themselves, but that's infantilizing tripe. After all, what's more manly: having your wife pick out your clothes as though you were a child, or learning about male dress and buying them yourself?

Manhood, thy name is competence! Men should make their own damn decisions as to how to dress themselves, mainly because it's not their wife's responsibility. It's part of being a grown-ass man, like knowing how to change a tire, or knowing when to shut up and just hold her.

For heaven's sake, gents: don't go around looking like your wife dresses you!

(Got both of those patterns, by the way. One is a linen shirt with French cuffs. Zang!)

~W

Disclaimer: Of course, all this is null and void if he's a "kept man" and all of this is on her dime. In that case: mama gets what mama wants!

Anyhoo, to your left is a photo of me at the age of five. The trouser cuffs are a bit wide, but the break isn't bad.

~W

Why are you bothering with the journal of this sorry, stuffy old duff when you could be visiting fellow New Jerseyan and all-around mensch manningkrull? He's younger, thinner, groovier, and lives in Paris.

I'd say more, but I have to put in my teeth and yell at some kids who are walking on my lawn.

~W

I do enjoy and appreciate instances of audacious glamor (Nicole Kidman's green Chinese dress floored me several years ago), but I also can't help but to cheer on the willful indiscretions (Remember Bjork's swan dress that brought to mind Diagaliev's surrealist ballets? Of course, you do.)

Now by conventional standards, the ensembles to the left are awful: The fit! The bows! The break in the trousers! The brown suede shoes with the black tux! The piping!

But were their intentions conventional? Did they really intend to look like George Clooney or Nicole Kidman, and fail? Or might we give them more credit and assume they're more complex, interesting and groovy than that?

Dana Stevens has what I think is an astute take on what appears at face value to be rather daft sartorial choices:

"Daniel Day-Lewis' wife is Rebecca Miller, daughter of playwright Arthur Miller and photographer Inge Morath. She's a published fiction writer who's also directed several films (Personal Velocity, The Ballad of Jack and Rose). She's just too smart and cool to be wearing that dress unironically. I honestly suspect that she and DDL were deliberately spoofing the whole who-are-you-wearing red-carpet culture by dressing as they did—note his brown suede clodhoppers poking out from that black tuxedo (which, for all we know, he made himself during his summer interning with a master Florentine cobbler). Rebecca's dress even has a certain Victorian/frontier-brothel vibe that may be a tribute to the period setting of There Will Be Blood. After observing him throughout this awards season, I've decided that Daniel Day-Lewis actually is some sort of hyperevolved exemplar of superior humanity. He's what every doting parent falsely imagines their child to be: more beautiful, gifted, intelligent, and gracious than anyone else alive. Maybe Rebecca's dress is her way of saying, 'Fuck you, world. I've landed Daniel Day-Lewis and I can wear anything I want.'"

Of course this little analysis was written with tongue firmly in cheek, but like Dana Stevens, I too feel they were taking the piss a bit. What strong, independent-minded person with any kind of soul wouldn't on such a night, in such a ludicrous setting? It's the only healthy response, really: It's a red carpet gala in Hollyweird--don't take it seriously! Go have fun!

After all, to merely aim for "elegant" or "timeless" out of fear isn't necessarily a safe bet on The Carpet Perilous: One can just as easily look like a bland yet impeccable dumbass who drank the "Classic Hollywood" Kool-Aid.

Here I am in the new midnight blue velvet jacket made for me by Duchess Clothier, and wearing my bespoke blackwatch tartan Holland & Sherry wool trousers made for me by Lord Willy's. Pale lavender shirt by my favorite shirtmaker, Simone Abbarchi of Florence.

( More velvety joys of yesterweek behind cut )

~W