Roy Rogers: Fashion Icon

The real fashion influence in my early life was not Cary Grant. It was Roy Rogers.

I craved anything western, from suede jackets with fringe and brown plaid shirts with contrasting stitches in pointy arcs, to red cowboy boots and a dad-gum wide belt with bullets and a holster.  Howdy-Doody and Buffalo Bob had the same effect on me, but to a lesser degree than old Roy. (It was probably the gun thing, right, Dr. Freud?) And the most lasting influence of this infatuation has been in my choice of shirts.

My favorite picture of myself as a kid is of me standing outside the farm stand where we bought our pumpkins for making Jack-O’Lanterns. One foot on the wooden steps, smiling bravely at the camera, I have on a navy shirt with a little red windowpane check and pearl-covered snaps and pockets with flaps, green corduroy pants held up by a Indian-patterned, beaded belt, chaps, a holster, red cowboy boots and a brown rolled-brim hat with beads around the crown. Like Jesse James out in front of the Dry Gulch Saloon, I was.

I realized, some time in my adulthood that the picture was taken at Halloween. We were buying pumpkins. I was in my costume! This led to a kind of epiphany about dress, the appropriateness of certain kinds of clothing, and of the nature of dressing in costume versus dressing for my regular life. I know there is a fine line, perhaps, between the two, in as much as I dress in a business costume sometimes, when I dress for important business occasions, for example, but costumes are always artificial.  

I am convinced that costumes are fine for masquerade parties and Trick-or-Treating. All other occasions, (including the Academy Awards ceremony,) call for more conventional, authentic dress.

DRESSING 101 – INTRODUCTION TO ELEGANCE – LEVELS 1, 2, & 3 

Level 1:

Tee shirts and sweat shirts; cut-offs or shorts; un-ironed garments; any garment with an excess of pockets; athletic clothing and footwear (including socks); any garment with tears, rips, worn-out spots, logos larger that ½ inch, or writing of any kind on it; baseball caps.

    Here’s a tip: If it involves cleaning products, hoses, athletic activity, or any tools, gardening implements, dirt, or animals, it is a Level 1 function. Dress accordingly.

Level 2:

Collared shirt, knit or woven, solid, stripe, plaid or check; turtle-neck or mock-turtle; jeans which are clean, reasonably uniform in color, and which fit you; trousers – cotton, wool, elegant casual or relaxed-dressy – with a crease, a belt, and clean leather shoes. 

     Level 2 situations include the widest range of possibilities: going to work in a casual environment, (or if you are self-employed,) evenings at home, all the normal day-to-day stuff. The degree to which you care about yourself and your relations with others is precisely the degree to which you will attempt to have a nice appearance in your casual clothes.

Level 3  (Basic Variations):

• Dress slacks and dress shirt, worn with a sport jacket and tie; or
• Dress slacks, solid or subtly-patterned dress shirt and necktie, or, finally,
• A suit, worn with a knit shirt, a woven sport shirt or a dress shirt but no tie.

    Level 3 occasions are those which call for some distinction. Commonly, these are business days for the average executive, informal social events like cocktail parties, or dinners in restaurants, brunches, and so on. These types of events call for clothes described by my favorite phrase: Casual Elegance. The defining factor in Level 3 dress can be either a necktie or a tailored jacket of some sort, but not necessarily both.

    Dressing for the Level 3 type of event or situation is the next plateau, the conceptual-sartorial span between average day-to-day and The Suit. Level 3 is where your personal style is most noticeable. In case you weren’t paying close attention to that last sentence, let me repeat it, with emphasis: Level 3 is where your personal style is most noticeable.

     “What?” you’re saying. “Better dressed in a sport coat and slacks than in my suit?”

    That’s right. Better dressed because it’s harder, the way that climbing the face of El Capitan is harder than ascending Everest, because it demands more pure skill. And the ones who take the time and put in the effort to learn this skill are the ones who deserve – and get – the highest honors.

   Of course, the boundaries of these levels may sometimes be vague. A man in a navy blazer with dark gray slacks, white shirt, solid or neat-patterned tie, pocket square and polished oxfords is as formal as any suit-wearer; he is probably good for most Level 4 occasions. And a cotton or linen suit, worn with a crew neck or a collared shirt but no tie, is Level 3, sportswear. It is only the attitude you want to project, the venue, and the time of day, that dictates the level of dress a man needs. The intention here is to give some form, some memorable pattern to getting dressed. As far as how each level is defined, I am confident you’ll get the groove, especially since you’re interested enough in the subject to have read this far.

Here’s the low-down on hand-made.

There are five major operations in making a jacket that, done by hand, result in a superior product. That is to say that these operations have never been improved upon by the invention of machinery, the way the sewing of straight seams has been improved, for example. All of these operations are responsible for the superior fit, comfort and durability of the “hand-tailored” jacket.. All of them are centered in the top of the garment, around the shoulders and collar; and all of them are important in achieving better fit and greater comfort for the same reason: flexibility. A hand stitch is a continuous passage of thread through the cloth; the thread does not “lock” to a bobbin thread as it does in a machine stitch. The thread moves, expands and contracts with motion, remaining supple, creating seams which are at the same time tight, fluid and elastic, such as are needed around the collar and the armhole to give the wearer the most precise fit and ease of motion while retaining the ability to return to their original shape and dimensions.

            Now you can be sure that the sewing machine manufacturers around the world, Messers Pfaff, Strobel, Juki, Reese and Singer, all of them, have devised “simulated hand” stitching machines of one sort or another. We already mentioned the Liba machine, devised to replicated the slip-stitch that holds a necktie together. One surprising feature of many factories is the good-old AMF edge-stitch machine, which makes a kind of bush-league replica of a hand-stitched lapel edge.

All of this is testimony to the ingenuity and deceptive bent of machinery and clothing manufacturers, willing to collude in these silly deceptions. The bitter irony is, however, that despite their ingenuity and effort, anyone who would recognize the hand work in a garment will also be able to tell fake from real.

So what’s the point exactly?    

Note to Consumers: Without tearing the jacket apart, there are only two places where you can see hand-sewing that means anything: under the collar and around the armhole. Interestingly, the way you can tell that these areas are hand sewn is by the irregularity of the stitches.

            The five critical hand operations?

1. Attaching the sleeve heads, lining and pads to the armhole
2. Attaching the collar to the top of the back
3. Attaching the felt under collar to the collar edge
4. Sewing the lining around the shoulder seam
5. Sewing the lining around the armhole   

Now any truly hand-tailored garment is certain to have other areas of handwork inside, such as the tacking of the vents, sewing on the buttons, fashioning the buttonholes, stitching the lapel- and pocket-edges, attaching the lining at the sleeve cuffs and at the jacket-bottom hems; even the trouser waistband, when sewn to the outer shell by hand, creates a more comfortable and resilient fit and feel. The five critical jacket operations listed above are most important to the wearer is because those areas are where the comfort and stress resistance are most necessary, and where the hand-sewer can follow the elliptical, – rather than straight – curving sections of the cut cloth. The hand stitches follow and reinforce the contours of the collar and the armhole opening, giving strength and flexibility, smoothness and suppleness to those intricate seams.

Do I hear snoring? Are you sleeping? Wake up! I’m trying to help you spend your money wisely. Don’t hold it against me. There are two additional things I will try to say as economically as possible; then you can shut the light.

First, although hand tailoring is expensive in this world of diminishing skill, (there being so few people who are capable of doing it anymore that they can insist on very high wages,) there is still no way that anybody can justify the numbers some of these crooks (the manufacturers or “designers”) put on the price tags. A tailor, living today in, let’s say, New York City, can make a suit completely by himself and completely by hand, (not that you’d want him to, since long, straight seams are done better by machine,) in about ten hours. Let’s say the guy earns $150 an hour (10X the real number,) you’ve got $1500 in labor, right? And let’s say, to be completely over the top, that you made it out of Super 200’s with 24K gold filament stripes that cost $500 a yard.. That’s $2000 for the goods. Total? $3500. I have seen suits made in factories out of regular wool with prices higher. Caveat emptor, is all I can say.

Second is this. You can’t tell the benefits of hand tailoring until you wear the jacket for a while. You certainly can’t tell in the store. A totally machine-made coat may fit and look just as good, but after a while the comfort and durability, the garment’s ability to retain its shape, move with you and conform to your ever-changing dimensions, will be obvious. This I also promise.

St. Grottlesex Style

     “Preppy,” that unique blend of outrageous colors, extravagant patterns and sometimes bizarre details, stands beside Cowboy of the US West, the jazzy Zoot Suit of the Harlem Renaissance, 1980’s Seattle-spawned Grunge, and others, as icons of their ages, truly American fashion phenomena. “St. Grottlesex,” a term coined to describe the youthful demographic of this pure-bred, Mayflower-borne social set, was an amalgam of the names of the most elite of these private secondary schools, Saint Paul’s, Grotin, Middlesex. 

   It is said that the style these young men affected, jackets with small shoulders but an easy fit through the body, narrow neckties, slim-fitting, pleatless pants worn above-the-ankle short, was derived from the influence of British swells. But there is no real historical evidence to support this. My father arrived at Princeton in the mid-1930’s and, according to him, the guys from the New England schools were dressed in this unusual way; to him it was a sui generis, a style like no other, unto itself, signifying the wearer’s membership in America’s unspoken upper class. Over the next thirty years the purity of the look and the exclusivity of its adherents became diluted, until it reached a near self-parody in the manner of The Preppy Handbook, a best seller with the same mysterious popularity as things like The Pet Rock.    

    Although its appeal was at first limited to a very well-heeled, insular audience, in fashion terms preppy was a rumbling, a tectonic shift that signaled an impending earthquake. In the next decade we went from Eisenhower-age grey uniformity, through the pink-and-green embroidered phase, all the way to flamboyant-designer and, ultimately, drug-induced psychedelia: from the grey flannel suit to bell bottoms and magenta velvet, skin-tight jackets, to sunburst tie-dyes and beaded necklaces. By 1970 no one knew what was going to happen next in men’s wear, and the masculine mystique of guys like Harry Truman and Jack Kennedy was just a memory. Preppy broke the ice.

   The Preppy craze became widespread in the late 50’s, like the Hula Hoop for the Chip and Trey set. My father told me he wondered how long it was going to last. He was in the vanguard. Storekeepers would ask, “Do you think people will be buying these dinky-shouldered coats two years from now?” Gant was part of it, as were Corbin slacks, Southwick’s suits, Reis of New Haven ties, Canterbury belts, Bass Weejuns, and a bunch of other stuff now lost in the attic of memory.

  Some of these companies took incredible chances with color and pattern. One, GT Trousers, they were called, a Boston firm, made a killing in preppy pants. They had a huge range of colorful corduroys and velvets with pheasants, geese, foxes, hounds and all manner of Anglo-Saxon iconography embroidered on. Scottish knitters like Druhmohr and Ballantyne showed Shetland and slack-knit cashmere sweaters in colors from Ashleigh Apricot to Wallingford Wisteria. Pink and yellow oxford shirts gained widespread acceptance. Madras was everywhere.

   It was a revolution in fit, as well. The fifties look was characterized by big, easy-fitting, wide-shouldered jackets, and details like pleated pants. Think of cultural icons like Ward Cleaver, Beaver’s father; or Perry Como. The natural shoulder, Ivy League look was spare, lean. No pleats, no shoulder pads, tight trouser legs. Everything got small. Corbin advertised “Natural Shoulder Pants;” a clever way to describe the look.   

  There was a store near where we lived called Mark, Fore and Strike that sold all this stuff. The place was blinding, brighter inside than it was outside, even on a sunny day. I bought a madras poncho that you pulled over your head. It had a hood and a sort of marsupial pouch in front instead of pockets. I was about thirteen, and maybe for that reason alone I was immediately embarrassed; I maybe wore the thing three times. It was the exact opposite of my white Levi’s experience. It was stupid; but it was a milestone in my sartorial education. A year or so later I got a white windbreaker with a souped-up’32 deuce coupe on the back custom designed and drawn by Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, the absolute king of west coast hot rod art. Equally stupid, but way more counter-culture, more of a statement. I wore that probably four times. I had some trouble with my identity back then.

    A couple of years later Big Daddy Roth’s Hot Rod-Surfer dude art gave way to Peter Max’s Beardsley-esque psychedelic poster art, tie-dyed tee shirts, tight bell-bottoms from Brittania jeans and Mexican wedding shirts from stores like The Different Drummer on Lexington or Jack’s in Boston. (The Different Drummer’s advertising campaign was iconic of the age: A guy holding a pile of, you guessed it, with the legend beneath: “Tired of the same old shit?” It was a David Ogilvy-esque stroke of genius, like the Hathaway eye-patch of the revolutionary era.) And as took place in the French Revolution, chaos followed chaos; as if it had been Harry Truman or Jack Kennedy who’d said, “Après moi, la deluge.”  We all got into the counter-cultural habit, donning our huaraches, serapes, six-inch-rise Britannia jeans and batik-print headbands; any self-consciousness we may have felt about this outlandish metamorphosis of style was easily overcome by two or three tokes on a reefer.

Launching Lauren

Volumes have been written about the Life of Ralph, from his bourgeois Bronx beginnings to his spectacular, Madison Avenue mega-success. Some of these books are actually interesting; and some get the part about my father more or less right, although they always refer to Norman as “a manufacturer,” which is not at all what he was. “Impresario” or “entrepreneur” would have been more accurate, since my old man was no more of a factory guy than was Ralph himself. So you may have read about this rock star of the rag trade, you probably know at least part of the story; born Ralph Lifschutz, or whatever it was, Brooks Brothers salesman, blah, blah, blah. But just in case you don’t remember, here’s the emmis. (That means truth; another example of how talking about the clothing business sounds better when you say things in Yiddish, as in:) Here’s the emmis, Ralph didn’t know bubkes, but he had chutzpah.   

In 1966 Norman was hitting his stride. Orders were coming in like never before; money was everywhere. The influence and renown of Norman Hilton Clothes had reached almost mythic proportions. It was the “in” thing, sold in every better respected shop in the country. Carrying the line separated one’s shop from the riffraff; the company’s salesmen had to choose which stores were the best store in each city.

It was a logical next step for Norman to add products, to as they say “extend the brand” to capitalize on this bonanza. How better than to produce dress shirts and neckwear under the Norman Hilton label, accompaniments to the suits and sport jackets.

At the time, all over the industry, and especially in the hallowed halls and elevators of the Sperry Rand building at Fifty-second Street and Avenue of the Americas, where the head offices of every major clothing firm were located, people were talking. In the Ground Floor Bar across the street in the CBS building, and wherever retailers, wholesalers, editors and assorted mavens mingled, they were all talking about a young guy who was making outrageous, 5-inch-wide neckties that were selling for twenty dollars, about four times the price of any other tie. The “kid” (he was just over 30) worked for a St. Louis company called Beau Brummell Cravats. His name was Ralph Lauren.

My father always thought big. There was no way, as anyone who knew Norman and Ralph would quickly attest, that talent the likes of Lauren would be content working in the confined environment of the Norman Hilton business, but those kinds of practical considerations never bothered my dad. His closest assistant, Peter Strom, was dispatched to St. Louis to spring Ralph from his contract with Beau Brummell and for a brief period the Norman Hilton dress furnishings line was designed by Ralph Lauren.

My father told me that it was clear in their very first conversation; while Ralph would work to create the Norman Hilton dress shirt and neckwear lines, his true ambition was to make a line that went above and beyond the Norman Hilton style, a complete collection of clothes, from shoes to hats, sportswear to dinner clothing, knitwear to leathers, all of which would have a richly romantic, updated look. He knew from the beginning that it would be called Polo.

It is not even slightly surprising that Norman immediately saw the potential in Ralph’s idea, and not just on account of the young man’s obvious talent. The natural shoulder era had reached its apogee, just as every style trend would. He knew something was going to come and take its place. It was the 60’s, don’t forget. Change was in the air, like Jimi Hendrix, like marijuana smoke.

Norman sold his stock in Winnebago (a prescient move, as it turned out,) to come up with the seed money, $75,000, to capitalize Polo Fashions, Inc., which he and Ralph owned as equal partners. This company sold all of Ralph’s designs of shirts and ties to retailers. And since this is my story and not Ralph’s, I’ll tell you briefly what happened: in a short time Ralph figured out that having Norman for a partner was only half the fun of being on his own. He started a new company known as Polo/Ralph Lauren, which could sell anything other than shirts and ties and would not have to give my father half of the proceeds. A decade later Ralph bought my father’s share of Polo Fashions for three quarters of a million dollars; a reasonable return, although nothing like half of what Polo/Ralph Lauren was worth.

But the money isn’t interesting. What’s interesting is that the endorsement that Norman gave Ralph, the introduction he offered him to the Big Leagues of US retailing, the pedigree that the Norman Hilton reputation for quality imputed to all things Polo, was a cornerstone of Ralph’s initial success. Ralph’s prodigious talent, drive, and vision might never have been given an audience otherwise. These are the conditions of fate; this is how mythology is born. Somehow, in helping to kindle the fire that became the Polo sun, my father was setting fire to his own house. The sales and management talent that he had trained and engendered, in Peter Strom and the rest of the sales team, the romance and allure which Norman had created around his own product line, all of this went to Polo, which sputtered a bit at first and then exploded into star-like success, while the Hilton family enterprise, tethered to manufacturing facilities and outdated structures, sputtered eventually out.

 My Blog: The Experience of A Lifetime  (In Clothes)

Jeans Today

I can’t think of anything that has evolved to such an extent without looking much different. The tricky part for anybody considering the subject of jeans is how to know what makes the difference between hog-slopping pants and your Calvins. Like wine, all jeans kind of look the same; but the more exposed and educated you become the more skill you’ll have in differentiating one from another. With jeans you have to know about fabric and fit to appreciate the differences between Army-Navy dungarees and what they call Premium Denim. But it is just this difference that gives a good jean its Level 2 designation, and leaves the old miners’ pants back in the Level 1 hamper. 

            Workmen’s pants are made of heavy, strong, and rigid cloth because they are designed to simply to cover the body, to provide protection in a work environment, and to last forever. They are blue because Levi Strauss, who invented them, favored indigo dye, which is strange because it is very caustic and not particularly color-fast. Anyhow, as a result of being made of dense and inflexible material they stretch out in places and stay stretched, developing bulges at the knees and a baggy seat – the kind of seat that, above which, you might see a particular type of cleavage. Old fashioned dungarees are designed to fit every body; (i.e., to have no discernable fit whatsoever.)

            Premium Denims are made of technologically sophisticated cloth, spun, woven and dyed to be made into pants that fit in a way that conventional trousers never can. (“Can” is the operative word here.) If you’re going to buy a pair of jeans for a hundred and fifty dollars or more you should have pretty high expectations. These pants should change your life (or at least your sex life.) No conventional trouser design can hug your butt as much as possible without feeling tight and give a longer, leaner look to your legs and lower body. Unfortunately, however, if you have a waist that measures more than 38 inches around, or if your thighs are unusually big, you may have to give premium denim a pass. In your case the conventional design, longer-rise trouser is most likely more flattering.

People are surprised to hear that jeans can be a Level 2 or even a Level 3 thing in terms of formality. Naturally the distressed, unevenly faded variety will never stand in for a dress trouser, but straight leg jeans (or “5-pocket” pants, as they are known) in the dark, rich colors, from blue, black and gray all the way over to brown, can be a perfect complement to a tailored jacket in any season. It may be hard to actually get the necktie thing right with jeans, the rise being lower  

Better jeans may stretch a little, and they will certainly have been washed before you buy them to achieve a soft, lived-in feel. In fact, the wash technique and the resulting color and drape of the legs is the lion’s share of why they cost so much more.

You’ll see really expensive jeans in stores with holes “worn” into them by dollar-a-day laborers with forks and files and stuff. If you want to pay extra for that, I have a bridge we should discuss. Washing them repeatedly so they’re softer before you wear them is one thing, but trying to look like you wore these jeans to Woodstock is just a fake-out.

 FYI     “Jean” is the name of a cloth for making sturdy, durable pants, derived from the old English, “jene fustian,” a name for a heavy cotton twill typical of Genoa, Italy (jean-o-a, get it?). And in case that’s not enough information, denim is a modern-day corruption of the French “de Nîmes,” the name they gave to the same fabric the Genoese thought they’d invented. Coke and Pepsi all over again.