American Style
This is a brave assertion, but I’m certain of it. The universal inspiration for style in menswear since the end of WWII, the most profound and pervasive influence on the design of men’s clothing worldwide has been us, American men. Sociologists and historians call the 20th century “American, and nowhere has this been more obvious than in masculine dress. The eighty years since VJ-Day have seen the rise of Hollywood and the broadcast of American jazz and pop music. From “North By Northwest” to “The Godfather,” from Elvis and Miles Davis to Johnny Cash and Run-D.M.C., popular media has showcased American style. The culture that came of age in Harry Truman’s era was broadcast via the cinema, the radio and TV to a world that was starving for entertainment as well as order. We Americans were “It.” Are we still? Apparently. “Grunge,” the style of the slovenly, has had the most widely pervasive influence of all.
No one talks about this. People who write books about men’s clothes usually pay homage to the French, the English and the Italians. Americans, although brash and haughty in our foreign policies, seldom seem to take credit for influencing the consumer culture world-wide. This may be because we’re embarrassed at having exported a lot of crude, commercial, glitzy and unhealthy junk, from MacDonalds to fentanyl, on the world, enough junk to have created a backlash that brought on horrors like 9/11.
I’m sure you’re not surprised to learn that Milanese men do not dress like what we see in the designers’ “look books.” (Most of them worthless even to a retailer.) Italian men never wore the clothes Armani copied from Prohibition-era Chicago gangsters. The consumer culture has popularized some nonsense. A salesman in Saks who tells you that suit has a “European cut” is more influenced by that article he saw in the Newark Star Ledger than by any evidence of the nationality or background of the designer. In fact, since the arrival of Yves Saint-Laurent and Dior on the 1970s, the clothes sold in stores are licensed products, designed exclusively for the US market and bearing little resemblance to the designer’s or couturier’s actual conception, let alone the taste of the average European guy.
The look of men’s clothes since WWII has been an American phenomenon. Japan is the best example. Paul Stuart and J. Press are now Japanese companies. The streets of Tokyo are packed with men and women in standard-issue navy blue Ivy-League suits, which they wear with white button-down collar shirts and regimental-stripe ties. It is said that these companies keep the unprofitable, struggling US branches open only to continue the illusion at home in Japan of being authentically American.
Just as Ralph Lauren’s early success was enlarged by his involvement in the costumes for Robert Redford’s “The Great Gatsby,” Armani’s big explosion was created by the stir surrounding the clothing he did for the Chicago gangster-era movie “The Untouchables.” How did Giorgio know what Frank Nitty and Al Capone dressed like, anyway? Here we have some real irony: Armani copied old American looks worn by immigrant Italians in American cities, and sold them back to us.
Now in the internet age the look of the American man is that of the day-laborer: blue jeans — where did these originate? — a t-shirt, sneakers and a baseball cap. It is impossible to find a culture in this world where dressing, preparing to leave your home, to be seen in public, means what it used to. The icons of success, the American oligarchy, can only be recognized by their yachts, private jets and their mansions, from which they emerge looking like Ed Norton in “The Honeymooners.” Everybody can dress like Elon? It’s the style of Kurt Cobain, a third grader playing hooky.
One day recently I was having coffee and reading my Herald in the Piazza Cavour, Como’s central square, and looked up to see a kid of about seven or eight coming toward me across the piazza dressed in a t-shirt with the San Francisco 49ers’ logo on it and wearing a baseball cap, with a backpack-style book bag on his back . This kid, it struck me, was not just globalization personified; he was the universal child: what might differentiate him from a kid in Beijing, Prague, Sao Paolo or Johannesburg was only the language he spoke or the color of his skin. World dominance has this subtlety.