Men's fashion and the Men's suit.

Recently, David Kinsey of My Fellow Acrobat wrote a blog entry about a TV commercial by Oliver Peoples' glasses. The advertisement features Zooey Deschanel (who, together with M. Ward, released a wonderful recording last year with '60s Burt Bacharach style tunes) and Matt Costa, each sporting a range of Oliver Peoples' glasses, in a late 50s/early 60s setting.

David comments that the men's line of glasses "seem to be coming out from another time zone than Zooey's." Now is it that, beyond men's sunglasses, men's fashion in general is 'anachronistic' and not as 'inspired' as women's?

My take on it, is that men's fashion has always been a lot more formalized and not as flexible compared to women's. Now, I am not talking about the grand age of men's fashion back in the 16-17th centuries, long before the dandy Beau Brumell, who is said to have introduced the now oh-so-standard men's suit with the shirt and tie combo. Somehow, men's fashion, at least when it comes to formal clothes, has become unchangeable, with strict rules to follow. Just a glance at any contemporary award ceremony will show that men are stuck into wearing a tuxedo that allows very little variance in both form and color, whereas women can play around with the silhouette, color, type of fabric, and even add a wider range of accessories. Men lost even more space to manoeuver when hats became more of an option than an obligation for a decent gentleman (and no, it isn't JFK's Inaugural address that killed the hat industry!).

Because of its inflexibility and rigidness, my impression is that the abandonment of the suit style as casual wear was quite dramatic for men's fashion. Already in the 50s, Marlon Brando and James Dean made jeans, t-shirt and leather jacket from a working class to fashionable items of clothing. Although we can still see middle class men largely preferring suits at that time (as seen in low-budget French Nouvelle Vague films from the mid-50s to the early 60s), I would guess that the Swinging London scene of the mid-60s (see for example, the menswear shop "I was Lord Kitchner's Valet") and the hippie movement of the late 60s detached, compartmentalized and froze men's formal fashion. In other words, while allowing for more pluralism in informal styles, the suit 'costume' (as the French still call it), remained detached and became relatively resistant to change (well, the changing width and length of this and that I consider to be minor).

Try to stray from these limits of the suit, and a photo taken wearing the particular suit would be a source of amazement and embarrassment a few years later.

I might be stretching it a bit, but I think that this rigidity is what results in men paying much more than women on suits. Since men cannot digress too much from the norm, the only way in which they can distinguish themselves is by the quality of the fabric, the mastery of tailormanship and the informed selection of how to combine double/single breast, types of lapel, pockets, sleeves, vents, etc. Just like the scene in American Psycho, where the characters compare the subtle variations of the different shades of white, the font, and how watermarks are used, men who aspire to be "fashionable" become trained very quickly to read the subtle language of the suit...