I would be interested in relocating to California in the prime of the West Coast style, hanging around in the Haig and Lighthouse with Chet, Pepper, Cooper, Perkins, Rogers, Mulligan and Shank. Arriving about the time when Bird was relaxin' at Camarillo and leaving when Pepper had finished recording Art Pepper + 11 with Davis's band. There was still good recordings coming out from the West Coast for a couple of more years, but from 1959 onwards, Pacific Jazz and Contemporary had lost the zeitgeist to Blue Note, Prestige and New York.

Like Hard Bop, I certainly prefer the music, clothes, style and writers from that period, probably of most interest from 1959-62. Certainly there's more of the great canon of jazz to enjoy now, and I'm currently listening to Art Pepper's Smack Up on Japanese 24bit remastered CD, with an essential extra track on not on the original release - Solid Citizens.

The iGents seem not interested in 1955, but rather to be the members of an idealised house band on a technicolor Mississippi river steamer circa 1901, but filmed in a Hollywood studio in the golden age of musicals. This why so many of them have a preference for dressing like they're in a trad jazz band - straw boaters and stripes. And also why anything they have made bespoke comes across as stylised and comical as its meant to be viewed on the big screen in 35mm. 

Now I'm not knocking trad jazz, there's nothing wrong with Lu Watters and Fire House Five Plus Two.

The worse advice I ever took regarding shoes was on AAAC, allegedly the source of the advice was Edward Green shoes, and this was to take a new pair of shoes prior to wearing them and coat them with shoe polish and leave them for 24hours. Didn't work for me.

4F and Shamrock really nailed it with these previous two insightful posts - the desire in Andlyand is for a costume, not a style, and wearing a costume in your daily life makes you look, at best, "stylized and comical" and at worst like some kind of reverse goth.

And it's always bound up in ideas of social class, too. Others have pointed out that this is kind of amusing given AAAC's ostensibly egalitarian "anyone can dress with style!" leanings. Take this recent post by CuffDaddy:

http://www.askandyaboutclothes.com/forum/showpost.php?p=1050257&postcount=2

I seldom strongly disagree with CuffDaddy but I always think he's kind of an abrasive prick, and this post really confirms it. Also, NB that it's several thousand words long, and it comes from a poster who almost never fails to mention that he's a successful lawyer - where does he find the time? His advice here is so boring and conservative as to escape any possible objection.

But the real soul of the post is the statement that you can only wear a purple tie around "educated" people and that if you wear a purple tie around "uneducated" people they will think you're a homosexual and, presumably, sexually assault you in the style of "Deliverance." The central metaphor of Andyland really is natural nobility versus the unwashed, and knowing that you can pair a light blue tie with a white shirt somehow makes you a member of this privileged class.

This attitude irritates me, especially given that, were most of us posters transported back in time to the court of the Sun King we would be more qualified to bake bread or muck out the stables than to buckle on some tiny slippers and engage in state intrigue. To put it another way, it does no good to dress up like Cary Grant or the Prince of Wales if you're a weird, Aspergers-y petit bourgeois shut-in, you'll still be a weird, Aspergers-y petit bourgeois shut-in. Not that this is news to anyone here.

But I still think that this is the fundamental difference between AAAC and Devil's Island - here people seem relaxed and at home with their relationship to clothing, whereas at Andy's it always seems to revolve around getting the board's approval and imagining that you're grinding your Alden boot (from Leather Soul, ideally "deep discount") into the face of some peasant.

Last edited by Gilgamesh2003 (2010-01-31 08:23:15)