"My God, it's full of drape."


-2006 A Suit Odyssey

"You don't even know what he's done....He's made a new kind of cloth; it never gets dirty and it lasts forever...Do you know what a long-chain molecule is? Do you know what happens if one makes one of
infinite length with optimum interchain attractions? Do you know what it means? It means that to break the fiber you'd have to split the molecule. It means for all practical purposes the suit will last forever!" —The Man In the White Suit starring Alec Guinness (1951).

Great flick. Anybody seen it?

Cecil Beaton. 'An Evening with the Stones'. Diary: 1967.

"Mick showed me the rows of brocade coats. Everything is shoddy, poorly made, the seams burst. Keith himself had sewn his trousers, lavender and dull rose, with a band of badly stitched leather dividing the two colours."

"The clouds were lying low but not unpleasantly over the peat bog, and a traveller might have descried, sandwiched betwen the clouds and the brown earth, little figures delving & hurrying. Were he to have approached closer he would have seen that the figures were of people obviously clever. Some wore spectacles and little-used cricket shirts, others had bought their ties in Paris."

'Lord Mount Prospect'. John Betjeman. The London Mercury. 1929.

I always thought something wasn't quite right with the old boy:


"penguins  look good in tails, birds look good in tails.  Tails are teh ultimate expression of form over substance.  Who likes them?  Probably three people in the country, and I would neither vote for those people nor appoint them to any office." 

-- Mario Cuomo to the NY Times on why he wouldn't wear morning dress to his son's wedding.

“Long before sunrise, Castillo was awakened by a commotion coming from the next cabin, where Daisy was ensconced. When she emerged from her compartment shortly before their arrival, he thought to ask why she had awakened so early. Then he realized that Daisy was perfectly dressed and in full makeup:

‘Is there a gentleman waiting for you at the station, Daisy?’ Castillo asked.

‘Only my driver,’ she replied.

‘Then why are you so dressed up? Why not just a pair of sunglasses?’

‘I did it for myself,’ Daisy explained. ‘It’s a question of discipline, you see.’”

—Daisy Fellowes, the sewing machine heiress, traveling from Paris overnight to the South of France with the couturier Antonio Castillo.

Yes indeed. I plundered the French 'History of Men's Fashion' again.
Amazing writing for a London daily paper in the 30's isn't it?. I'd love to see the full article.

t.

It is true that the strict social codes he so admired went by the boards after that. The rules of dress loosened up and, only a few years later, the fashion plates of the pre-war years began to look incredibly quaint. Consider two generations of Bouvier men, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis’s father and grandfather. John Vernou Bouvier Jr., patriarch of the family that began summering in East Hampton in 1915, was known as a stylish dresser. His customary summer Sunday uniform, as described by another of his grandchildren, was “a high stiff collar, brown tweed jacket, white linen trousers, black socks and white shoes.” He also sported a mustache waxed to spiky perfection, which made for risky kissing by little Jackie and the other grandchildren.

Then consider his son, John Vernou Bouvier III, Jackie’s father, who nurtured his image as a dangerously dashing playboy in the twenties and thirties (they called him “Black Jack Bouvier”) and brought the family’s reputation for sartorial splendor firmly into the jazz age. On a summer Sunday in East Hampton, his nephew relates, “he would combine a wide-lapelled double-breasted beige gabardine suit, with its cuffless trousers rolled up slightly to reveal no socks on his deeply tanned ankles, with black evening pumps.” It may be Black Jack whose fondness for “Brooks Brothers socks” (otherwise known as bare ankles) established socklessness as a mark of high-style insouciance. He probably also played a role in associating the pencil-thin mustache with a warning: “Women Beware.”

from:

http://www.hamptons.com/hamptons_article_long_island_221.htm