1930s style

We all like to look at those Apparel Arts plates of well dressed men from the 1930s. Well, those of us that knows about them. I am referring to the old issues of Esquire magazine and the Apparel Arts catalogs from the 1930s and 1940s which were a bounty of colored (and black and white) illustrations of all the options the well dressed man could possibly dream of for every time, place and manner.

Alan Flusser wrote that the 1930s is the classic period when all the ideas on what a man should wear were agreed on and set down, and maybe that’s true. It was an elegant rich age. Of course most people were living in cardboard boxes during the Great Depression but at least the lucky ones had an amazing array of choices.

But as much as those clothes look good and as much as they promise us a portal to a more fabulous past, if a modern man were to try to wear most of those clothes he would find them uncomfortable. They would be too heavy and too stiff. The colors themselves would be ever so out of step with the colors of today.  If a man were to outfit himself cap a pie in 1930s elegance, he would look very rigid and dated.

But why is this true if the look is timeless? Why is what Flusser wrote starting to erode? Why is it if you ape the 1930s you’ll look like you’re in a Broadway revival?

I think it’s because when Flusser wrote these things he was very near the end of a time when  tailored clothes were compulsory for men. Propriety was in command and men needed to learn a set of rules someone else set down. However, for better or for worse, the almost ten years of “Casual Friday” being applied throughout the week has removed the talons of propriety which made men feel inadequate or common if they did not wear tailored clothes. Basically, the horse has left the barn.

That’s the sad part. The good part is that men are starting to realize that they don’t look good in khakis and golf shirts and now choose to wear suits and sports jackets again.

However, even though men now elect to wear tailored clothes they are in command and dictate their own needs of comfort and style. Thus the old rules no longer apply. Of course some of the physical rules of tailoring do apply and although being improved and updated;  you cannot just eliminate everything.  But true talent as a designer  is having the ability to edit what is useful with what is useless.

There’s a difference between referring to the 1930s and wearing the actual artifacts, colors styles etc… I love the old movies (The domain name might be a giveaway)but I don’t want to wear the actual clothes they wore. That is too literal and unimaginative. The sorts of fantasies Walter Mitty might have had which may be a pleasant daydream but not a look for the serious man to spend money on looking like.  Instead, I want to wear my new and modern clothes the WAY they wore theirs, with style, nonchalance, panache and daring. We refer, we salute and we admire the past…but we refresh, always-just like they did.

We are in a period of transition and I think this might be true globally. Milan, Naples, Paris, Tokyo, London and NYC are all using colors and fabrics for men’s clothes that would have been thought unacceptable a few years ago. Likewise, old standards are being relegated to the curmudgeon.

I think we’re living in a new 1930s where the lucky ones have a lot of elegant choices to mark themselves out as individuals even if most men are still dressing down.

Leaf through those alluring Apparel Arts color plates of gentlemen wearing elegant clothes. Stay up bleary eyed and wonder at those old abstract movies with their superb character actors in their natty, individualistic clothes. Wonder at the tilt of their fedoras and the spring in their spectators for they will never be reproduced. However, they will always exist to give us guidelines, if not rules, about how it used to be and how it can be better still again.

When you buy clothes, buy the updated ones which let you be comfortable in your modern life and leave the 18oz suits to stars for they are the stuff that dreams are made of.