Entries categorized as ‘style’
I see too many dudes every day who have no idea what they’re doing: guys who have no idea how to dress, how to drive, how to lift weights, how to eat/drink, how to sit, how to listen, how to speak, how to spell, how to write, how to think for themselves, or how to even live their lives. I very, very rarely meet a fellow gentleman and then later think to myself, “He knows what he’s doing.” That sucks. Now, I don’t claim to know what I’m doing most of the time, but I’m trying. Please try with me.
—Tommy V.
No kidding.
(Via.)
Categories: masculinity · quotes · style
You’re a big man, but you’re in bad shape. With me it’s a full-time job. Now behave yourself.
—Jack Carter (Michael Caine), Get Carter
Categories: masculinity · movies · quotes · style
Tagged: Get Carter, Michael Caine
November 27, 2009 · 1 Comment
Categories: academe · style
Tagged: Cornel West
John Gavin as a small-town college professor in Tammy Tell Me True (1961).
I repeat: If academics in real life dressed anything like academics in the movies, they’d be one of the best-dressed occupational groups in America.
See also Parts I, II, and III.
(Via.)
Categories: academe · style
If one dresses too formally at my college – or most colleges – one might be mistaken for an administrator, which is a clear violation of the unwritten sumptuary laws. One might be given inappropriate deference by the unknowing. And I did find more students holding doors for me and calling me “sir” as if I were a person of importance.
Such gestures embarrassed me a little, but they also made me feel more confident and capable. I began to think I could exert some pressure on my institution to raise the bar of formality a little by raising it a lot for myself.
In the process, I probably irritated some of my colleagues, a few of whom are aggressively informal on principle: denim, work boots, sandals – anything goes but formality. The situation is not unique to my home institution. Professors (in the humanities, at least) don’t make much money relative to other professionals, so we press our sour grapes into the sweeter wine of smugness: “We are too important to pay attention to such trivial, privileged matters as clothing.”
—Thomas H. Benton, aka William Pannapacker
Categories: academe · quotes · style
He opened for us two hulking patent cabinets which held his massed suits and dressing-gowns and ties, and his shirts, piled like bricks in stacks a dozen high.
“I’ve got a man in England who buys me clothes. He sends over a selection of things at the beginning of each season, spring and fall.”
He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them, one by one, before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel, which lost their folds as they fell and covered the table in many-colored disarray. While we admired he brought more and the soft rich heap mounted higher—shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, and monograms of Indian blue. Suddenly, with a strained sound, Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily.
“They’re such beautiful shirts,” she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. “It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such—such beautiful shirts before.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Categories: books · quotes · style
Recently, I’ve developed a weakness for hotel stationery. It’s rare enough to receive an honest to goodness letter in the mail these days. Getting one on hotel letterhead just adds to the romance. If you believe my stationery, I’m at the Hotel Ritz one day, Fontainebleau the next. And while a box of Crane’s correspondence cards will run you north of $100, hotel stationery is complementary, so I try to go home with a stack every time I’m on the road. (Some of the classiest joints like the Chateau Marmont will even print you up personalized stationery.) And if it’s a vintage find off eBay, all the better. I just got a box of stationery from the long defunct Eastern Steam Lines. Along the bottom of the paper it says, “Onboard Steamship.” That’ll keep ‘em guessing.
—Walker Lamond
(Via.)
Categories: quotes · style · writing
Maybe he’d never go back to the States. It was not so much Europe itself as the evenings he had spent alone, here and in Rome, that made him feel that way. Evenings by himself simply looking at maps, or lying around on sofas thumbing through guidebooks. Evenings looking at his clothes – his clothes and Dickie’s – and feeling Dickie’s rings between his palms, and running his fingers over the antelope suitcase he had bought at Gucci’s. He had polished the suitcase with a special English leather dressing, not that it needed polishing because he took such good care of it, but for its protection. He loved possessions, not masses of them, but a select few that he did not part with. They gave a man self-respect. Not ostentation but quality, and the love that cherished the quality. Possessions reminded him that he existed, and made him enjoy his existence. It was as simple as that. And wasn’t that worth something? He existed.
—Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley
(Via.)
Categories: quotes · style
“Mr. Gwathmey was part of a generation of architects who put their own aesthetic stamp on the ‘high Modernist’ style developed in the early 20th century by Le Corbusier and others. Many of Mr. Gwathmey’s best buildings were houses.”
*
“Mr. Gwathmey (pronounced GWAHTH-mee) himself was a dashing figure, given to Savile Row suits and shoes from the London boot maker John Lobb. He drove black sports cars from which he stripped details he considered extraneous and lived in refined style, in an apartment of his own design.”
Charles Gwathmey, Modernist Architect, Dies at 71 (New York Times)
Categories: architecture · design · style
Tagged: Charles Gwathmey
Categories: style · video · writing
Tagged: Gay Talese
