Lest one think academics who dress well only exist in the movies, here’s a picture of Cornel West, the author, most recently, of Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud, A Memoir. Note the artfully disheveled tie, cuff links, and pocket watch.
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.)
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.”
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
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.
(Via.)
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.)
“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)
Partly because of the G.I. Bill, the University of Iowa, like many universities across the United States, experienced a surge in enrollment following the Second World War. In 1947, two years after the war ended, Margaret Bourke-White came to campus and took some pictures. Here are some of them, courtesy of the amazing LIFE photo archive.
One thing is for sure: college students used to dress better.
Posted in academe, photography, style
“My God, don’t they know? This stuff is simulacra of simulacra of simulacra. A diluted tincture of Ralph Lauren, who had himself diluted the glory days of Brooks Brothers, who themselves had stepped on the product of Jermyn Street and Savile Row, flavoring their ready-to-wear with liberal lashings of polo kit and regimental stripes. But Tommy surely is the null point, the black hole. There must be some Tommy Hilfiger event horizon, beyond which it is impossible to be more derivative, more removed from the source, more devoid of soul.”
—William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
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