At the very least, there has been a course correction. But a survey of the landscape suggests we may have entered an age of sartorial advancement. You might, of course, suppose the phenomenon to be New York specific, or limited to the coasts. They could probably rattle off the names of the right-nothing labels in their sleep.
But it’s the right nothing.” The men in that room had done their homework. “Chic,” as the Ango-Irish opera designer Patrick Kinmonth once remarked, “is nothing. It seemed pointless to speculate on whether the guys in this room, who clearly had given thought and care to what they had on, looked stylish on account of being gay or straight or American or, uh, French. Maybe, unacknowledged and in those long-gone days, it was Broadway Joe who began the inexorable march of butch dandies into the mainstream. Maybe he is the liminal figure theory-heads are always rooting around for. Looking around the restaurant that night at all the guys wearing scarves knotted just-so or herringbone tweeds from Rag and Bone or Adam Kimmel jumpsuits or shirts produced by the heritage labels whose revival has evidently become a point of soaring national pride, I realized that Namath may have been slighted by historians of fashion.
