In the early 1980s, dressed in a bespoke dark velvet three-piece suit and ruffled white silk shirt, my young English friend met me for dinner at the prestigious 21 Club restaurant. He was detained at the door. Where was his tie? After a brief discussion, a 21 Club tie, festooned with jockeys, was draped over the ruffles and we were escorted to Siberia. Richard Thompson Ford calls that 21 Club tie a “badge of shame.”
There are many badges of shame recorded in “Dress Codes,” a sharp and entertaining history of the rules of fashion. In his introduction Mr. Ford, a Stanford law professor and cultural critic, writes that he learned his sense of style from his father, a trained tailor and an ordained minister. “For years my dad endured my sartorial misadventures (asymmetrical ‘new-wave’ haircuts, nylon parachute pants, the ‘punk’ look, which consisted of deliberately torn garments held together with safety pins or duct tape) in quiet despair.” In the end the author followed his father’s example and came to appreciate the virtues of tailored suits, polished dress shoes and crisp shirts. So much so that in 2009 he decided to enter Esquire magazine’s Best Dressed Real Man contest.
Read Full Article »