Mark Oppenheimer
Clothes make the man
You may have noticed in this morning’s New York Times the article in which it’s asserted that men in their twenties and thirties are actually more dapperly dressed than our boomer parents. As one bit of evidence the author selected Prof. Samuel Rascoff of NYU Law School. Quoth he:
“The fashion gene skipped a generation,” said Samuel Rascoff, 36, a law professor at New York University who specializes in national security law and who, being a fastidious dresser, has given serious thought to the trend, which he sees reflected in his students.
“There’s a sense that this return to style, or to a consciousness of how you look, is an attempt by young men to recover a set of values that were at one point very much present in American society and then lost,” he said. “It strikes me as being of a piece with the way young people buy their coffee or their food: paying attention to authenticity or quality, and to whether something is organic or local. They stand for a rejection of the idea that all consumer goods are ephemeral and inevitably made in China and bought at Wal-Mart.”
Here is Prof. Rascoff:
Now, it so happens that I knew Sam Rascoff when he was a wee law student (not that I was a law student—I was not), and he did have a way with clothes. But unless his style sense has taken a major leap forward, he is at best the fourth-best-dressed man I know. In ascending order, I nominate these men as better dressed still:
3. George Raine, my old college classmate, now an associate at Ropes & Gray, the Boston law firm. George puts the white shoe in “white shoe.” Consider:
2. Prof. Willard Spiegelman, the editor of Southwest Review and a teacher of English literature at Southern Methodist University. So well dressed that he appeared in a fashion spread in the New York Times Magazine. Consider:
1. D. Graham Burnett. This guy is a sartorial legend. He teaches the history of science at Princeton. I have only met him twice, but sweet Jesus does he have threads. In fact, he may violate the old principle (which I have heard attributed to Diana Vreeland, late of Vogue, and generally late) that if you dress elegantly they notice the person, not the clothes. (Or was it Coco Chanel?) He dresses so well I can’t for the life of me remember his face. These pictures don’t quite capture the texture of the fabric, the warp and woof, the weave, the whoo-whoo of his how-de-do. And one of the pictures is weirdly gay (Burnett is a married man). But they will have to suffice:
While I am at it, may I say how much that second Burnett photo, the rent-boy pose, reminds me of the author photo the late Yale historian John Boswell used?
Don Draper, eat your heart out.
Comments
11 Responses to “Clothes make the man”
Comment
I miss the east coast. (And, um, Dallas?) Out here in SF, it’s still a lot of hipster-skater-I-don’t-wanna-grow-up chic, skinny jeans and hoodies and Vans and such. But I’ll be watching for those American Apparel bow ties.
Jonathan raises a good point: To the phrase “men in their twenties and thirties” should probably be added the qualification “on the East Coast” or perhaps even “in some metropolitan areas on the East Coast and their satellites.”
The Boswell photo reminds me of Truman Capote’s famous author-seduces-reader pic that graced Other Rooms, Other Voices. See it here at http://www.pep-web.org/document.php?id=sgs.006.0318.fig007.jpg. Bennett
I think Sam’s clothes are second hand. This guy cannot dress.
Sam’s clothes are allright, but he still cant do anything about that red hair and freckles
Geez, these guys look a bit dorky, kind of like the guys that show up at your bachelor party in pink pants, thinking they are trendy, yet making you want to scream, “He’s my future brother in law, I HAD to invite him.”
Oh, come on! #3 is disqualified, due to the egregious bow tie. No way that’s an “elegant” manner of dress, sorry. Ditto for Professor Spiegelman. Burnett is pushing the limits with the sweater vest. -1.
agreed. Sweater vests are always questionable. There’s a picture of me with a bowtie at Christmas (around age 5); I doubt there will ever be another picture with one.
[…] clearly the best dressed professor of English ever to have walked the Earth. (And he is not without competition.) Having just learned of his lover’s death, George has taken to radiating sartorially […]
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