It was Fashion Weak Again

The small spectacle that is New York Fashion Week being over and carefully avoided with few notable exceptions (one clown in particular painted his face all white and I thought him to be a sidewalk performing Pierrot until I saw the rest of his outlandish hobo meets high camp attire), I had to breathe a sigh of relief until the next circus comes to town. Alas, in the downtown environs in which I make my rounds, one comes across too many of these characters strutting around like peacocks but without the beauty part and more like chickens with their heads cut off crying for not help but attention.  I find it best to have a good laugh and cross the street.  Usually, if I am in the presence of one friend in particular, I say one comment which reduces us to tears but which I cannot for politeness' sake share here.

With that being said, I must admit, and the reader must surely realize, that I am in fact not so much adverse to fashion as I am to the peculiar denizens who inhabit that world.  Perhaps it would be best clarified if I say that I am most interested in a certain kind of style that a journalist at a loss for words would consider to be "classic," although the breadth and width of what can be covered there is anyone's guess (and usually is).

One book that is in my rather miniscule fashion collection happens to be the Victoria and Albert Museum reissue of Sir Hardy Amies' "ABC of Men's Fashion" in which he aptly states that "A man should look as if he had bought his clothes with intelligence, put them on with care and then forgotten all about them" and which pretty much says it all.

A last word, though, should one be interested in the aforementioned book.  The original English edition (I believe in paperback from the early 1960s) has a dated cover but has retained the element of the fellow for the new issue, which with a splash of aqua blue is much more subtle.  The current American edition, with a grey cover and sporting an illustration of three buttons, is hardly fashionable at all and one should by all means pick up a copy of the English reissue if and when one visits the V&A.

The much preferable English edition of Sir Hardy Amies' book.

An illustration from said book on the occasion of wearing a bowler hat.