Dress Code

Men's Style: The Thinking Man's Guide to Dress
by Russell Smith
248 pgs

People of taste naturally recoil from the "self-help" genre of literature. Its book racks teem with pamphlets of ungainly size, garish prose, and condescending pictures -- Exhibit A in the critic's case for the vulgar commercialization of the publishing industry. Russell Smith's monograph on men's dress refutes that prejudice. Perhaps a reflection of his Canadian (versus American) provenance, he treats his reader as a diffident but eager student, a diamond in the rough rather than a bastard child of the boobouisie. The charm of his writing lies in this balancing act. Whether he is distinguishing between fashion and style ("you do have to follow fashion to be stylish . . . . [but] [t]here is no such thing as timeless fashion"), left wing and right wing denunciations of taste (the socialist conflates taste with class, the traditionalist confuses masculinity with boorishness), individuality and vanity (the former (inexplicably) includes the waistcoat-with-pocket-watch-and-fob, the latter the bow tie), he writes in a fluid style reflective of his sartorial tastes: clean and direct with flares of personality.

The book is organized by apparrel: shoes, suits, jackets, shirts, ties, etc. Smith takes you through each item's historical evolution, rightly believing that taste requires knowledge of how fashion develops. And while he will occasionally, as if prodded by an editor, recapitulate his dos- and-don'ts toward the end of a chapter (List of suits needed, by order of priority: (1) charcoal; (2) navy; (3) pinstripe; (4) lighter gray; (5) black; (6-100) anything you like), he leaves it to the reader to tease out the didactics. Important words or phrases are bolded; epigrams pulled to the side in quotation marks. Edwin Fotheringham provides simple illustrations that manage to be both unadorned and detailed. Smith's interest comes alive when interlarding his own text with what can best be described as a hybrid between marginalia and footnotes. These run the gamut from a four-page diatribe against keychains in pants pockets to a confession of Russell's favorite (though unfashionable) article of clothing. They imbue the chapters with a quaint, at times twee, tone -- an agitation of cultural sediment rarely visible but often intuited in social life. The font recalls that of a Victorian gentleman's guidebook. Peppered with dotted, austere illustrations, cool, sleek cover jacket lines that look pulled from the stills of a Rock Hudson-Doris Day movie's title credits, and liberal allusions to Cary Grant, the book betrays a 50's nostalgia that jibes awkwardly if at all with its aspiration to contemporary modishness. Like the tv show "Mad Men," it cannot help but admire an era (however stained by racism and sexism) the fetishes of which inaugurated the hyper-stylization of men's fashion.

It concludes, however, in a welcomely unpretentious manner, with a score of axioms, some conventional ("A jacket will always make you feel more comfortable than a sweater"), many evocative ("French cuffs are the poor man's sport's car. They make you feel rich and powerful, even when you're not"), and not a few dogmatic ("No moustaches. No fanny packs. No tinted spectacles"). If such rule-making (especially as evinced by the last ukase) strikes you as superficial, you are not alone. But considering how far the pendulum has swung away from beauty-and-pleasure, Smith's book may be a timely push in the right direction, even if it sometimes overshoots its mark.