My Daddy’s Suit: Bruce Boyer and Ivy Style

I’ve developed a recent fascination with the writer Bruce Boyer—an authority on men’s fashion.  Boyer worked as a professor, and he brings to the table an historian’s taste for detail and precision that I appreciate:  the kind of hairsplitting that is as soul-satisfying as a Scotch in a leather wingback chair by a roaring fireplace.  And though his writing affects the authority of the posh country gentleman, his observations are honed precisely because he is not:  he comes from working class stock and will always be a stranger in the house, always looking through a plate glass window at a party to which he is not entirely invited.

Boyer’s bailiwick is conservative men’s fashion–the classic fashion that hasn’t changed for over a hundred years:  East Coast Ivy League Style.  He is the kind of guy who will explain, with gusto and relish, the exact reason why button-down collars are buttoned down (spoiler: because Polo players didn’t want their collars blowing in their face).  Or the history of khaki pants (it entered into America’s closets as military uniform during the Spanish-American War and became a part of campus clothing after World War II when the GI Bill brought the huddled masses to campus).

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What was the impetus for this intellectual Odyssey?  I was driving one Saturday through the posh, scenic section of Pasadena and, on a whim, decided to stop by an estate sale in one of those old houses that imitate the grandeur of the English country gentleman.  It was the last day–the mosh-pit-free-for-all–when you can scoop up great deals, and everything was picked through, sad and empty.  There was a sign on the lawn:  TUTOR HOUSE FOR SALE.

I walked through the back patio.  An Armenian gentleman was bargaining ruthlessly for a discount on a Persian rug of tribal origin and things were getting kind of, well, insulting.  “I’m Armenian.  I must always ask for a discount,” said the paunchy man with a walrus moustache.

“Why do you say that?  I’m Armenian, too.  I never ask for a discount,” rejoined the woman who stood behind the Costco fold-out table with the steel money box.  She held out her bony arm.  “What, you want blood from me?”

I was about to leave when I spotted a glen plaid suit—a suit with subtle lines of blue moving in and out of its criss-cross of black and white.  It had a label–Southwick Atkinson–sewn into the lining.  I immediately decided I must buy it.  And after some research, the desire to determine its history brought me to Bruce Boyer, this fashion guru:  I learned to my delight that Southwick was the premier purveyor of quality mens’ clothing and Atkinson, one of its great retailers.

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I no longer buy vintage at this stage in my life but, darn it, the suit fit me like a glove.  It was in mint condition.  And it is still entirely stylish—kind of Mad-Men-ish.  These are all things that recommended it, despite the fact that it was hanging in that dark closet, in a paneled room that held a tiny twin bed and an afghan in the corner.

“I think this one was disabled,” said a woman casually as she looked at the various electronic devices hooked up to the bed.  I wasn’t creeped out.  The suit was one of many suits–all exactly the same–but all worn down like a pencil to its nub.  This was the best suit–the cherry one–and I knew one thing about this man:  He had decided on a style and stuck with it.

That glen plaid suit reminded me of my father who wore this exact kind of suit, day in and day out, carrying a hard grey attache case with important papers in it.  So seeing this suit made me think of the many years my father worked before he saved enough money to start his own business and lift us into a world of ski vacations.  His suit at that time was not his own, most probably.  It was probably a suit that a nice church member gave him when we first arrived into this country–penniless refugees adrift.

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Still, he made the suit his own and, in making that suit his own, it became a part of him–a phantom limb. I never thought of it as anything but his suit, until that moment standing before a stranger’s closet when I realized the profound fact that this could not possibly be the case. So, I bought the suit just as if it were my father’s suit, handed down to me.  It was a steal at eight dollars—even if it belonged to a dead man.

Boyers might say that the suit belongs to West Coast Ivy Style—that cool “hep” style of privileged men who dispersed from the East Coast establishments of privilege, colonizing the landscape of the West coast—men who liked to snap their fingers and listen to the jazz stylings of Chet Baker during a time when America was a post-war juggernaut, men who still knew that their loyalties lay with the East Coast establishment and its Anglophilia and its love of the old school and the venerable.  These are the kind of men who would judge you by the collar of your shirt and the seat of your pants.

Can you judge a man by his suit of clothes?  The opening epigraph to Bruce Boyer’s most recent book True Style is a quotation from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “A Case of Identity,” and the lengthy quotation ends with this finger-wagging pronouncement  of the great detective to his sidekick, Dr. Watson:  “I can never bring you to realize the importance of sleeves, the suggestiveness of thumb-nails, or the great issues that may hang from a boot-lace.”  So, clothes are the very business of great detective work and at the heart of man–at the heart of the art of ratiocination–which is concerned above all else with the practice of uncovering our place in this world that is pure surface–even if that place is as empty as a suit that contains nothing but phantom memories in a closet full of moths.

 

2 thoughts on “My Daddy’s Suit: Bruce Boyer and Ivy Style

  1. Clothes are absolutely fascinating, Khanh. Even if you can’t actually judge someone by her or his clothes, people do. And some people do deliberately choose clothing that reflects their views of themselves. In those cases, clothes really are telling.

    • Margot–I love the act of deciphering what people’s clothes mean, especially when people are trying to dress toward an aspiration, or when they are trying to fit in. We are all chameleons of a sort. We are always standing out and staying in…the shadows. The stock broker in the pin stripes…the boy in the polo shirt…the woman on the corner in the high heel shoes!

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