Michael Caine
Michael Caine’s oft-discussed working-class mannerisms are more than endearing idiosyncrasies. “I expressed my rebellion by never getting rid of my Cockney accent,” he has said. Turns out holding on to that part of his past, refusing to belie his roots, helped distinguish Caine from his contemporaries, some of whom opted to shade their less privileged backgrounds. He didn’t possess O’Toole’s good looks or Burton’s intensity. Instead, he relied on less celestial qualities—and those everyman glasses of his younger days—to win parts. Woody Allen used him in Hannah and Her Sisters because he was believable as a “regular man.” And he was scrappy, unentitled, and relentless, grabbing role after role as if working to keep the clothes on his back. Ah, but for that, he had an ace up his sleeve: His contracts have stipulated he keep his characters’ wardrobes. “I’m the original bourgeois nightmare,” Caine once said. “A Cockney with intelligence and a million dollars.”
• Dark, heavy frames make a statement. Think of them not as bookish but as perennially cool.
Photo: David Bailey
Alain Delon
In the 1960s French films Plein Soleil and Le Samouraï, Alain Delon’s characters hurt and kill almost idly, as though they couldn’t think of anything better to do. And yet none of it ever registers in his bright blue eyes or on his unlined face. It’s often said he acted as though he were wearing a mask (see the cover of the Smiths’ The Queen Is Dead—that’s him), and his clothes in Soleil and Samouraï, preppy togs and snug fedora, respectively, serve the same function—they seal the facade. Whether or not you can pin his movies’ easy detachment on his supposed association with real-life criminals (Delon’s bodyguard was found dead in a Dumpster in 1968), it’s riveting to see someone so pretty commit acts so ugly. It’s something Delon understood better than anyone. “People go to the movies to dream,” he said, “not to see actors with faces like their plumber.”
• Dress for the occasion. When you’re vacationing in the south of Italy in the middle of summer, it’s okay to undo an extra button.
Photo: 1978 Sanford Roth /AMPAS/MPTV
Pete Doherty
Likes crack; digs heroin. Frequent run-ins with the law. But used to shag Kate Moss! What else is there to say about Pete Doherty? One more thing: He’s always had, for worse more than better, a certain authenticity. Rock ’n’ roll may be dying, but for now he’s the only bona fide let’s-dial-it-back-to-1972 rock star we’ve got. Other rockers look his part or act his part, or sport the lank hair and wet-Play-Doh complexion, but Pete actually does the drugs and has the sex. And in so doing, he provides us with that all-important figure: the young wastrel we sort of envy but we’re glad we’re not. As an old girlfriend of Pete’s once said in a British newspaper: “It is difficult for his friends to tell him he is going wrong in his life, because he’s been dating one of the world’s most beautiful women, he’s got a top-ten single with his band, and he’s on the front of every newspaper in this country.”
• Just because you’re wearing a suit doesn’t mean you can’t wear boots. But we’re not talking businessman suits—we’re talking slim-cut, rock-guy getups.
Photo: Rex Features/Everett Collection
Hedi Slimane
When you see Hedi Slimane in person, he reminds you of a Japanimation character: two-dimensionally skinny, big round Speed Racer eyes, and a stop-and-stare hairdo that has ranged from a faux hawk (which he is credited with creating, back around 1998) to, more recently, a helmetlike cut that feels vaguely East Berlin. Except that you don’t even need to see Slimane to appreciate the former Dior Homme designer’s style. Just look at Justin Timberlake or Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong or any number of young, cool-cat actors. Basically, any of us slinking around in an anorexically thin black tie; or a superslim, short-cut suit; or white sneakers with slouchy jeans and a suit jacket; or a back-from-the-dead fedora owes a debt to Slimane. Some designers make beautiful clothes; some change the way we dress. Slimane has done both.
• It’s all about fit. No matter your body type, your clothes—especially your suit jackets—should deftly shadow its lines, favoring precision over indecision.
Photo: Art Department
Cary Grant
“It’s sort of a mystery,” muses Eva Marie Saint on what set apart her North by Northwest costar, Cary Grant. “Other men wear suits. But with other men, there’s the man and then there’s the suit on him. That didn’t happen to Cary Grant. Style was like a skin.” Whether that skin was custom Kilgour or off-the-rack Brooks Brothers, the legendary actor wore it effortlessly. He became the twentieth century’s model of polished masculinity—all worsteds, understated silks, and unparalleled ease. But before he arrived in Hollywood in 1932, Grant was known as Archibald Leach, a vaudevillian acrobat who remade himself, disguising his thick neck and uneven shoulders with upturned collars and high-cut armholes that he requested of tailors everywhere from L.A. to Hong Kong. As Grant once said, “I don’t dress for the moment.” Which is why, more than two decades after his death, he remains a dominant presence in our sartorial imagination.
• A light gray suit is your best bet to looking like Cary Grant. And keep the pairings simple—white shirt, dark tie, great shoes.
Photo: 2007 Mark Shaw/MPTV
Special Thanks also in GQ/feature
GQ.COM
: home > gq > features
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment