Sean Connery
All the actors who’ve inhabited the role of James Bond have enjoyed the trappings of style—killing bad guys in Savile Row bespoke—but only one of them can truly be said to have style. (And no, we’re not talking about George Lazenby.) Sean Connery is still the yardstick by which all other Bonds are measured—the arched eyebrow, the dry wolfish smile. But we at GQ think it mostly has to do with the way he moved. It only looked effortless: Before he was cast in Dr. No, Connery was an ardent student of the Swedish movement teacher Yat Malmgren, whose book on body technique became Connery’s bible. That’s how the former bricklayer from a hardscrabble section of Edinburgh learned to walk with (in one observer’s memorable phrase) “the threatening grace of a panther on the prowl.” Read it as a gloss on his penchant for violence or his sexual prowess: It works both ways.
• The little things make the man. Notice the cufflinks and the pocket square. But also notice that they’re subdued—white handkerchief, understated links. And the suit, shirt, and tie are also subtle. Look chic, not like a mobster.
Photo: Bob Haswell/Express/Getty Images
Sam Shepard
Even when Sam Shepard is photographed in color—standing next to another actor or maybe his longtime companion, Jessica Lange—he looks like a lone figure in one of those Walker Evans sepia-tinted photos from the Dust Bowl. With his lank hair, sad eyes, rugged denim, and rangy way, he could be a cowboy or a grifter or a vet or a trucker, always an archetype of the stoic western male. And he’s made a living not only playing parts like these on screen and stage but also writing them. Shepard is the author of more than forty plays, one of which won a Pulitzer. Many of them ask what it means to be a western man, if he isn’t extinct. “I swallow the smog,” one character says in True West. “I watch the news in color. I shop in the Safeway…. There’s no such thing as the West anymore! It’s a dead issue!”
• Bet on black. A plain black T-shirt (fitted, short in the sleeves, not too long at the waist) gives you a jolt of urban cool, no matter where you are.
Photo: Herb Ritts/Lime Fot
Woody Allen
Picture a writer and it’s Woody Allen you’ll see. Allen’s low-key tastes have barely changed over the years. He has mastered an unassuming mix of tweed and corduroy, and maybe a slight variation here and there on those horn-rimmed glasses that might as well have been glued to his face in the 1970s. Call it nerd chic, the slightly disheveled, East Coast–intellectual style that current tastemakers like Wes Anderson have adopted so skillfully. Allen proved that you don’t have to doll yourself up like Cary Grant to be a sex symbol—you just have to wear it well.
• Don’t try to be someone you’re not. Allen has spent a lifetime embracing his oddness, and women have spent a lifetime embracing him.
Photo: William L. Hamilton/Camera Press/Retna LTD
Willem de Kooning
“De Kooning was like Brando to some people,” says the painter’s biographer Mark Stevens. “A tough, tragic guy; a hard drinker; a gorgeous wreck.” For the seminal midcentury American artist, wardrobe was primarily a function of occupation. “He was all about his work,” says Stevens. “But it would be corny to say he was oblivious to how he looked.” With a face some described as angelic and a magnetic sexuality, the Dutch-born de Kooning looked good in just about everything: from the tailored suits he picked up in Rome during a creative lull in the late ’50s to the fedora he wore in the ’20s, long before his career boomed and his hair went white as gesso. “It would be a great disservice to talk about de Kooning in terms of fashion,” says Stevens. His most enduring stylistic lessons, after all, remain in the paint.
• Work clothes aren’t just for construction workers. A pair of Ben Davis pants, a denim barn jacket—they can be incorporated into your everyday wardrobe.
Photo: Dan Budnik/Woodfin Camp
Al Pacino
Think back to that scene in Saturday Night Fever when Travolta looks at the Serpico poster on his wall: “Pa-CHEE-no!” Even if you don’t share Tony Manero’s ethnic pride, you recognize the magic in that name. Pacino is that gritty New Yorker of the 1970s—the sideburns, the blow-dried hair, the leather blazers. Whether Pacino was playing a corruption-fighting cop or a junkie or a Mob boss, you knew he’d grown up with these characters in the South Bronx. In 1979 the interviewer Lawrence Grobel found Pacino living in the same shabby three-room apartment he’d occupied for years, surrounded by dog-eared copies of Shakespeare. “It’s my turf,” he told Grobel. “I really love New York…. From Battery Park right up to Harlem…. I still get out there in the streets. Watch a guy put forty packs of crackers in his soup.” Hear it again. “Pa-CHEE-no!” Thirty years later, the mere sound of it still radiates cool.
• A black leather jacket is versatile. Try one with suit pants, or even a white dress shirt and a dark slim tie.
Photo: Brigitte Lacombe
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