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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
What does it mean to be an elegant gentleman today? Or, even, elegant at all?
It’s a question we ask this week as we mourn the death of Robert Redford – a man so ubiquitous on our pages that we have, on occasion, had to ban pictures of him in HTSI, because we used him so frequently to illustrate a style. Redford encapsulated elegance and personality; his wardrobe and his film-star persona fitted effortlessly. According to his costume designers, he was specific about the details: the actor liked his trousers tailored to be more fitted (who wouldn’t want that bottom to get a better close-up?), and he had strong thoughts about how he wanted individual items to look. In this issue – which went to press before news of his death – we focused on the provenance of his jacket in Three Days of the Condor, a grey herringbone blazer that has become the obsession of designers ever since. According to the film’s costume designer, Joseph Aulisi, the jacket was found on a random rail at Barneys. It then took a couple of alterations to give it that amazing boxy fit. Truth be told, however, even if you found an exact replica, no one but Redford could ever wear the preppy classics quite so well.
Redford’s uniform has never really gone out of style. Unlike womenswear, which feels quite wedded to trends and a certain fashionability, menswear is more bound by sets of ancient codes. Sometimes the codes can feel deliberately mystifying and elitist: one thinks of that devastating scene in EM Forster’s A Passage to India in which Dr Aziz gives up his collar stud to Cyril Fielding, only to have his gesture of friendship described as a “fundamental slackness” by Ronny Heaslop, an imperialist snob.
As Nick Foulkes observes in the introductory essay to our menswear issue, the most exquisitely dressed men are generally driven by a rulebook of their own. Nevertheless, given that we know you chaps love guidelines, we have offered a schoolboy’s guide. We have also been blessed with an illustration of the quintessential gentleman as imagined by the artist Alison Friend, who has characterised him as an HTSI-reading little hound. I first spotted Alison’s work via her campaign for the shoe brand John Lobb in December last year, and am delighted that she agreed to do a bespoke painting especially for us.
Meanwhile, stylist Julian Ganio and photographer Ronan Gallagher have produced an extraordinary story at The Durdans, Epsom, the privately owned home of Andreas von Einsiedel, who also features in this shoot. As you can see from the cast of characters who fill its pages, elegance is as much about confidence and languor as it is about a specific item of clothing. But it helps, I notice, if one’s look includes a nice overcoat; and there seems to be an enduring love, in fashion at any rate, for the red sock.
I’ve admired the designer Haider Ackermann forever, both for his namesake label and as a style arbiter in his own right. The French-Colombian designer has an impeccable and idiosyncratic wardrobe, but insists that many of his accoutrements are the extension of an identity crisis: he has long used clothes and accessories as means by which to hide himself.
His new role as creative director of Tom Ford catches him at a point of metamorphosis: he’s lost the scarves and wire-framed glasses and, since doing our shoot, even shaved off his trademark black coiffure. Perhaps he’s channelling some of the bold audacity that he needs to take on a brand that has always traded on raw power. Haider has set the scene for a confident new phase in fashion. I can’t wait to see what happens next.
Jack Carlson helps Rob Armstrong further understand the “preppy”, a creature who continues to fascinate the style cognoscenti even though no one is quite sure who or what it is. Jack himself presents as a blue-blooded individual: as a Georgetown graduate and rowing Blue who studied archaeology and once taught at a prep school, his biography has something of the Dead Poets Society about it. But he reveals his background is far more modest than it seems. His new role as creative director and president of J Press puts him at the heart of one of the most august American sartorial institutions, a shop to which I would make a special pilgrimage throughout my 20s to stock up on crew socks and woven lobster belts. Now owned by a Japanese company, J Press is on a mission to outgun its longtime rival Brooks Brothers, another purveyor of preppy, which has had less success of late. Jack has got big plans for J Press. We get the first look here.
Lastly, to Nicky Haslam, the ultimate style arbiter and gentleman. Ever the provocateur and rule-maker, his annual compendium of “things he finds common” – favourites include “loving your parents”, “type 2 diabetes” and “swans” – makes for a deliriously wicked list. As our Aesthete he is a riot, telling us all sorts of ribald stories that no ordinary person would share with journalists. Who else, for example, would describe Margot Fonteyn as a “hopeless” dancer, or imply that they were being loud on account of having taken “too much cocaine”? Nicky has an unfiltered capacity to provoke in a way that I find extremely endearing in this age of caution. And at the risk of sounding completely common, I think his every word is gold.
@jellison22
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