For All People Talk About European Fashion, It's The
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Styling by Matthew Marden Jacket ($4,995), shirt ($450), trousers ($695), and tie ($235) by Ralph Lauren. FOR ALL PEOPLE TALK ABOUT EUROPEAN FASHION, IT’S THE AMERICANS WHO HAVE SET THE TONE OF MODERN MEN’S WEAR: COOL, CASUAL, AND ALWAYS REBELLIOUS. SO TO SURVEY THE CURRENT STATE OF STYLE, WE GATHERED LOOKS Ralph Lauren, photographed FROM OUR FAVORITE U. S. DESIGNERS on the steps of Lake Como’s Villa d’Este in 1977. (AND ONE EXPAT BRIT). TURNS OUT AMERICAN GUYS DON’T HAVE TO LOOK FAR TO LOOK GREAT. Photographs BY TONY KIM Dec + Jan 2018_Esquire 119 Michael Kors, pictured Anorak ($798), sweater here on his way to ($398), and jeans ($148) junior prom with his Afghan hound, Kabul. by Michael Kors. RALPH Michael Kors doesn’t think you need to suffer to look good. You could tell from his Fall ’17 runway show, in which he dressed the models in LAUREN full-pleated trousers and big, billowing wool coats. The clothes were elegant, but they were also comfortable, a rarity FIFTY years ago, he started AN EMPIRE on the catwalk. “After years of too tight, I wanted to ease up on the coats, the on the strength of a single tie. Now trousers,” he says. “The foundation of he’s the GODFATHER of AMERICAN STYLE. American style has always been about easiness, comfort, and movement.” Kors would know. Long before his Project Runway quips made him a household name, he spent his boyhood studying American fashion codes. His Hometown: THE BRONX • Age: 78 mother was a former Revlon model, his father an Easy Rider-esque rebel. As a teenager, Ralph Fifty years. Think about it. Ralph His grandmother trawled the racks Lauren spent his high Lauren has been around so long, at Loehmann’s daily, and his grandfa- school summers work- it’s easy to think that the worldview ther was a dandy. “A lot of seven-year- ing at Camp Roos- he created has simply always olds wouldn’t think it was thrilling to evelt, in the hills north of New existed. He’s made his success go with their grandfather to the tai- York City. “I started as a waiter appear like his style: effortless. lor,” Kors remembers, but he did. By in the dining hall,” he told me But think for a moment what a eleven, he was running a boutique in over dinner. “Then I worked my world without Lauren’s vision his mother’s basement; by seventeen, way up to become a head coun- would be. Ralph Lauren has not he was enrolled in fashion school; and selor. I played sports outside just shaped American style in these by twenty-one, he had dropped out and every day. Tennis. Swimming. fifty years—he’s also godfathered debuted a women’s-wear collection at Baseball. You name it. I loved it. most of the designers in America, Bergdorf’s. I never wanted to leave. It was many of whom came through his The Kors style is about approach- the best time of my life.” design studio, everyone from able minimalism, rich textures, and a Barely ten years later, at the Thom Browne to John Varvatos luxe, jet-set sensibility that never feels age of twenty-eight, Lauren, to Todd Snyder. Perhaps more elitist. It has translated into lines after knocking around the fashion important, he also has set his mark at every price point, fragrances and world, selling ties or working at firmly on global style. Ralph Lauren MICHAEL handbags, ten seasons of Project Run- Brooks Brothers, found himself has always been about sunny way, and a 2010 CFDA Geoffrey drawn back to those summer optimism, about achieving the life Beene Lifetime Achievement award. days. He took a small office in one envisions for oneself. He took In 2011, when his company went the Empire State Building and the basic elements of the American public, it was one of the highest-val- proceeded to take many of the man’s midcentury wardrobe— KORS ued American fashion companies ever elements of those formative button-down shirts; gray flannels; to do so. years—the sun-drenched after- thick herringbone weaves; chalk- Kors only started designing men’s noons spent on the courts; the stripe suits—and made us all re- wear in 2002, more than two decades long, golden evenings in the see them as something bigger. He The man who brought into his career. When he finally did, company of good friends; a style injected a vitality into them that plenty of men found a new way of dress- that was elegant by force of its has made the Ralph Lauren style COOL, CASUAL clothes to ing. The clothes were understated, easy effortlessness, a mix of casual and the benchmark look for success a nation always to wear, and flattering—the same piec- formal—and use them as the core around the world. ON THE MOVE es Kors himself looks for. So why the DNA of a billion-dollar empire “I was just a kid pursuing my long wait? “Men finally started to say that is now celebrating its fiftieth dream,” Lauren says. “Life is they were interested in fashion,” Kors anniversary. amazing.” —Michael Hainey Hometown: MERRICK, NEW YORK • Age: 58 says. “They realized they didn’t have to wear the same things their fathers did.” Then again, our fathers didn’t have Kors showing them how to pull it off. —Jon Roth 120 Dec + Jan 2018_Esquire Leather jacket ($1,290), bomber jacket ($330), trousers M ($230), and shoes TO FORD ($270) by Hilfiger Edition; shirt ($100) and belt ($60) How do you balance a FASHION HOUSE and a FILM CAREER? by Tommy Hilfiger. Start with SKY-HIGH STANDARDS, then AIM HIGHER. Hometown: AUSTIN • Age: 56 Tommy Hilfiger in 1970 (obviously), photographed in London, trying to hitch a ride to Stonehenge. and rock royalty like Britney Spears and Lenny Kravitz and won a following with hip- hop heavyweights, too. In 1994, Snoop Dogg wore one of his rugby shirts for an SNL per- formance. The company reported a $94 mil- lion increase in sales that year. Then the bottom fell out. “On every street corner, on every person, you saw Tommy Hilfiger,” the designer says. The brand had overreached, and sales began to plummet. The cool kids who gave him ca- chet didn’t want to look like everyone else. So he course-corrected using his greatest talent—knowing what those cool kids want TOMMY before they do. In Europe, sales remained strong (Americana remains a national ex- port), so he took cues from the Continent, HILFIGER pulling back the design to a “simplified, so- Ford in the phisticated, muted look” and closing some days of yore. He REINVENTED prep for stores to regain the Hilfiger halo. He weighed a NEW GENERATION—and now he’s millennial tastes and enlisted influencers like Gigi Hadid and created runway spec- doing it ALL OVER AGAIN tacles—a pier carnival in N. Y. C., a Ven- There are a few adjectives we Americans So he started his own company, realizing his ice Beach pseudo-music-fest—to attract like to use to describe ourselves. We’re casual. vision outside the bounds of an old-school Euro- Hometown: ELMIRA, NEW YORK • Age: 66 new, Instagram-happy converts. “When did We’re comfortable. We’re nice. Tom Ford doesn’t pean fashion house. He took the go-go hedonism Tommy Hilfiger become cool again?” The care about any of that. He’d rather give us what we of his Gucci days and then restrained it—made it Jacket ($5,290), green henley shirt ($1,590), New York Times asked. lack: glamour. For men, it’s the swagger of a young more sophisticated, more posh. He also became white henley shirt ($990), “We’re early adopters of whatever is rele- tycoon or a movie star. It’s charisma and polish and sober, which aided the transition: “I could not trousers ($1,140), loafers vant and cool with youth,” Hilfiger says. He’s a little darkness. Whatever it is, it feels powerful. juggle all of the things that I do now if I were still ($6,990), and belt by referring to American style, but he might as He’s been chasing that feeling since he was a boy. drinking,” he says. “Clarity in the mornings was Tom Ford. You can, in fact, become too success- well be describing his own company, which is “I was always in a suit and tie,” Ford says of his child- a great surprise.” ful. Just ask Tommy Hilfiger. He sent shock back on track, to the tune of $6.6 billion, and hood. “I was teased a bit. I thought a backpack was With one business taking off, Ford began a sec- waves through the fashion establishment in now working with electro-pop heartthrobs sloppy, and carried my books to school in an attaché ond career as a director, first with A Single Man, a 1985, starting with a brash advertising cam- the Chainsmokers. case instead.” He got a degree in architecture, but by lush meditation on sex and death in sixties L. A., paign that suggested he was in a league with The new collections are selling, but so is 1990 he was designing women’s wear at Gucci, then then with Nocturnal Animals, a thriller by turns icily Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, and Perry Ellis the old stuff. A 1990s Hilfiger jean jacket a down-at-heel, overlicensed property. He remade remote and searingly violent. Both films roil with (on a billboard in Times Square, no less).