"Classic" style

I'm tired of men's style blogs talking about classic style and how wonderful it is. They seem to think that because the suits they wear now might have looked normal in the 1960s, they would look normal in any decade since the modern suit came into fashion. The writers of these blogs are fooling themselves.

I believe I've written before that we're in a time of backward-looking fashion (call it retro if it makes you feel better), and that fashion has looked backward more than forward these fifty years. This doesn't mean that men's style is timeless--today's suits would look silly in any past decade except the sixties--but rather that the drivers of men's fashion have been paying more attention to their rear view mirrors than the road ahead.

These praisers of "timeless" men's style often throw in references to the quite different world of women's fashion, which they see as trend-driven and mindlessly obsessed with the latest thing, whether that thing be figure-flattering or fugly. The worst of these wander into vaguely misogynistic suppositions about the nature of women themselves considering this propensity for following the herd.

What they fail to realize is that they themselves are following the current fashion in menswear: wearing sixties-inspired suits and calling them timeless. The sixties silhouette would not have looked timeless in the seventies or the eighties or the nineties; it would have looked ten or twenty or thirty years out of fashion. The icons of classic cool (Steve McQueen, Marlon Brando, Fred Astaire, Cary Grant) were not concerned with posterity but with the moment, and the only reason they still look good now is that they were so successful at blending what was current and what looked good on them.