• Hi, I am the owner and main administrator of Styleforum. If you find the forum useful and fun, please help support it by buying through the posted links on the forum. Our main, very popular sales thread, where the latest and best sales are listed, are posted HERE

    Purchases made through some of our links earns a commission for the forum and allows us to do the work of maintaining and improving it. Finally, thanks for being a part of this community. We realize that there are many choices today on the internet, and we have all of you to thank for making Styleforum the foremost destination for discussions of menswear.
  • This site contains affiliate links for which Styleforum may be compensated.
  • We would like to welcome House of Huntington as an official Affiliate Vendor. Shop past season Drake's, Nigel Cabourn, Private White V.C. and other menswear luxury brands at exceptional prices below retail. Please visit the Houise of Huntington thread and welcome them to the forum.

  • STYLE. COMMUNITY. GREAT CLOTHING.

    Bored of counting likes on social networks? At Styleforum, you’ll find rousing discussions that go beyond strings of emojis.

    Click Here to join Styleforum's thousands of style enthusiasts today!

    Styleforum is supported in part by commission earning affiliate links sitewide. Please support us by using them. You may learn more here.

Manton in the NY Times

Bradford

Current Events Moderator
Joined
Mar 19, 2002
Messages
6,626
Reaction score
228
Just saw a quote from Manton in today's New York Times...

Here's a link for those who are registered...

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/06/fa...on&oref=slogin

And a copy of the article for those who are not...

August 6, 2006
I Wore Shorts to Work, and They All Laughed
By ERIC WILSON
IN the late 19th century, Oscar Wilde was ridiculed for his views on fashion, specifically that men should follow the enlightened example of women in the Victorian era: lighter fabrics, brighter colors and generally more comfortable clothes. A parody of Wilde in Punch caricatured a man wearing shorts as effeminate and wimpy.

At the same time, English literary journals also began to suggest a less regimented dress code for men than the prevailing dark suit, and by the 1920's, the idea had become a serious movement with the formation of the Men's Dress Reform Party. None of its ideas got anywhere. Valerie Steele, the director of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, said such movements were considered so leftist, associated with utopianism or vegetarianism, "that men thought they would be moving to some ideal of nonfashion or total nudity."

Last week during the heat wave, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg suggested New Yorkers wear light-colored, loose-fitting clothing, though he continued showing up to work in a dark suit. His remarks drew the same tone of derision as Wilde suffered. Gawker.com posted an old photo of Mr. Bloomberg in shorts with readers' comments like "What can brown do for you?" and "Mikey is escorted to his first day of school by gigantic lesbian bodyguards."

Nevertheless, I, neither vegetarian nor nudist, wore shorts to work on Thursday. It was partly a show of civic-mindedness, but also a way of redressing the disparity between men, who wear a stifling suit and tie to the office in summer, and women, who breeze by in ventilated cotton eyelet skirts with loose silk camisoles or the bubble silhouette dress of the season that barely seems to graze the body.

And clearly I was not alone in noticing this double standard. The designer Cynthia Rowley had been reading a report from The Associated Press that day that advised women to prepare for the heat wave by wearing dresses, but offered no guidance for men. "I should go down to Wall Street and set up a little booth where I could cut off their pants legs and hem them into shorts," she said. "But they would have to throw away their socks." There was a short-lived shorts moment in the 1950's, abbreviated for that reason.

It is not so easy for men to put together a cool shorts outfit as designers would suggest: shorts suits were the big message for spring men's wear shown in Milan by designers like Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons for Jil Sander. You can imagine there are men's magazine articles in the works about the effects of global warming on fashion.

I wore a dressy pair of low-waisted, narrow knee-length navy twill shorts from Joseph, a white dress shirt, brown loafers (no socks) and a tightly tailored gray jacket from Thom Browne, another designer who put shorts suits in his fall collection. I found myself cooler, strangely confident and, because of that, walking more gaily than usual.

But on the street, people stared. Some took pictures.

"What country are you from?" asked Joe Gianotti, an insurance executive, who was eating lunch with Jim Silverberg, a manager at the New York Public Library, in Bryant Park, where the temperature approached 100 degrees. Mr. Silverberg wore long sleeves and a tie. Mr. Gianotti had taken his tie off and described himself as something unprintable for wearing it at all.

"It is unfair," he said. "Women wear flip-flops and miniskirts, and some of them even have their stomachs out. But if I wore shorts, they'd make a big deal of it in the office. You look around, and all the men have long pants on, so it's obvious that you have to wear them. We're not in Bermuda."

"Shorts are against library policy," Mr. Silverberg added. "Though women tend to get away with them."

But why does this have to be so? On Wall Street, I was surprised to discover that with the exception of two suits, and the many tourists, the male dress code had already adjusted to the heat. And yet everyone was dressed exactly alike: instead of a suit it was a dress shirt, either white or cobalt with the top button open, and trousers. The uniformity was startling, but apparently comforting as well. Two men "” wearing clunky lace-up shoes, thick belts and sunglasses meant for extreme surfing "” were pointing at my shorts and laughing.

The philosopher J C Flügel explained a similar reaction to dress reformers in the 1930's as rooted in "man's intense fear of appearing different from his fellows" and also fear of association with tendencies of narcissism and homosexuality. I went ahead walking more gaily.

Still, it struck me as defeatist that Mayor Bloomberg would not take his own advice and lighten up. "There are red lines that men won't cross," said Michael Anton, a former speechwriter for President Bush who now works for Rupert Murdoch at News Corp. Under the pseudonym Nicholas Antongiavanni, Mr. Anton wrote "The Suit," a book on corporate style.

"Shorts, for the immediate future, are a step too far," he said. "If we ended up dressing identically for work and for leisure pursuits, men would feel intuitively that something has been lost."

Comfort, for one thing. But on Friday I wore pants.
P.S. I don't know what Manton would say, but I once went to a Sunday church service in Birmingham, MI wearing a blue blazer, blue shirt, red tie, penny loafers and khaki shorts... so either I was 20-years ahead of the trend or just another irreverent college preppy
tounge.gif
(probably the latter)
 

Featured Sponsor

How important is full vs half canvas to you for heavier sport jackets?

  • Definitely full canvas only

    Votes: 55 36.2%
  • Half canvas is fine

    Votes: 59 38.8%
  • Really don't care

    Votes: 17 11.2%
  • Depends on fabric

    Votes: 26 17.1%
  • Depends on price

    Votes: 26 17.1%

Forum statistics

Threads
505,157
Messages
10,578,860
Members
223,880
Latest member
nor77man
Top