I know that many of our readers couldn’t care less about fashion, but all of us care something about clothes.  Even those of us who say they don’t care about clothes at least, I hope, wear them every day.  We at least want to look good, or at least decent, or at least presentable, or at least not bad.  We may not follow the design aesthetic of the day, or the city where we live, or the office where we work, or the station in life where we find ourselves, but we follow some aesthetic.  We all have a look.  The Sartorialist is an interesting blog of mostly pictures, pictures of people’s looks.  As the writer says:

I started The Sartorialist simply to share photos of people that I saw on the streets of New York that I thought looked great. When I worked in the fashion industry (15 years), I always felt that there was a disconnect between what I was selling in the showroom and what I was seeing real people (really cool people) wearing in real life.

The pictures are fascinating, mainly because the people dress so oddly, or perhaps so well.  The Sartorialist knows how to spot a suit with the perfect cut, and his eye is keen. 

Michael Anton, former speechwriter to Rudy Guiliani, has written a companion book to Machiavelli’s The Prince, but it’s not about what you’d think.  It’s about clothes.  For men.  It’s called The Suit: A Machiavellian Approach to Men’s Style.  The idea isn’t so far-fetched.  The selection and wearing of clothes is a political act, to be sure.  It’s just one we don’t notice that we’re doing.  For example, today I’m in Atlanta, working on rewrites for a speech on location.  I’m the only one in the group not wearing a tie.  It’s a bold statement that says, “Ties make me angry.”  I will, however, put on a tie for the speech.  I also have quite earnest opinions about the wearing of suits, and the cut of sportcoats, and how they just aren’t serving the same purposes anymore.  Anton’s knowledge of all this stuff is not just accoutrement.  It’s fundamental.

There’s no question that the modern suit as we know it was born in London, refined in London, and perfected in London. Anybody who is wearing a suit with shoulders, lapels, a collar, and front buttons is wearing something that is a direct descendant of what English country squires wore, that was brought to town, perfected by Brummell, and refined in the Victorian era.

The suit that we wear was the track suit of its day. It’s called a “lounge suit.” This term has fallen out of use. You still see it in formal diplomatic invitations, in the U.K. for example. It will say, “Dress: Lounge Suit.” What they mean is a suit with a jacket that matches the trousers. The lounge suit takes a short coat-meaning a coat that doesn’t come down to the knees, either all the way around like a frock coat, or only in the back like a morning coat. When it first started to be worn, it was considered informal.

You were not supposed to wear it for business, or to any kind of ceremony, or to church, certainly not to dinner anywhere. It was to knock around in during the day. It was sort of scandalous to wear it anywhere else.

I have many and contradictory opinions about clothes, but let me just say that any civilization still married to the high heel and the necktie can’t be all that advanced.

Don’t get me started on neckties and bowties and the other cultural accoutrement that have evolved from practical usage (keeping the collar fastened around the neck before the advent of the button) into impractical torture device (keeping all of one’s blood in the head and thus causing physcotic I-May-Be-Having-an-Aneurysm episodes).  If you squint at my tiny illustrated photograph, above and to the left, you will notice a tie.  You will also notice that the smile on my face looks a lot like the death mask of a man who would rather die than wear that thing.  For some terrific reason, though, the tie is back.

Necktie sales may have foundered in the decade or more since the words “casual Friday” entered men’s vocabularies, but in the last year or two, stylish men in their 20s and early 30s have embraced the old four-in-hand as a style statement - that is, as long as it is an optional one. Even with tie sales among older age groups uniformly down, sales to men 18 to 34 were up more than 13 percent, to $343 million from $303 million, between March 2006 and March 2007, according to NPD Group, which tracks clothing sales and trends.

The issue of the tie, and of fashion in general, is too complex and murky for one post to treat.  Bill Blass, one prince of men’s fashion, has said that he loves the tie, but that the tie will eventually have to go.  It’s too impractical, too uncomfortable in most situations, etc.  If it’s going to die, can’t we just kill it now?