THE OTHER DAY, ON C-SPAN, I saw Bernard-Henri Lévy, the French intellectual, giving a talk plugging one of his books at a Barnes & Noble. Monsieur Lévy is a man with a vivid face, including a nose that doesn’t disappoint, high coloring, and a small mouth worth watching. Yet I soon found my mind wandering from his heavily French-accented pronunciamentos about the state of the world. Instead I concentrated on his white shirt, worn under a black blazer, the top three buttons of which were unbuttoned down the front as were the cuffs of his shirt, which flapped loosely from under his jacket sleeves. Why this déshabille? Was Monsieur Lévy late getting to his talk and unable to finish dressing? But then not long after, I saw a photograph of him in a back issue of Vanity Fair, and, lo, there they were, the same three unbuttoned buttons down the front of his shirt, the same flapping cuffs.
Clearly, this was a look that the Frenchman was going for, a fashion statement. But as a fashion statement, what did it say: I am dashing, madcap, unconventional, I suppose. Whether other men on the continent are similarly unbuttoned these days, I do not know. But the other night I saw a version of the great Cary Grant-Rosalind Russell flick His Girl Friday introduced by the director and film historian Peter Bogdanovich, and damned if his shirt front and cuffs weren’t similarly unbuttoned. “Peter, Peter, Peter,” I hear Cary Grant saying. “Button up, my boy, button up.”
Is a trend beginning: the unbuttoned male? Will it catch on? Will all men now have to go around with flapping shirt cuffs and pupik-plunging shirt fronts? Will shirt makers soon dispense with buttons on cuffs altogether? Is there no way to stop it?
Fred Astaire wore beautiful clothes as well and wittily as any man in the twentieth century. Billy Wilder claimed to have a recurring dream in which he asked Astaire where he bought his clothes, and, just as he was about to tell him, Wilder woke, ticked off at missing out yet again. But at one point Astaire began to wear a necktie at his waist in place of a belt. A bad move from an otherwise flawlessly elegant man: bad because it was too calculated and artificial, and finally silly.
I recently mentioned this to a friend now in his nineties, who told me that for a brief spell he, too, wore a necktie in place of a belt. He did so, he added, because his wife, taking her lead from the great dancer, had asked him to do it. “God,” I said, “you must have loved her.” Fortunately, the necktie as a belt substitute business did not catch on; it was the only production of Fred Astaire’s that didn’t have legs.
A number of people who love the movies agree that the last splurge of swell American flicks came in the 1970s, with the rise of the directors Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, Bob Rafelson, and others. But one of the problems with these movies is that the clothes, especially the men’s clothes then trendy–the long-collared shirts, the bell-bottomed trousers, the long sideburns (every man his own Elvis), the Afros and Jewfros and dopey helmets of hair worn over the ears–make so many of these films seem like goofy costume dramas. Perhaps through the magic of redigitalization, the clothes of the actors in these movies can be changed and the movies made freshly watchable.
I was sitting at Wrigley Field earlier this summer with a friend who is a physician, a hematologist. Looking at the tattooed back of a perfectly middle-class girl sitting in front of us, my friend said that if he were thirty years younger he would devote all his efforts to finding an effective way to remove all the tattoos that people in their twenties today are now having done. When these people get to fifty, my friend is confident, they are going to be looking around desperately for ways to remove their tattoos.
Tattooing by the middle class young is a trend whose sense I haven’t come close to plumbing. The pain, the expense, the permanence–why would anyone put himself through this torture for such an aesthetically displeasing result? Because of the power, the only and immensely unsatisfactory answer is, of trendiness. Can a trend, once begun, be stopped? No one has ever found a way, short of embarrassing the trend-setters before things get out of hand.
I don’t know if Monsieur Lévy is a trend-setter or not. He may well have picked up the way he wears his shirts from a now aging Alain Delon or some other Parisian more elegant than he. But I think he ought to be told, straightaway, to knock it off. Perhaps one man in the last fifty years looked good with the front of his shirt unbuttoned, and his name is Harry Belafonte. As for those flappy cuffs, one can only hope that Monsieur Lévy pours enough soup–preferably hot, rich, red soup–on them to prove to him that he needs to button up, and now.
-Joseph Epstein
