Men’s clothing is rather immutable, if you compare it with women’s clothing, at least according to a classic concept. It is the accessories that make the difference, Detaili, as the title of Josh Sims’ book translated in Italy for Luxury Books (in bookstores from April 14). Each of these objects has helped shape contemporary men’s fashion. The motorcycle bootsfor example, they owe their stylistic peculiarities to the reinforced boots that were used by workers and engineers who were protagonists of the American industrial revolution long before Marlon Brando and James Dean made them a bulwark of the 1950s style. The cowboy boots instead, which we know thanks to the numerous American western films that began to be successful in the 30s of the last century, today they are mostly perceived as a popular, rococo, vintage art form. Originally their function was primarily of a practical type: the shape, the heels and the material used were used by men and women to ride in agility, without the shoes sinking or slipping off the stirrup.
The origins of the baseball cap they can be traced back to the hats of the New York Knickerbockers: they wore them even in 1849… and then they were made of straw! Its “modern birth” in fact dates back to 1958, when the baseball federations established unique stylistic canons for their players: essentially, a rounded and adherent crown of thick cotton or wool fabric, composed of six panels sewn together. them and on the top of which a button is sewn, known as “squatchee”, and with a wide and curved stitched visor
What about the bandana? The association that binds it to rebellious characters, lone wolves and revolutionaries originated in no less than the eighteenth century when the Calico Acts of 1700 and 1702 had banned the imports of cotton fabrics in England and had limited their use, ending thus to attribute the mark of the rebel to those who continued to wear it.
John Sims tells the stories behind modern men’s accessories: their heritage, their design, the stars who wore them and made them famous and much more.
It is the little things in a person’s sartorial image that make the difference. It is the details – or rather the accessories, as the fashion industry prefers to call them – that convey the idea of uniqueness. A men’s suit, however well cut, will not stand out from any other unless the right tie or clutch adds temperament; a classic shirt has nothing exceptional about it, it is the cufflinks that make it different from the others. The clothes can be considered as a canvas on which a picture is painted with all its details.
Often these are objects that are insignificant in themselves, such as a strip of leather which is none other than one waist. Its importance, however, goes beyond representation, a buckle can be worth a thousand words. What matters is that the choice is personal. It is precisely on the concept of personality that a decisive game is played: accessories, used in one way rather than another, help to express a man.
Frank Sinatra, for example, stated that the angle of inclination of a fedora denotes the attitude of the wearer; Fred Astaire sometimes used a tie instead of a belt, while the Duke of Windsor invented his own way of tying the tie. And then again from the watches to the pocket handkerchief, passing then also to the underwear and the accessories of great usefulness such as the fountain pen, the sunglasses and the umbrella.
From the book Details by John Sims (Luxury Books) here is an excerpt from the chapter on shoes, dedicated to moccasins:
In 1987, Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney was faced with what the newspapers dubbed “Gucci-gate”. This was no corruption case, but the mere fact that Mulroney owned something like 50 pairs of Gucci loafers was enough to brand him as a politician who had completely lost contact with the average voter. At that time, Gucci loafers had been a symbol of success or an object of desire for over 30 years. In 1953, at the time of the opening of its first American branch, the leather goods company Gucci realized that moccasins enjoyed enormous popularity in the United States and therefore decided to create their own version, with a more Italian style. It made them more tapered, with an almond-shaped tip. On the upper he added a clamp, a clear reference to the origins of the company, which was born as a saddlery, and made them in fine calfskin. But the winning choice was probably to offer them in black. Until then, the moccasins available on the market were mostly brown in color and in an era when office attire still included the combination with black shoes, this made them the casual shoes par excellence. Gucci reinvented the moccasins transforming them into formal and elegant shoes, an image that was further consolidated when stars of the caliber of Fred Astaire and Clark Gable began to wear them. In 1985 the moccasins landed in the permanent collection of the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
The Gucci house was obviously not the first company to sanction the popularity of moccasins. This credit is likely to go to Raymond Lewis Wildsmith, of Wildsmith Shoes of London, to whom in 1926 King George VI commissioned the creation of comfortable shoes without laces to wear in his country residence. Wildsmith followed the instructions received, effectively creating the first model of men’s shoes without laces, which later became part of his collection with the name of 582, later renamed Model 98.
The baseball cap : Known as the “Chicago model”, with flat top, low and straight cut, sometimes with horizontal circular motifs. This model did not spread much, but it was used by Philadelphia Athletics, which attributed to him a long series of sporting successes obtained between 1909 and 1914. For about ten years, starting from 1976, the baseball cap was also the good luck hat of the Pittsburgh Pirates. Some teams liked to introduce custom modifications, such as two-tone panels or cords, as a hallmark. Others, such as the New York Yankees, the Boston Red Sox and the St. Louis Cardinals, have instead kept their caps almost unchanged, which thus ended up becoming authentic classics. Over the course of the twentieth century, only minor changes to the basic baseball cap design actually took root. In 1901, the Detroit Tigers were the first to use the front of the baseball cap as the seat of their team emblem, an orange tiger; this idea was later taken up by organizations, companies and advertisers of all sorts, but not by the St. Louis Browns, who, until 1945, shied away from any type of logo. In 1903, partly in an effort to make its baseball caps look of higher quality, sporting goods company Spalding introduced a quilted peaked cap, the so-called “Philadelphia model,” which was very successful and defined the new standard. In the 1940s, the use of rigid canvas for the production of visors was gradually set aside in favor of latex rubber, which meant the possibility of making longer visors. The cap was also intended to grow in height. The New Era manufacturer of New York, supplier of Major League baseball teams since 1934, in 1954 launched the 59Fifty model, basically a standard cap but with a higher and more rigid crown, which was later made of breathable acrylic material. This would later become the official model adopted by the professional league. As the dress code became less formal in the 1960s, baseball fans began to wear their favorite team’s cap when they went to the stadium: it was the first step towards making the baseball cap one of the dominant trends in men’s fashion. Wearing a certain cap was a manifestation of loyalty not only to a team, but also to one’s city and community. A clear example of this was the empathy that led to the widespread use of New York baseball caps outside the city after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in September 2001. Used by sportsmen from many other disciplines, the baseball cap is so comfortable and practical that it has also been adopted by farmers, truckers (theirs usually includes a mesh section in the back) and manual workers, thus becoming an icon of urban style
