I ducked out of my office for a few minutes this afternoon to grab a sandwich, and while I was walking the mean streets of Salt Lake City, I happened to encounter a guy who is sadly all too exemplary of people’s fashion sense these days.
He had a full beard, but a shaved head, so his sideburns rose up alongside his ears and then just… stopped. He wore an Army-surplus field jacket; knee-length cut-off jeans with frayed leg openings; and black athletic shoes with what appeared to be black Lycra leggings, or possibly pantyhose. And he didn’t appear to be homeless, either. He was striding along as happily and confidently as any runway model.
Now… I have an allergy to neckties, I don’t even own a suit, and I’ve long maintained that I was lucky to be born well after that era when men couldn’t leave the house without a hat. But there are days when I really wish I saw fewer people who looked like my chrome-domed-but-bearded friend and more who looked like this:
Whatever happened to elegance, people? Or dignity? Or just plain looking in the mirror before you leave the house? I think I’m going to go watch North by Northwest now and try to drive the image of those weirdly freestanding sideburns from my head…
I think that some people inherently look elegant, while others inherently look earthy, and any attempt to look elegant is doomed to backfire. The reverse is also true. In the movie “An Affair to Remember”, Cary Grant turns aside from his status as a wealthy playboy and instead decides to become a starving artist. But it’s Cary Grant, and in the scene where he’s got a job painting billboards, he’s dressed as a painter, and he looks utterly ridiculous. Because, of course, he’s Cary Grant, and there’s no make-up job in the cinematic universe that can make him look like a blue-collar slob.
Heh – I confess, that’s one classic film I’ve not seen, but I can imagine exactly what you’re describing.
I was just saying something similar the other day about actors in period pieces — some fit into historical settings and costumes perfectly well, while others have some kind of unshakable contemporary quality and end up looking ridiculous. Considering that people must have had a similar range of features back in the day, I wonder why that is?