Southern wear is elaborately casual
Esquire, January 1935: “The big idea this year, if you want to be well dressed for the southern resort season, seems to be that of carefully conveying the impression that you don’t give a damn how you look. The French have a word for it, dégagé, and indeed it is a prevailing characteristic of Riviera fashions.
Here the impression is fostered by the roll of the lapel to the bottom button of the double-breasted light tan gabardine suit, by the open-throated Burgundy coloured polo shirt of silk and wool and inherent informality of a porkpie hat of light-weight felt.
Other details worthy of notice are the eight-inch side vents at the back of the jacket, the brown buckskin shoes with leather soles and heels that are varnished black and the red carnation that gives the lie to the studied carelessness of the whole effect. You can wear a coloured silk handkerchief around the neck, if you like.”
There’s a link to nubuck here, which we’ve been discussing a lot recently, as that name probably derived from treating buckskin with the sanding technique, and developing the name ‘new’ buck. Brown shoes in buckskin sound lovely, pity the illustration was in black and white so we can’t see the exact tone. Not a fan of pork pies though.
In the late 1930s, Esquire magazine was the delineator of menswear style. One is struck by the obligatory wearing of hats, and ubiquitous smoking of cigarettes. Hardly any fashion illustration failed to include that most sophisticated accessory; a cigarette.
But back to hats: Advertising pages were filled with them. More hats than any other single product. Times have changed. I see no sign of hats ever making a come-back on such a broad scale. Our lives are simply too different. Men’s hats seem almost “costumey” or too theatrical for the mainstream modern male. –John Wesley
Simon, to the best of my knowledge nubuck never had anything to do with buckskin. It’s just a cheap way to give some surface interest to ordinary leather and not even as nice as ordinary suede. The name is nothing but marketing talk. The stuff is best avoided, honestly.
Re hats: I agree. Too much time spent indoors. Not needed.
The illustration was done by the great L. Fellows. He could portray expression and emotion as well clothing.
Being Fellows was one of the greats, what do you make of the man’s posture. He seems unusually bent forward. Kyphosis?