Style expert Glenn O'Brien
It's difficult to figure out what to wear after reading Glenn O'Brien's highly entertaining new pseudo-manual on style and decorum, How To Be A Man. And that's the whole point.
Besides a few specific dos and don'ts regarding the more arcane side of formalwear (a cummerbund apparently looks better with the curved lines of a shawl-lapel jacket), this is a how-to book for those who already know how to.
O'Brien should need no introduction to the style-conscious, so we can skim over the bio: former Factory worker of Andy Warhol's, New York bureau boss for Rolling Stone, creative director of advertising at Barneys New York and, more recently, writer of GQ's Style Guy column.
We'll also glean over his most serious credential: host of the fuzzy, sometimes inaudible cable-access show TV Party, which ran from 1978 to 1982 and featured Jean-Michel Basquiat, Deborah Harry and others of the downtown Manhattan set, as well as screenwriter of the poetic film of that era, Downtown 81.
So, what's the one thing that O'Brien believes every man must do before leaving the house? "I'm tempted to say, 'Everybody must get stoned.' That's Bob Dylan," he says. "I don't know. I think everybody should read the great books. Does that sound really corny?"
Let's just say O'Brien isn't about to spoon-feed young men advice. How To Be A Man is more an essay on the philosophy of men's style, with all its contradictory, macho-cultured balances. On the one hand, O'Brien - himself a habitué on many most-stylish lists - notes the adage of the original modern dandy, Beau Brummell, who became famous at the turn of the 19th century for ushering in long pants and the darker, more conservative look that suddenly made the stockings and gilded finery of British noblemen appear girlie. Brummell's adage: If people turn to look at you on the street, you're not well dressed. It applies today. And as Ralph Lauren adds: If it doesn't look good today, it never looked good.
Yet in the same breath, O'Brien rails against today's ill-cut suits, Casual Everydays, loafers uncouthly worn by U.S. Congressmen as formal footwear and other signs of civilization's demise. Among the worst culprits in his view are the besneakered CEOs in their corporate jets and their bland lower managers with knuckle-grazing jacket sleeves. "We need an army of skateboarders in clashing tartans. We need shock troops in berets and goatees, full beards and eyeliner," he writes.
Blame basketball coach Pat Riley and the legacy of the 1990s power suits, a nadir of men's fashion, O'Brien says. Yet the return of the sleek, early 1960s lines, as modernized by designer Thom Browne with slightly lowered pants than the cut JFK wore, gives O'Brien hope of new directions to come - notwithstanding the fact that the JFK era was one of the most conformist for suits. O'Brien doesn't care. It looks good.
"I think one of the reasons that my friends and I looked good in the late 1970s and early eighties was [because]that's when the clothes from 1964 were hitting the thrift shops," he says over the phone from Manhattan "It's very, very close to what's at the height of fashion today."
He adds: "I actually think the kids today, the really young generation, are pretty interesting. I think beards give me hope. What it means to be a man has gotten more manly and less conformist."
Yet there's something else going on here than just style, something more nuanced than O'Brien's mantra that "real style comes from within" or his belief that, "if someone has great style, they are immune to [fashion]"
It has to do with something that he mentions quietly toward the end of the book, in the section How To Be Famous (Or Not). His best advice is to "find a nice comfy niche in the lower ranks of notoriety and stay there." Play with your identity. Be someone far beyond what people peg you as. Lie about your past to the press. Be serious and earnest, yet scare off adversaries with kindness. Basically, keep people guessing.
"That's one of the great losses of our culture: The generalist has been not discredited, but abandoned. Everybody's a specialist. What we need is to be more well-rounded, to know about many different things. Then we won't be the victims of experts."
Because, as O'Brien knows, a thinking, style-savvy man never really needs any how-to advice from an expert.