Regular readers of this column will know how bored its author professes to be by those magazine articles lauding male fashion icons of yesteryear. Actually there's no professing about it. The complaints are true and heartfelt.
The cause of my ennui? The fact that it's always the same old faces: Michael Caine in The Italian Job or Get Carter or one of his Harry Palmer films. Steve McQueen photographed in his racing gear or that Harrington and Ray Bans combo. Paul Newman in virtually anything. Yes, even Slap Shot.
I admit that these men all have a certain timeless appeal due in part to their sense of style and also because they're tolerably good-looking. But ultimately their continued influence on men's fashion is detrimental because it puts the designers who pay homage – and they are many – into a spiral of conservatism and retrospection. Stylists and magazines follow suit and as a consequence we all end up in a 1960s-themed loop of Ivy League duds and Savile Row knock-offs.
“A lot of designers latch on to the same handful of guys,” American fashion designer Michael Bastian said recently. “It’s Steve McQueen, it’s Paul Newman, it’s Cary Grant and Fred Astaire, all done to utter death”.
Mind you, perhaps it's partly to do with the zeitgeist. Three decades ago, for instance, there wasn't a student bedsit in the land that didn't have a poster of James Dean. I know, I attended parties in most of them. Images of the actor in a white t-shirt with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth were great favourites, as were stills from A Rebel Without A Cause or Giant.
On TV in the same era, Nick Kamen's 1950s-themed advert for Levi's 501 jeans was James Dean-inspired and became a sensation. These days, however, Dean's power as a male fashion icon seems to have lapsed, despite the best efforts of Arctic Monkeys' Alex Turner.
Or it had. Another favourite James Dean poster was Magnum photographer Dennis Stock's shots of the actor walking through a rainy Times Square hunched up in an overcoat. Now those images and the muse-like relationship between Stock and Dean is the subject of Life, the latest film from rock photographer-turned-movie maker Anton Corbijn. If anyone can catapult Dean back onto the fashion designers' moodboards, Corbijn can. He made even Bono look sort of cool.
Of course Dean is hardly an obscure figure in that regard so Corbijn is returning him to the pantheon rather than inducting him into it. But it begs the question: who else should be re-appraised and who else should be turned to for fashion inspiration that hasn't been so far?
Noting the lack of any sort of diversity in the select group of male fashion icons, the New York Times recently turned its attention to the matter. One writer on black style suggested Marvin Gaye, for instance. That's a great start. More please.
So how about widening the net and looking a little further afield for the next generation of male style icons? It may happen only incrementally, but things can shift and change. There's no reason why we should to be stuck with Harry Palmer and Cool Hand Luke forever.
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