Archive for August, 2010

Tyler’s eloquent style instantly caught my eye. He is wearing freshly polished dark leather boots, gray tailored pants, and a sheer jersey tee shirt. He is also carrying what looked to be a handmade leather backpack. His look captured my attention because he is so present while looking stylistically as if he belongs in nineteenth-century Chicago. If he were a literary figure I’d place him somewhere between a Charles Bukowski poem and an Upton Sinclair novel. This, the presentation of a character, is what great style is all about.

The style pendulum is swinging away from the lazy and causal looks favored by the Boomers, for whom a status symbol is to wear jeans in their professional workplaces (see Steve Jobs), towards the tailored and fitted looks popular before the cultural revolution of the 1960s. Many of the designers (Marc Jacobs at Louis Vuitton) presented collections inspired by more “conservative” eras like the 1950s. Although they’ve been calling it the “Mad Men Effect,” emphasizing the top-down direction of this trend, trendsetters like Tyler have been leading the move towards the tailored aesthetic on the streets for several years now.