{"id":1210,"date":"2012-12-18T11:10:40","date_gmt":"2012-12-18T19:10:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=1210"},"modified":"2012-12-18T11:10:40","modified_gmt":"2012-12-18T19:10:40","slug":"menswear-books-josh-sims-icons-of-mens-style","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=1210","title":{"rendered":"Menswear books: Josh Sims, Icons of Men’s Style"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"I relish the menswear enthusiast\u2019s life for a number of reasons, the first and foremost being that we get less homework than women\u2019s wear enthusiasts do. This very idea may strike you as ridiculous, especially if you keep up with Put This On and countless other sites like it, but remember: they strive, often frantically, to keep up with an ever expanding breadth of garments, accessories, lines, and designers. One lady\u2019s wardrobe may well include dozens, or even hundreds, of each. The menswear enthusiast plunges into something much narrower and deeper. We go down, you might say, a historical hole, digging our way toward the origins of the fifteen or twenty items we wear with the utmost regularity. Chinos, tweed jackets, button-down shirts, aviator sunglasses, Chuck Taylors: the versions we own today have undergone minor changes since the models\u2019 invention, whereas women\u2019s clothing, by comparison, endures regular and thoroughgoing revolutions. But boy, how much you can learn about those minor changes, let alone about the inventions themselves. \u201cA minute to learn\u2026 a lifetime to master,\u201d went the old Othello slogan, and the same applies to the game of men\u2019s dress.<\/p>\n

Much of our early menswear education comes from popular culture, often in minute-long flashes. Josh Sims\u2019 Icons of Men\u2019s Style <\/em>takes some time, if not a lifetime, to offer a bit more mastery on 52 particularly timeless, universally recognized items, most of which got their break from twentieth-century American popular culture. Gregory Peck appears on the cover wearing aviators; Tom Cruise, encased in Top Gun<\/em> gear, occupies a full page doing the same. An image of Jimmy Stewart dominates the chapter on tweed, as one of Ronald Reagan dominates the chapter on the sweatshirt. A shot of Michael Jackson shooting Thriller<\/em> illustrates the wearing of loafers. The text cites Steve McQueen nine times, four of them with pictures. Magnum P.I., you\u2019ll feel relieved to hear, makes an appearance as well. Sims writes up a scattering of items now rarely seen in the United States \u2014 the Barbour jacket, the Breton top \u2014 but tends to stick with what we\u2019ve seen on the bodies and in the hands of American film stars, musicians, athletes, and politicians. Yet given the considerable influence of midcentury Americana on the rest of the world, a certain internationalism remains.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read the whole thing at Put This On<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I relish the menswear enthusiast\u2019s life for a number of reasons, the first and foremost being that we get less homework than women\u2019s wear enthusiasts do. This very idea may strike you as ridiculous, especially if you keep up with Put This On and countless other sites like it, but remember: they strive, often frantically, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1210","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-clothes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1210","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1210"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1210\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1212,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1210\/revisions\/1212"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1210"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1210"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1210"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}