ART & ATTIRE


'PICTURE PERFECT' - MEN'S ATTIRE IN ART


Robin Dutt looks at the elegance in men’s clothing as depicted through Art over the ages and as a precursor to the modern day mobile culture


Giovanni Boldini Portrait of Lawrence Alexander (Peter) Harrison, 1889


Edgar Degas Hilaire Degas 1857


n our world of the immediacy of the image, this may be a sobering thought. Photography has only been a feature of our lives - and then not all - since the


late nineteenth century having been invented (depending on your source of choice) in the 1840s or 50s. But from its genesis it must have been clear that this invention, revolutionary as it must have been to practically all, would become the very essence of the


strategy and experience of our kind. Everyone today is a photographer via a mobile 'phone - that device uniting image with spoken and written word. Computers bring imagery swimming eagerly to our eyes, bidden or not. There is no escape. The camera however, is as much an ally of the truth as a confidante of a lie. Retouching is the master-stroke weapon. Paintings can be retouched too, of course but the difference is obvious as is the intent. An obsession with perfection makes one wary of photography. Perfection in painting again is not the same goal. But pre-photographic representation, artistic


depiction, mostly painting and drawing, was the only means of recording how we looked and dressed - artistic licence and generosity apart. In the world of costume and fashion of course, it is female modes which were most recorded in everything from regular magazines to celebrate the coming season and also books and pamphlets. Yet there is a wealth of images of male


attire attesting to the fact that fashion even for those who might not seem so concerned was a very real construct. Early men's fashion commentators gave exhaustive facts on types of materials suggested by the 'trend du jour' along with changing palettes. Whilst some especially eighteenth century cartoons, caricatures and illustrations often gently lampoon the excesses of male costume (think of Gilray, Cruikshank and Rowlandson) the male form in clothing of the day gives more than an accurate idea of how a man dressed. The depiction of the Dandy, the Fop and the Macaroni were often extreme but there was more than a modicum of reality about the clothes and what they said. Drawings and engravings of elegant men to accompany the words were exact and pin sharp in other celebratory creations of male


SAVILE ROW STYLE MAGAZINE 45


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