MATT DECKARD SAYS
 It was an escape from the strangulation that was the Victorian cuts and colors… the dead blacks and morbid grays. The predecessor to the automatons that followed with the slick clean lines of the jet set era -- another society pulled into the depths of utilitarian commonality with their secrets and spy tactics and tests of loyalty and unspoken organizations and the renewed celebration of the servant in gray. Bold and buff, wasp waists with sharp broad lapels, Hollywood set a standard that made business owners into tycoons and actors into stars by bringing back plaids stripes and color to the city with a sunny vision of a perfect world where all the women were perfectly quaffed with feminine shapes and unscathed makeup. The new Hollywood style was suited for waving to an admiring public and not for sitting at a desk, stapling papers together.
Jackets that gave shape to the wearer with pronounced shoulders and cinched waist-bands. Tailors were adding options galore to suits: patch pockets, belted backs and pleated backs… no combination was taboo and the rules on city-wear and country-wear were tossed. Perhaps not acceptable in London or New York… but here in Hollywood? Any day of the week!
 Vests were cut high and worn tight adding to the bold chest with a close row of buttons flanked by two besom pockets on either side while fang like tips hung down covering the trouser waistband. Trousers were deeply pleated with extra high waistbands that now went above the belly button in order to appease movie censors worried about the new rules on film decency. The trousers were cut full and would show the waterfall of excess material ending at a wide cuffed bottom. The fabric swaying incrementally as the legs within were at full gate. Everything was calm, every movement was sure. The tension came from the admiring onlookers.
 Splashed across the pages of every mag-azine, the suits from the 30s and 40s were the herald of importance. This is the look that made reporters look like undercover super heroes. The look that made that fresh-faced college kid with all the girlfriends look high on life. The look that would make the gal run to you if she was in trouble. It was the look of a wall of trust clad in wool wearing a hat and nobody - not nobody - was going to compromise his integrity.
It replaced the glum oppressed styles of Chaplin’s Tramp on the street and the two hobos Laurel and Hardy. Replaced It with a new Hollywood styled happiness in an upbeat world where the clothes worn by Hope and Crosby showed that money and fame had taken foot as staples in a new and brighter America.
The Hollywood look was freedom to make yourself the hero in a world where everyone else was trying to fit in yet was afraid to say so, lest they be cast out.
That’s the Hollywood look.
|
JACK NEWCASTLE SAYS
A man ought to be a razor, sure of his step and slicing his way through the city. Traffic has to be lanced, crowds of camera-toting tourists need to be pierced, and, lest an unwanted lunch menu or copy of Awake! be thrust into his hands, he should always be at the ready with a deft feint and a brisk ‘no thanks.’ The razor is neither master nor slave to his city but one with it. He walks his line without menace but, if necessary, is prepared to hold it. Respectable acuity, that’s his demeanor, and certainly it shows in his clothes: narrow lapels, narrow tie, a stingy brim cocked at an incisive angle; no other style announces a man of confidence than the Continental look of the sixties.
 The Continental is the Rome of Mastroianni, the Vegas of Sinatra. It’s Chet Baker’s trumpet and a Brubeck downbeat. The London Mods knew it; the Kingston Rude-boys made it a god. No matter a man’s size or shape, it will make him look sleek and cat-like, and to those that believe this a dubious claim, I need only to direct you to the original Thomas Crown Affair. Yes, here’s the style that made even a jowly Jack Weston look good. Just consider that. Jack Weston! You would think that…Hold on, I have to reiterate. Jack Weston! Right. Now, as I was saying, one would think a style this sharp would stick around for a bit longer than a decade but by the early seventies the fashion houses were revisiting the thirties and reintroducing those wide lapels and great big neckties, so The Continental goes away for a bit, but being that it’s such a damn cool look, by 1976 it’s back again and this time with with a black leather vengeance. Elvis Costello and the Attractions, The Specials, The Jam - the list of now iconic bands that adopted and tweaked the style goes on and on, and all this was happening while those wide-lapellers went about swinging their gold chains and boogieing down to Disco Duck
 Oh, don’t get me wrong, I’m not completely against the old wide lapel Hollywood look - it does have its charm in a sort of ‘nice place to visit but I wouldn’t want to live there’ way - but therein lies the very problem with the bold Hollywood suit. The Hollywood look is handy when you want to be Jimmy Stewart, when you want to be the ‘nice guy’, but as Johnny Rotten said, being called nice is just about the worst insult anyone can suffer. Nice means you’re not a threat. Nice means you’re without values. ‘Nice,’ he wrote in his biography, ‘is a cup of tea.’ Continentals don’t want to be a cup of tea, and neither do our women want us to be.
You see, as for flair and romance, I’ll certainly concede that battle to the Hollywood look, but the Continental look is one of sex, and it’s of torrid sex at that. The Hollywood is for guys who have sex with their socks on; the Continental is for men who have sex with theirtrousers on. The Continental's woman, consumed with passion, has no time for the trivialities of finding a room and getting all undressed, and so she looks to pull her man to a secluded doorway or broom closet, unless, of course, her man happens to be wearing his narrow lapel white dinner jacket - then it’s a romantic night of cocktails by the fireplace and Stan Kenton on the hi-fi. The Continental's tux says ‘I’m suave and elegant,' while the wide tux of old Hollywood says ‘I’m the befuddled father in a Preston Sturges movie.’
As of late, the Continental is coming back round again and though I'm not in complete agreement with the modern twist it's being given, it's as sharp and fresh a look as it was a half-century ago. In fact, it's razor sharp. |
