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Mr Clooney’s suit jacket looked like a corset on a barrel |
It’s all about the fit and the details, menswear experts like Tom Kalenderian of Barneys New York and Michael Hainey of GQ said in last week’s Times pre-Oscars piece about evening wear for men: point to point on the shoulders, proper trouser break, a flash of white cuff to break the wall of black, accurate collar dimensions to keep guys from looking like they’re wearing horse collars or a noose.
Apparently the memo didn’t get through to much of Hollywood.
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Billy Crystal, the baloney coloured host, wore an anachronistic white tie, as if about to set sail for
a dinner cruise aboard the Good Ship Lollipop |
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Tom Hanks was
a walking demonstration of what tailoring is intended to do, everything gravity and the good life can do to a man’s body neatly accounted for in his full-shouldered, double-breasted, six button Tom Ford tuxedo |
George Clooney, eagle-eyed readers complained after the piece appeared, tends to wear his Armani trousers puddled around his feet and he did it again on Sunday’s awards. (He also looked like he should have taken a tip from the ladies and spent the past month pushing away from the table: Mr Clooney’s suit jacket looked like a corset on a barrel.)
Brian Grazer, the show’s producer, seemed to have borrowed a shirt from his older brother. Antonio Banderas was one of many who fell into the increasingly common solecism of wearing a business-like four-in-hand tie with an evening jacket, something that caused Tom Ford to say, “When I see men doing that, I go right up to them and say, ‘This is awful, just wrong.’”
Naturally, there were others — like Jean Dujardin — who strayed toward wing collars, a style best left to the guy carrying the drinks tray. And Billy Crystal, the baloney coloured host, wore an anachronistic white tie, as if about to set sail for a dinner cruise aboard the Good Ship Lollipop.
Still, there were men who used this impeccable uniform to fine advantage. Tom Hanks was a walking demonstration of what tailoring is intended to do, everything gravity and the good life can do to a man’s body neatly accounted for in his full-shouldered, double-breasted, six button Tom Ford tuxedo.
Christian Bale, in gangster black, upended convention and yet, mostly because he is thin as a knife blade, managed to make the suit look suitable and personal, an editorial commentary by a man raised in a circus family on just how respectable show people are obliged to be. |
