3rd column
www.telegraph.co.uk
Jefferson Hack celebrates the return of the urban dandy
There is a certain ego and attitude that comes with having a definite sense of style, of being comfortable with yourself in individualistic clothing. For me, the opposite - a uniform sense of style - has always meant a uniform mind at work.
Classic combination: the new dandyism takes its cues from style icons such as David Bowie
My style icons have no such thing and, as a result, have taken the classical elements of a man's wardrobe and subverted them, as a new generation of men is doing today: witness the return of the urban dandy.
The dandy, as Baudelaire said, has a burning desire to create a personal form of originality, within the external limits of social conventions.
It is a kind of cult of the ego, embodied by two of my style icons, David Bowie and William Burroughs - opposites at first glance, but connected in many ways.
I have a picture of them taken by the celebrity photographer Terry O'Neil in 1972. Bowie wears a fey felt hat and a Clockwork Orange T-shirt peeking through an almost unzipped, waist-hugging leather jacket; Burroughs sports a tough trilby and an elegant, loose, three-button suit.
Both men are sartorially minded, and both are anti-establishment figures. We know Bowie is straight, but he looks provocative as he careers towards the feminine. We also know Burroughs was hell-bent on chemical exploration, yet he could easily have passed as a friendly doctor.
Imagine a combination of both men's styles - a loose-fitting suit worn with a T-shirt underneath; a tight-fitting, fine-leather bomber jacket over a shirt and tie - and you get the look of today's urban dandy.
Russell Brand is raking this look on TV, while bands such as Grinderman, featuring Nick Cave, are wearing vintage three-piece suits and hats and making them feel cool and unpretentious again.
Tough, mature-looking men are also making it look cool to dress up; men such as Joseph Corre, co-owner of Agent Provocateur, the artist Harland Miller and the comedian David Walliams.
They celebrate an individualistic but grown-up sense of style - and they feel comfortable with themselves and their personal riffs on formality. This is at the heart of the new dandyism, a look that is as cocksure and egocentric as it was 140 years ago.
Baudelaire would raise his glass.
The new subversion: Stefano Pilati
'We must never confuse elegance with snobbery," said Yves St. Laurent when he was describing how he took ideas from the beat of the street and transformed them into formidable fashion. It is this subversive approach to elegance that is now being redefined by Stefano Pilati, the current design director of YSL.
"Everything I design is really a reflection of something I want to wear," says Pilati, 40, who is wearing narrow Prince of Wales check trousers, cut to stop at the ankles, and an oversized woollen cardigan, both from his latest collection. "It's something that I am looking for now, that I want to have for myself in the future."
Three years after taking the helm at YSL, Pilati has finally hit his stride with this season's men's collection. If you want to see the new urban dandy on the catwalk, this is where to look.
It was Jean Cocteau, the original Dada-dandy, who said: "In every landscape or still life, a painter portrays himself." And so to Pilati, who has also found the confidence to paint himself into this collection.
"It's about mixing the informal and the formal, the classic and contemporary," says Pilati, on his approach to defining the look for the YSL man.
A safari jacket is tied to the side; a classic trench is amplified in cashmere; a brothel creeper is modernised with a rounded toe.
This mixing of codes takes centre stage in the label's new advertising campaign. Art directed by Pilati and photographed by Innez and Vinhood Matadin, it features the lifestyle designer Marc Newson, seemingly caught in a mad dash after slipping effortlessly into the YSL spring/summer collection - late, perhaps, for a museum opening or award ceremony.
I don't know the Australian-born Marc Newson, whose Lockheed Lounge chair sold in auction at Sotheby's last year for a staggering $968,000.
I don't know if he's skittish or calm as a person, but I do know that he's one of the most successful designers working in UK and therefore he's more than likely too pressed for time to put on a shirt or tie.
Showing Newson wearing YSL as he jumps and runs through his London home, dodging his iconic design pieces, Pilati is making dressing up appear casual.
"I feel closer to someone like Newson thanI do to obvious icons like Justin Timberlake or David Beckham," explains Pilati, who recently dressed Timberlake for his world tour. "For me, he represents the other, edgier side of Yves St. Laurent."
Who are Pilati's other male style icons? "I can name you a lot," he says, reeling off a list that includes Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso, Samuel Beckett and Monsieur St. Laurent.
He speaks of an older, rarified order of men. "They were men who where comfortable with who they were, no matter how tortured they were as artists. There was always some distinguishing element that allowed them to go from classic elegance to a more eccentric style."
At the beginning of this year, Newson was the first designer to have exhibited at New York's prestigious Gagosian Gallery, a space usually reserved for mega-artists like Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons.
Among his pieces were a web-like bookcase cut from a seamless slab of marble and a super-polished nickel surfboard that smoothed over any visible differences between the worlds of art and design.
If Newson's work is about transposing materials from one context to another, challenging the conventions of formal structures to create complex forms and shapes, then he has more in common with Pilati then just his rugged good looks.
Pilati is a natural provocateur, a dandy in design. He is clearly distancing himself from the clean-cut social world of his predecessor, Tom Ford, as he reinvents, in his own image, the modern YSL man.
Add to favourites: Duggie Fields
Artist Duggie Fields makes distinctive post-Pop Art paintings that have been described as looking like "the stained-glass windows of modern media". Fields sports a distinctive kiss-curl quiff and elegantly tailored suits. Rei Kawakubo of Comme Des Garçons based part of her spring/summer collection on his style. He is an innovator and an artistic explorer who navigates through a deranged, cartoon-like landscape peopled with avatars of himself, his friends and icons.
Read "The ecstasy of influence", an essay by Jonathan Lethem on copyright restriction and the beauty of second use. tinyurl.com/2yfvlm
Explore The site for a cultural history of 1980s London and the club generation of Leigh Bowery, Boy George and Steve Strange. tinyurl.com/3y4ujp
Shop at the coolest store in the world, www.doverstreetmarket.com
Details: 20 Limited
Sometimes luxury, design, dandyism and downright decadence just collide in one object of desire. Take this cashmere-lined, long-haired, all-black fox-fur double hammock. Founded by partners Jolyon Fenwick and Herewith Marcus, the luxury online shop www.20Ltd.com showcases only 20 products at a time.
They are all exclusive designs, such as an all-white Biomega bike and a table-football kit by Eleven Forty. It's boys' toys, girls' toys and, in the case of this £9,000 hammock by Bless, expensive toys for both sexes to share.
"As design becomes more crafted and thoughtful and art more rampantly egotistical," says Fenwick, "the nobility gap between the two is narrowing." And the noble are bound to buckle under the inviting thought of a soft, fur-lined nap.
Tribute: Ralph Lauren
Ralph Lauren may be less subversive than Pilati at YSL but he's another true dandy, and on Monday he was named Menswear Designer of the Year at the stateside CFDA Awards, the Oscars of the fashion industry.
Polo, his main line, is too Town & Country for me, but with Black Label and the bespoke Purple Label he has created a razor-sharp silhouette for men. It is 40 years since he began Polo. As they said at the awards: "He's admired, imitated but never equalled."
www.telegraph.co.uk
Jefferson Hack celebrates the return of the urban dandy
There is a certain ego and attitude that comes with having a definite sense of style, of being comfortable with yourself in individualistic clothing. For me, the opposite - a uniform sense of style - has always meant a uniform mind at work.
Classic combination: the new dandyism takes its cues from style icons such as David Bowie
My style icons have no such thing and, as a result, have taken the classical elements of a man's wardrobe and subverted them, as a new generation of men is doing today: witness the return of the urban dandy.
The dandy, as Baudelaire said, has a burning desire to create a personal form of originality, within the external limits of social conventions.
It is a kind of cult of the ego, embodied by two of my style icons, David Bowie and William Burroughs - opposites at first glance, but connected in many ways.
I have a picture of them taken by the celebrity photographer Terry O'Neil in 1972. Bowie wears a fey felt hat and a Clockwork Orange T-shirt peeking through an almost unzipped, waist-hugging leather jacket; Burroughs sports a tough trilby and an elegant, loose, three-button suit.
Both men are sartorially minded, and both are anti-establishment figures. We know Bowie is straight, but he looks provocative as he careers towards the feminine. We also know Burroughs was hell-bent on chemical exploration, yet he could easily have passed as a friendly doctor.
Imagine a combination of both men's styles - a loose-fitting suit worn with a T-shirt underneath; a tight-fitting, fine-leather bomber jacket over a shirt and tie - and you get the look of today's urban dandy.
Russell Brand is raking this look on TV, while bands such as Grinderman, featuring Nick Cave, are wearing vintage three-piece suits and hats and making them feel cool and unpretentious again.
Tough, mature-looking men are also making it look cool to dress up; men such as Joseph Corre, co-owner of Agent Provocateur, the artist Harland Miller and the comedian David Walliams.
They celebrate an individualistic but grown-up sense of style - and they feel comfortable with themselves and their personal riffs on formality. This is at the heart of the new dandyism, a look that is as cocksure and egocentric as it was 140 years ago.
Baudelaire would raise his glass.
The new subversion: Stefano Pilati
'We must never confuse elegance with snobbery," said Yves St. Laurent when he was describing how he took ideas from the beat of the street and transformed them into formidable fashion. It is this subversive approach to elegance that is now being redefined by Stefano Pilati, the current design director of YSL.
"Everything I design is really a reflection of something I want to wear," says Pilati, 40, who is wearing narrow Prince of Wales check trousers, cut to stop at the ankles, and an oversized woollen cardigan, both from his latest collection. "It's something that I am looking for now, that I want to have for myself in the future."
Three years after taking the helm at YSL, Pilati has finally hit his stride with this season's men's collection. If you want to see the new urban dandy on the catwalk, this is where to look.
It was Jean Cocteau, the original Dada-dandy, who said: "In every landscape or still life, a painter portrays himself." And so to Pilati, who has also found the confidence to paint himself into this collection.
"It's about mixing the informal and the formal, the classic and contemporary," says Pilati, on his approach to defining the look for the YSL man.
A safari jacket is tied to the side; a classic trench is amplified in cashmere; a brothel creeper is modernised with a rounded toe.
This mixing of codes takes centre stage in the label's new advertising campaign. Art directed by Pilati and photographed by Innez and Vinhood Matadin, it features the lifestyle designer Marc Newson, seemingly caught in a mad dash after slipping effortlessly into the YSL spring/summer collection - late, perhaps, for a museum opening or award ceremony.
I don't know the Australian-born Marc Newson, whose Lockheed Lounge chair sold in auction at Sotheby's last year for a staggering $968,000.
I don't know if he's skittish or calm as a person, but I do know that he's one of the most successful designers working in UK and therefore he's more than likely too pressed for time to put on a shirt or tie.
Showing Newson wearing YSL as he jumps and runs through his London home, dodging his iconic design pieces, Pilati is making dressing up appear casual.
"I feel closer to someone like Newson thanI do to obvious icons like Justin Timberlake or David Beckham," explains Pilati, who recently dressed Timberlake for his world tour. "For me, he represents the other, edgier side of Yves St. Laurent."
Who are Pilati's other male style icons? "I can name you a lot," he says, reeling off a list that includes Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso, Samuel Beckett and Monsieur St. Laurent.
He speaks of an older, rarified order of men. "They were men who where comfortable with who they were, no matter how tortured they were as artists. There was always some distinguishing element that allowed them to go from classic elegance to a more eccentric style."
At the beginning of this year, Newson was the first designer to have exhibited at New York's prestigious Gagosian Gallery, a space usually reserved for mega-artists like Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons.
Among his pieces were a web-like bookcase cut from a seamless slab of marble and a super-polished nickel surfboard that smoothed over any visible differences between the worlds of art and design.
If Newson's work is about transposing materials from one context to another, challenging the conventions of formal structures to create complex forms and shapes, then he has more in common with Pilati then just his rugged good looks.
Pilati is a natural provocateur, a dandy in design. He is clearly distancing himself from the clean-cut social world of his predecessor, Tom Ford, as he reinvents, in his own image, the modern YSL man.
Add to favourites: Duggie Fields
Artist Duggie Fields makes distinctive post-Pop Art paintings that have been described as looking like "the stained-glass windows of modern media". Fields sports a distinctive kiss-curl quiff and elegantly tailored suits. Rei Kawakubo of Comme Des Garçons based part of her spring/summer collection on his style. He is an innovator and an artistic explorer who navigates through a deranged, cartoon-like landscape peopled with avatars of himself, his friends and icons.
Read "The ecstasy of influence", an essay by Jonathan Lethem on copyright restriction and the beauty of second use. tinyurl.com/2yfvlm
Explore The site for a cultural history of 1980s London and the club generation of Leigh Bowery, Boy George and Steve Strange. tinyurl.com/3y4ujp
Shop at the coolest store in the world, www.doverstreetmarket.com
Details: 20 Limited
Sometimes luxury, design, dandyism and downright decadence just collide in one object of desire. Take this cashmere-lined, long-haired, all-black fox-fur double hammock. Founded by partners Jolyon Fenwick and Herewith Marcus, the luxury online shop www.20Ltd.com showcases only 20 products at a time.
They are all exclusive designs, such as an all-white Biomega bike and a table-football kit by Eleven Forty. It's boys' toys, girls' toys and, in the case of this £9,000 hammock by Bless, expensive toys for both sexes to share.
"As design becomes more crafted and thoughtful and art more rampantly egotistical," says Fenwick, "the nobility gap between the two is narrowing." And the noble are bound to buckle under the inviting thought of a soft, fur-lined nap.
Tribute: Ralph Lauren
Ralph Lauren may be less subversive than Pilati at YSL but he's another true dandy, and on Monday he was named Menswear Designer of the Year at the stateside CFDA Awards, the Oscars of the fashion industry.
Polo, his main line, is too Town & Country for me, but with Black Label and the bespoke Purple Label he has created a razor-sharp silhouette for men. It is 40 years since he began Polo. As they said at the awards: "He's admired, imitated but never equalled."
