Style Salute: William F. Buckley Jr.

When William F. Buckley Jr. went to the great Lyford Cay Club in the sky a year ago today, an era of authentic WASPy style died with him. If you want to get technical about it, Buckley wasn’t really a WASP (because he was Catholic not Protestant), and his wasn’t so much style as anti-style, but in the decades when he rose to prominence as a conservative provocateur par excellence, such distinctions waned in importance.

“Being a WASP has nothing to do with religion or money,” author Susanna Salk declared last year in her preppy-stuffed picture book A Privileged Life: Celebrating WASP Style. Rather, she said, it’s all about getting the look right. Whether Buckley would have agreed is debatable, but there he was on page 84, clutching a copy of God and Man at Yale, his button down rumpled and repp tie askew, a picture of pure prep imperfection.



Over the years, Buckley’s clothes varied little from his prep school days at the Millbrook School in upstate New York, where the prevailing aesthetic was “unpretentious WASP rustic,” says fellow alumnus Whit Stillman, the well-known writer/director. Looking at decades worth of photos of Buckley in frayed oxfords, unpressed Brooks Brothers suits and pilled Shetland sweaters, one suspects some items quite literally didn’t change. What was de rigeur at Millbrook was much the same at Yale and in Skull & Bones, whence Buckley migrated. The most important thing was one not be “too well dressed to be a gentleman,” to exhibit an effortlessness and ease frequently emulated by arrivistes, though rarely with success.



Old clothes “advertise how much of conventional dignity [the upper classes] can afford to throw away,” author Paul Fussell noted in Class: A Guide Through the American Status System. “The wearing of clothes excessively new or excessively neat and clean suggests that your social circumstances are not entirely secure.” That was of course never a problem for Buckley, whose “pleasantly disheveled and informal” look (as described by protégé Gary Wills) was rivaled only by that of his fellow patrician and friend George Plimpton.

That’s not to say Buckley’s clothes weren’t well made. Fussell points to an episode of his long-running show Firing Line in which he interviewed an oafish Texan of decidedly humbler origins. The Texan’s jacket collar “gaped open a full two inches,” Fussell writes. “Buckley’s collar, of course, clung tightly to his neck and shoulder, turn and bow and bob as he might.” His genteel shabbiness did not extend to exhibiting “prole gape.”

Buckley was “anti-fashion in the original sense of the term,” says designer and style expert Alan Flusser, author of Dressing the Man: Mastering the Art of Permanent Fashion. “He came from an era and background where if you looked like you spent too much time thinking about clothes, then everything else was suspect….I wouldn’t be surprised if some of those Shetland sweaters actually had holes in them.” At social functions, men of Buckley’s era and class were content to serve merely as backdrops for their wives. By contrast, Buckley’s wife Pat, who died last year, was almost a caricature, one of William Hamilton’s New Yorker cartoon WASPs come to life.



In the end, beyond a general notion of the preppy staples that have been replicated by everyone from Ralph Lauren to the latest designer-of-the-hour since Buckley’s Millbrook days, it’s hard to remember exactly what he wore during his many years in the public eye. Which was precisely the point.