High Style - Low Culture - and everything in between
Sunday, May 17, 2009
Must Have: Steve McQueen's Rolex Submariner
Included in Antiquorum's Important Collectors' Wristwatches auction on June 11 in NYC is the King of Cool's 1967 Rolex Submariner. McQueen wore the watch for many years (right) and it can be seen on-screen in his very last movie, 1980's The Hunter.
Years ago I switched my Submariner for a GMT Master II, in order to add a dash of color, but I would gladly trade it in for this one. Antiquorum has a ludicrously low estimate of $10,000 - $20,000 on the watch; I wouldn't be surprised if it fetched 10 times that.
Also included in the sale is the 1969 Heuer Monaco chronograph McQueen wore in 1971's Le Mans, a pretty iconic watch in its own right, as well as a vintage 1929 Scott motorcycle customized by Von Dutch.
How to Drive a Speedboat Without Spilling Your Drink
As demonstrated by Fiat heir Lapo Elkann, photographed for a Vanity Fair portfolio titled "Fortune's Children." Not everyone is enamored of Lapo, but few can deny the man has sprezzatura to spare. Here he is dressed to the nines while piloting the tender of his famous grandfather Gianni Agnelli's yacht, the Stealth, off the coast of Cannes.
On the few occasions when we've hung out with Lapo, he has always been charming, entertaining and of course terribly well dressed. His manners are impeccable, and if he strikes some as a trifle arrogant, well, who gives a damn? The man has true style, for which we're even willing to forgive that little incident with the transvestite hooker.
My new weekly column for Luxist, The Classicist, now has its own category on the site. Devoted to timeless style, enduring elegance, and true, built-to-last luxury, topics so far have included Savile Row's Anderson & Sheppard; classic London leathergoods firm Swaine, Adeney, Brigg; Panerai watches; luxe clothing co. Loro Piana; and the Henley Royal Regatta (top). You can see all my Classicist columns here.
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.
The fellows over at Condé Nast's Men.Style.com (the online home of GQ and Details) asked me to compile a feature and slideshow on the most stylish moments in the six decade history of the Cannes Film Festival - focusing on men of course. Doing the photo research was the most fun part, if a trifle exhausting.
Making the final selection of 20 slides involved some tough choices, and many deserving snaps and icons including Orson Welles ended up on the library floor, but the end result turned out brilliantly if I do say so myself. Above is a highlight showing the young Keith Richards at the festival in 1971. You can see the full feature here.
Included in Antiquorum's Important Collectors' Wristwatches auction on June 11 in NYC is the King of Cool's 1967 Rolex Submariner. McQueen wore the watch for many years (right) and it can be seen on-screen in his very last movie, 1980's The Hunter.
