Men’s Fashion – Page 5 – Old Magazine Articles

The Pajama Ascendency
(Literary Digest, 1923)

The pajama is ascending to glorified heights. Long the black sheep of polite private life, this garment has been elevated to the four hundred…Men are drugging their senses with batik designs in sleeping apparel and inhaling the stimulation of contrasting shades in underclothes.

What the well-dressed man will wear when going to bed is one of the burning topics of the immediate future…By and large, the thirst for color permeates the accessory field from linen to lingerie. The picture might be said to be complete. Man has achieved his zenith.

Read about a pajama fashion innovation that never quite caught on…

That 1960 Look for Men
(Pageant Magazine, 1960)

Some call it the Mad Men Look, others may simply label it that late 50s/early 60s look – but either way high praise should be dolled out to costume designer Katherine Jane Bryant who so skillfully brought these fashions to the attention of millions of men through her work on the T.V. show Mad Men (AMC).

For those lads pursuing an advanced degree in pulling-off that look in their daily attire, we recommend this handy list of fashion’s Do’s & Don’ts from 1960.

Much Talk of White Waistcoats, Shoes and Shirts
(Vanity Fair Magazine, 1921)

When the smoke cleared following the close of that dreadful unpleasantness that spanned the years 1914 to 1918, there remained much work to do; bodies to be buried, cities to be rebuilt. Men and nations prepared to face the new realities that came with the new social structure; many weighty subjects had to be addressed that had been ignored for so long a time. The most pressing of these topics was deciding which was the proper combination of white waistcoat and dinner jacket? In an age of industrial slaughter, which was more suitable: double-breasted or single-breasted? and what of ties, shoes and overcoats?

The Well Dressed Man in Winter
(Vanity Fair Magazine, 1921)

Illustrations of fashion’s offering from the Fall of 1921: great coats, semi-great coats, overcoats and ulsters; raglan and otherwise.

The Duke of Windsor Influences
(Men’s Wear, 1950)

MEN’S WEAR MAGAZINE printed a few paragraphs on the heavy hand that the Duke of Windsor had in the world of manly attire:

No one completely personified English qualities in attire than the Prince of Wales…Whatever he chose to wear was considered correct and in good taste and was accepted by millions of others in America and elsewhere. Following are a few of the styles that can be traced right back to the Duke of Windsor, either because he wore them first or was responsible for their spread…

-they include such fashion innovations as the Panama hat, the spread collar and brown buckskin shoes among others.

More articles about the Duke of Windsor can be found on these pages.

Good Taste and the Year 1914
(The Delineator Magazine, 1914)

A quick read for costumers and historians regarding the fashion dos and don’ts on the matter of men’s ready-made clothes from 1914.

The Beau
(Gentry Magazine, 1956)

Widely remembered as the best dressed man of the Nineteenth Century, Beau Brummell, (né George Bryan Brummell 1778 – 1840), set the standard for male sartorial splendor and as a result, his name
liveth ever more.

The attached men’s fashion article was written at a time when American leisure wear was going through it’s birth pangs and slovenly attire was on the rise all over the fruited plain; it was thoroughly appropriate for the editors of GENTRY MAGAZINE to print this article which not only examined the clothing philosophy of the Beau but also paid heed as to which actors portrayed him on screen (oddly, there was no mention made whatever as to who the various costume designers were).

He dressed simply, without ornamentation. What was it then that set him apart so ostentatiously from the crowd? What made him the best dressed man of the century? The answer lies not, as history has decided, in his clothes. It lay entirely in the way he wore them.

A further study of Dandies can be found here…

Remembering the Golden Age of the Dandy
(Vanity Fair Magazine, 1920)

This is a fun read covering the all too short reign of the dandy. It touches upon those who were the great practitioners of the art (Beau Brummell, Sir Phillip Dormer Chesterfield, Beau Nash, Sir Robert Fielding, Count Alfred d’Orsay) and those who came later, but deserving of honorable mention (King Alphonso XIII and Oscar Wilde), as well as the wannabe bucks who wished they were dandies but simply came away well-tailored (George IV and Edward VII).

An article about Beau Brummell can be read HERE

Men’s Correct Clothes
(Vanity Fair Magazine, 1919)

These images, as well as the headline, were from a paid avertisement for a fashionable fifth avenue shop that had originally appeared in a chic Conde Nast magazine.

Clothing the Camper and Yachtsman
(Vanity Fair Magazine, 1917)

For all too few it is understood that fashion need not end in the wilderness: for it is more than likely that that was where the need for fashion was first recognized and it was there, among the toads and the dung, that the Well-Dressed man first crawled out of the muck and civilization

was born. With all this in mind, Robert Lloyd Trevor reviewed the fashions for the enjoyment of camp-life in this 1917 Vanity Fair review. Another vital concern touched upon by the journalist was the clothing available to the yachtsmen at that time:

Yachting is one of the things that begin at the bottom. That is to say, at the shoes. They are the foundation, as it were, for the rest of life on the rolling deep.