Detroit-born designer John Varvatos is one of his hometown’s favorite sons, but the New York-based success story has never been afraid to wear his Midwestern roots on his tailored sleeve. The 2007 GQ Designer of the Year, who uses rock stars like Alice Cooper and Green Day for his promotional ads, has even been the face of one of the Motor City’s greatest companies, starring in commercials for Chrysler’s well-received “Imported From Detroit” campaign. Varvatos and the automotive company recently […]
The Old Oxford: Dreaming of the Golden Era of Travel
No matter what the season, whenever there’s a changeover from colder to warmer months (or vice versa), I start thinking of getting the heck out of town. My philosophy is a little James Murphy and Rosecrans Baldwin: New York I love you but you start to stink towards the middle or end of every season, and I need to get away.
The Old Oxford: Remembrance of Scents Past and Writing About What You Smell
“Life begins somewhere with the scent of lavender,” André Aciman starts off the first essay in his collection, Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere. “Lavender” is Aciman’s Proustian meditation on how a particular scent that his father used made him feel “sheltered, happy, beloved,” and it ushered in “good thoughts–about life.”
The Old Oxford: Steven Alan and All That Jazz
I can’t really argue much with anything “Loosely inspired by the effortless style of post bop musicians,” and that’s probably why Steven Alan’s Fall 2013 collection was without a doubt one of the biggest highlights for me as I ran around from Fashion Week events, to meetings, then to coffee shops to write up whatever deadline I was up against. Between the overall presentation and the inspiration behind the collection, I couldn’t really stop thinking about it.
The Old Oxford: The Lady in the Suit
(All photos by Jesse Untracht-Oakner) When you see a woman truly wearing a suit it catches your eye, and she is an image hard to forget. When Balzac wrote that “If clothing is the whole man, it is even more so the whole woman,” in 1830, he probably didn’t envision Marlene Dietrich, Katherine Hepburn, Grace Jones, or Patti Smith transforming garments traditionally made for men into something subversive, iconic, and beautiful. Amber Doyle is in that school of women who can […]
The Old Oxford: Real Men and Perfect Gentlemen
I constantly find myself looking at magazines, blogs and books that claim to be able to help the reader “Be a better man,” or pointing them to five or ten [insert whatever here] things every man needs to experience or own to truly be a man. I see books like Joel Stein’s Man Made: A Stupid Quest for Masculinity, which I assume was written as a joke, sadly I’m just too uninterested to look to find out. But then I see that nearly […]
The Old Oxford: Downton Abbey, Gatsby, Don Draper, and Costuming Drama
There was this one shot from the premiere of the third season of Downton Abbey that has really been sticking with me. It wasn’t the epic moment when the Dowager Countess and Shirley MacLaine shared their first scene together, anything having to do with Bates in prison, or Lady Mary throwing a fit when Matthew decided he wanted to be the latest of the show’s martyrs and not accept a windfall of cash that he inherited (days before their wedding, no less). […]