Tailored and Styled

In our walk through men’s sartorial history we’ve distilled several principles of style.  As we move forward in our analysis to the “Golden Age” of men’s classic dress, I think it’s fitting that to present the latest updated list of principles.

The ultimate goal of this process is to pull together an enduring set of principles that a man can use as a rock-solid and defensible guidepost for dressing well without any apologies.

Given the fact that there really are no guideposts out there anymore, I think this will be a valuable contribution to men so inclined to up their style quotient in a meaningful way and in a way that will withstand the capricious winds of fashion.

The previous list had 8 principles.  Given additional examination of men’s dress during the Victorian age, I’m adding two more: grounded individuality and selective simplicity.

1.  Modesty.  Modesty refers to clothing the body in a way that presents the self in a dignified manner.

2.  Decoration.  Dressing to accentuate a man’s inherent dignity and handsomeness.

3.  Symbolism.  Wearing clothes that communicate to others something of who we are and what we do.

Another very important principle arises from the above three and that is the ancient notion of the “Golden Mean.”  First articulated by the great Greek philosopher Aristotle, the Golden Mean is the desirable middle between two extremes, one of excess and the other of deficiency.  As applied to dressing well, the Golden Mean becomes our fourth principle:

4.  The Golden Mean.  Neither too much nor too little when it comes to dressing well.  For example, too much decoration or too little modesty introduces unnecessary and undesirable distortion into dress.

Along the way, we also uncovered several time-tested principles that arose out of the period of men’s style history known as “The Great Renunciation.”  These were:

5.  Harmony.  Integration of interior and exterior self so that the way one dresses communicates congruency in terms of your interior virtue and your most important social and professional activities.

6.  Classical Proportions.  First achieved in a profound way by Beau Brummell at the height the Enlightenment, classical proportion in dress is a crucial sub-principle of decoration.  It refers to Greek and Renaissance ideals of the human form as applied to men’s clothing.  In this sense, dressing with classical proportion strives to turns a man into a living Greek sculpture.

7.  Aesthetic Precision.  Again Brummell gets the credit for combining classical proportions with excellent fabrics, conservative colors, and high quality tailoring to arrive at an enduring standard of refined elegance.

8.  Refined Elegance.  The pinnacle of men’s classic style wherein a synergistic combination of all principles results in a harmony of balance, decoration, proportion, and precision that communicates the virtuous and individualistic best of what it means to be a man.

The walk through the Victorian period in the 19th century yielded two additional principles.

9.  Grounded Individuality.  By dressing with classic style you are saying that your individuality is not dictated by fashion; rather, you know who you are and what you stand for—and that doesn’t change.

10.  Selective Simplicity.  Selective simplicity enacts the principles of classic style with a certain ethic of “just enough” in terms of the clothing worn for particular occasions and in terms of the amounts and types of clothing owned.

We’ll continue to add to and polish these principles going forward, but it’s clear to me that we have a pretty good framework taking shape already.

By Joe Scherrer | Tailored and Styled Writer