 | Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com | Dressing the Man is the definitive guide to what men need to know in order to dress well and look stylish without becoming fashion victims. Alan Flusser's name is synonymous with taste and style. With his new book, he combines his encyclopedic knowledge of men's clothes with his signature wit and elegance to address the fundamental paradox of modern men's fashion: Why, after men today have spent more money on clothes than in any other period of history, are there fewer well-dressed men than at any time ever before? According to Flusser, dressing well is not all that difficult, the real challenge lies in being able to acquire the right personalized instruction. Dressing well pivots on two pillars -- proportion and color. Flusser believes that "Permanent Fashionability," both his promise and goal for the reader, starts by being accountable to a personal set of physical trademarks and not to any kind of random, seasonally served-up collection of fashion flashes. Unlike fashion, which is obliged to change each season, the face's shape, the neck's height, the shoulder's width, the arm's length, the torso's structure, and the foot's size remain fairly constant over time. Once a man learns how to adapt the fundamentals of permanent fashion to his physique and complexion, he's halfway home. Taking the reader through each major clothing classification step-by-step, this user-friendly guide helps you apply your own specifics to a series of dressing options, from business casual and formalwear to pattern-on-pattern coordination, or how to choose the most flattering clothing silhouette for your body type and shirt collar for your face. A man's physical traits represent his individual road map, and the quickest route toward forging an enduring style of dress is through exposure to the legendary practitioners of this rare masculine art. Flusser has assembled the largest andmost diverse collection of stylishly mantled men ever found in one book. Many never-before-seen vintage photographs from the era of Cary Grant, Tyrone Power, and Fred Astaire are employed to help illustrate the range and diversity of authentic men's fashion. Dressing the Man's sheer magnitude of options will enable the reader to expand both the grammar and verbiage of his permanent-fashion vocabulary. For those men hoping to find sartorial fulfillment somewhere down the road, tethering their journey to the mind-set of permanent fashion will deliver them earlier rather than later in life. |
Average Customer Rating:   Dressing the Gingerly Man I'm glad I went to my public library instead of buying. My first complaint are the doctored before and after photos regarding complexion. The models images are brazenly altered to the point where the very same model has sun-tans and different eye colors in before and after images just to bolster the authors point. Second, the book praises those with rather eccentric and not at all conservative style. For example there are several pictures of Gianni Agnelli wearing his watch OVER his shirt sleeve in addition to exposing his tie OVER his sweater. Third many of the pictures are out-dated showing models from the 50's & 60's. If his premise of timelessness is to hold then there should be sufficient imagery of modern examples of younger men instead we are greeting with a strong showing of gray/white haired men in black and white photos or old penciled sketches. Finally, there is the issue of dashing neck scarves, men crossing their legs at impossible angles and gingerly held cigarettes in almost every image which made me feel that I was not the target audience for the book even though I work on Wall St and am required to wear a suit daily.
However, there are some solid gold nuggets of information when it comes to materials used in quality attire and the reasons for going to great lengths to make sure one conveys authority and garners respect. I'm willing to wager this information can be obtained else where without the shenanigans of this book. How to look decades out of date. This is a book that does a good job of gathering the collective wisdom of men's fashion from the 30's to 50's or so. The problem is, that's limited help in 2010.
First of all, if you don't plan on wearing a suit all the time, this is really going to be limited in usefulness. Moreover, the author does not do a good job of separating the continuing long-term trends of fashion from tired and out-dated guidelines/cliches. The biggest one is how high to wear your pants. Yes, it should probably be a few inches above where most college students wear their jeans, but you'll get snickers and weird looks all day if you wear your pants where this book suggests. There are many figures where, as best as I can tell, he honestly appears to suggest wearing your pants 1/3 of the way between your belly-button and nipples. There are, at least, many pictures where the belt is between the middle and top button of a 3-button suit.
He repeats another tired piece when it comes to jacket length (where the bottom of the coat is) as well: have it hang down to the thumb knuckle. What a useless piece of advice. If you have kind-of long legs and kind-of short arms, wearing your jacket down only to the thumb knuckle is going to make your legs look really long and your torso really small. You don't want to remind people of a freaking flamingo. A much better point of advice is to simply try on a few lengths of jacket and see which one gives the best proportionate look to your legs, arms, and torso. Unfortunately, that wisdom doesn't fit in a catchy one-liner, so it doesn't travel as well.
Ugh. Pattern. Please, do NOT wear 4 different patterns in a suit. Actually, try to avoid 3 unless they are all very muted and somehow coordinated. Please, do not follow this book's advice and mix 3 patterns that are completely different. A very modern, sleek man will find his long-term wadrobe's backbone is a group of carefully selected solids. Many of the patterned items in this book are way too loud to be appropriate for modern workplace -- especially many of the black-and-white patterns.
The section on color is pretty good, and it is an amusing book to page through. It has a lively tone and good humor throughout. But in the end, it's a guide looking decades out-of-touch. Best dressed book One of the most informative books on men's dress ever. It covers not only the how to dress but the history of dress in an entertaining and well segmented volume. The book is written art work. A wonderful book I really like this book. It has a lot of pictures which all illustrate different dressing styles. In the beginning I was a little afraid that the author focuses too much on the British dressing style but he also successfully describes different styles such as the Italian. Dated and irrelevant If you're an American who aspires to dress like a 1940s matinee idol then this book is for you. If not, probably best to look elsewhere. |  |
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