"Arguably the Most Sartorially Influential Person to Ever Hold the Presidency"

"Whether sailing off the coast of Hyannis Port or hosting a glamorous black-tie dinner at the White House, Kennedy's innate charisma and charm were merely enhanced by the approachable way in which he outfitted himself. 'JFK was almost unaware of clothes being of any great importance,' remarks Deeda Blair, whose husband served as U.S. Ambassador to Denmark during the Kennedy administration. 'He always was well dressed and I would even say distinguished, but effortless and easy—unremarkable ties and I suspect no fussing about pocket squares.'"

Andrew Nodell in a 2017 Women's Wear Daily article discusses President John Kennedy's clothes.

"Amphetamines, Jean-Paul Sartre and John Lee Hooker"

"Early Mods could 'pass' between work and play without changing their suits, which is perhaps one of the reasons they were never sent up in the culture at large. Think back to 1960s and 1970s low comedy: no TV sketch show or sitcom or kitschy horror film was complete without its parade of subcult Aunt Sallies–hippies, ton-up boys, skinheads, punks. Rockers had shivs, skinheads had bovver boots, hippies might dose you–what was a Mod going to do? Make you listen to Otis Redding? Force you to buy a decent pair of trousers?"

In a 2013 London Review of Books article, Ian Penman reviews Richard Weight's Mod: A Very British Style.

"On Music, Style and the State of the Nation"

"'I've only been at festivals when they pay me,' he says, appalled. 'They wouldn't entice me otherwise. Stand in a field of mud and shit for hours, off my face? Doesn't appeal to me. Call me old-fashioned. I just like a roof on it.'"

Miranda Sawyer at The Observer talks with Paul Weller.

"The Great Masculine Renunciation"

"Ford isn't a fashion historian but rather a professor at Stanford Law School. As such, he doesn't wallow in the minutiae of Savile Row tailoring or wander into the weeds of Seventh Avenue personalities. Instead, he has a lawyer's eye for the ways in which legislation and common law have helped shape attitudes about fashion, along with a fan's sustained curiosity about fashion's visual language."

Robin Givhan at The Washington Post reviews Richard Thompson Ford's Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Changed History.

"The Pandemic Was the Final Straw"

"Guy says, 'When I talk to people who have been in the trade since the '60s and '70s, they say, "We used to sell suits." People would come in, buy a suit. And if you bought a suit, that means you also need a dress shirt. And if you wear a dress shirt, you also need a tie. You might also need a pocket square, you also need dress shoes, you need dress socks. This was your uniform. That's what you wore. Eventually the sport coat gave way, and then men only started purchasing sweaters. And then eventually the sweater gave way, and now many men only purchase a dress shirt and the chinos. They don't even purchase the tie.'" 

Seth Stevenson at Slate discusses the fall of Brooks Brothers.

"The Gritty Pinnacle of West-Coast Cool"

"By 1984 dozens of off beat independent businesses and forward thinking boutiques dominated the Avenue and over night these old rundown stucco buildings started to house kooky, outlandish and colorful shops covered in Graffiti and the store employees were the main attraction."

Alison Martino in a 2014 Los Angeles article remembers Melrose Avenue in the 1980s.

"A Great Unsung Hero in British Fashion"

"Simons started another trend while in Richmond. Still fascinated by east-coast jazz and the New York School art scene, he travelled to the Big Apple to meet manufacturers. He managed to negotiate bargain prices on end-of-season lines to bring back to the UK. 'Of course, their last season wasn't our last season,' he says. 'I went to the Empire State Building and bought all these madras shirts for a dollar a dozen. People were jumping up and down for them in London.'"

Andy Welch at The Guardian profiles London haberdasher John Simons.

"Ebbs and Flows"

"All cultures have histories. Young people born in North America may imagine that their grandmother's recipes or wardrobe emerged autochthonously in a timeless ancestral homeland. But that only reflects how thoroughly they have Americanized themselves, reducing other countries' complexities to folklores to be fetishized rather than understood and evaluated on their own terms."

David Frum at The Atlantic criticizes the "cultural-appropriation police."

"The DNA of Youth Culture, From Which Every Youth Movement–Punk, Glam-Rock, Two-Tone and Rave–Has Grown"

"Mod fashions and music were carried to the nation by Ready Steady Go!, broadcast every Friday evening ('The weekend starts here'), with its studio audience of 'faces', cherry-picked from London mod venues, which had the effect of both spreading the style and diluting its cult appeal. Weight is very good on the essential elitism of any youth cult, and the contempt with which the original 'faces' regarded the arriviste 'tickets'.
"By the mid-Sixties, 'mod' had become an all-purpose adjective applied to anything young, fresh, unconventional and stylish–Mary Quant, Biba, the Beatles, Terence Conran and Habitat, Carnaby Street: the whole 'Swinging London' cliché."

In The Telegraph in 2013, Mick Brown reviews Richard Weight's Mod: A Very British Style.

"We're Not Good Because We're Old, We're Old Because We're Good."

"An entrepreneur credited with introducing the ready-to-wear suit to the American market, Mr. Brooks also laid the groundwork for innovations—sack suits, navy blazers, reverse-striped rep ties, button-down shirts, patchwork madras, seersucker suits—now so familiar we tend to forget they were ever new. 'He was a disrupter and influencer,' Mr. Del Vecchio said of Mr. Brooks. 'And we're ready to start the disruption again.'"

Guy Trebay at The New York Times discusses the bicentennial of Brooks Brothers.

And Matthew Walther at The Week praises the company.

"This Is a Robbery in Progress"

"Private equity firms borrow massively to buy companies, and use corporate cash reserves to pay themselves back. Workers who supply the value to the business see nothing; in fact, to service the debt, companies usually cut staff. When the retailer collapses under the borrowing weight, all workers lose their jobs. And even when sales go up, like they have by 5 percent annually in the toy sector over the past five years, dominant toy sellers like Toys"R"Us cannot compete because of the debt burden. The company's profitability was increasing when it filed for bankruptcy."

David Dayen at the New Republic argues that the retail "apocalypse didn’t have to happen."

And Derek Thompson at The Atlantic discusses the rise of "bricks-and-clicks" stores

"Fred Perry Forced to Denounce Skinheads"

"It started as an accident: Fred Perry launched around the height of mod fashion in England, and trendy youths latched onto the shirts as symbols of identification with the movement. Mods begat short-haired, working-class hard mods, which begat apolitical skinheads who chose Fred Perry shirts to match the colors of their favorite soccer teams. When a substantial segment of skinheads joined up with the far-right National Front party in the '70s, Fred Perry’s association with racist right-wing extremism was born."

Christina Cauterucci at Slate discusses Fred Perry in the age of Trump.

"The Safety Pin and the Swastika"

"When that under­ly­ing assump­tion remains unques­tioned, the rhetoric of main­stream antiracism is itself sus­cep­ti­ble to appro­pri­a­tion by the right. This is what leads some­one like Richard Spencer to voice approval for inci­dents like one at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ottawa, when a free yoga class for stu­dents with dis­abil­i­ties was shut down for 'cul­tur­al issues of impli­ca­tion.' A Stu­dent Fed­er­a­tion state­ment on the mat­ter went as far as to link it to the threat of 'cul­tur­al geno­cide.' At the blog for Radix Jour­nal, an alt-right pub­li­ca­tion he found­ed, Spencer could bare­ly con­tain his excite­ment. He cit­ed the inci­dent as an exam­ple of 'racial con­scious­ness for­ma­tion,' and applaud­ed stu­dent activists for 'engag­ing in the kind of ide­o­log­i­cal project that tra­di­tion­al­ists should be hard at work on.'
"It should go with­out say­ing that left-lib­er­al iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics and alt-right white nation­al­ism are not com­pa­ra­ble. The prob­lem is that they are com­pat­i­ble."
Shuja Haider at Viewpoint argues that "if they were con­front­ed by a uni­fied 'we'–a sub­ject that refused to rec­og­nize the bor­ders, divi­sions, and hier­ar­chies that are reg­u­lat­ed by the log­ic of iden­ti­ty–the alt-right would be left with nowhere to plant its flag."

"The Casual Ethic Is Embodied in This Solitary Figure of Freedom"

"It had been so easy once upon a time, we mused. If you were a good accountant or lawyer, or worked in sales or almost any other non-blue-collar office job, you put on your dark business suit, white shirt, discreet tie, black oxfords and went to work. It was all rather simple and time-saving and free of nagging choices. You might have incorporated a few personal touches like a pocket square or fancy wristwatch. But you didn't have to worry about whether to wear the tangerine-colored cashmere turtleneck with the fawn suede blouson or the cappuccino-colored, waxed cotton shooting jacket with the puce narrow-wale cords (choices for which there seemed to be no authoritative guidance). As long as things fitted decently and weren’t garish, you were safe. More than a few men have told me they no longer understand what's appropriate for any occasion anymore, except maybe weight-training."

G. Bruce Boyer at First Things discusses men's clothing.

"I Keep Telling People I'm a Fashion Icon"

"He knows that you probably didn't know that he's an actual living person, or that if you had at one point heard that he was a tennis player, you most likely thought he was already dead. 'I'd love to sit here and say the success of the shoe has been totally because I'm such a great guy or I'm such a great player or whatever. But, you know …' So what is it like when a shoe named after a man is way more famous than the man born with the name himself? To have your name mean so much beyond who you actually are? When you Google Stan Smith, only one of the first 100 images are of the man."

Lauren Schwartzberg at New York talks with Stan Smith, of the eponymous tennis shoe.

"Biden Busted In DNC Parking Lot Selling Bootleg 'I'm With Her' T-Shirts"

"'Those cops cost me a good chunk of change when they yanked my merch, but luckily I've got an extra box of these babies stashed in the trunk of my Zam,' said Biden, who acknowledged the printing was a bit off-center on his knock-off shirts and that he had 'completely blanked' on what Clinton’s logo looked like, but repeatedly insisted the unauthorized apparel was 'pretty damn close.'"

From The Onion.

Additionally...
"Biden Chokes Up While Describing Hardworking Americans Who Can Only Afford Shitty Ditch Weed"

And finally...
"Biden Regales DNC With Story Of '80s Girl Band Vixen Breaking Hard Rock’s Glass Ceiling"

"The Five Tribes of Modern Male Fashion"

"There are, at this particular point in time, only five tribes from which to pick: the Perverse Prepster, the Arty Ninja, the Dedicated Follower of Satin, the Statham, and the Schlub. I guarantee that you, the ordinary man in the street, will fit comfortably into one of these categories. But how will you know?"

In Slate, Simon Doonan introduces a "field guide."

"Has Come to Symbolize Southern California Youth Culture"

"'My dad was down in Huntington Beach,' Van Doren said. 'Duke Kahanamoku was there, [surfers] Fred Hemmings, Corky Carroll and Paul Strauch were there too, and they all had these navy blue Hawaiian shirts on.... My dad said: "Duke, I can make you a pair of shoes out of that Hawaiian shirt …" Duke gave him Fred's shirt, my dad went back to the Randolph factory and made a pair of shoes for him.'"

Adam Tschorn in the Los Angeles Times marks the fiftieth anniversary of Vans.

And Keith Plocek in the LA Weekly presents "The Secret History of The Endless Summer."

"The Story of Image-Makers: Parade Planners and Playwrights, Hollywood and the Mail-Order Catalog"

"Among the variety of Klansman costumes in the film, there appeared a new one: the one-piece, full-face-masking, pointed white hood with eyeholes, which would come to represent the modern Klan. Maybe it was Griffith who brought those pieces of fabric together in their soon-to-be iconic form; after all, his mother had sewn costumes for his Klansman father. Or, given the heterogeneity of Reconstruction Klan costumes, maybe Griffith got the idea from another source altogether: Freemason regalia. Or maybe it wasn't Griffith's idea at all, but that of Paris-trained, Costume Designer Guild's Hall-of-Famer Clare West, who worked on the film: maybe she had witnessed confraternal processions in the streets of Europe, or just made it up.
"What we do know is that the blockbuster popularity of The Birth of a Nation gave free advertising to a traveling fraternal order organizer, former Methodist minister, and garter salesman, William J. Simmons. Simmons didn't just organize fraternities; he’d joined fifteen of them, including the Knights Templar and the Masons. The 1915 lynching of Leo Frank had inspired Simmons to form a new anti-Semitic, nativist fraternity. One week before The Birth of a Nation's Atlanta premiere, Simmons received his state charter for 'The Invisible Empire, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Incorporated.' He sold hoods and robes ($6.50) sewn in a local shop, wrote a handbook—the Kloran—and, in 1920, hired publicists Edward Y. Clarke and Elizabeth Tyler to launch a massive campaign that attracted 100,000 new members in 16 months."

The New Republic publishes excerpts of  Alison Kinney's Hood.

"A Timeless, Endlessly Re-Inventable Signifier of Dashing Badassery"

"As with many illicit affairs, official censure only heightened the passion of Clarks collectors in Jamaica. When Clarks introduced the Wallabee (a boxier, moccasin-inspired version of the suede chukka) in 1967 and the Desert Trek (a center-stitched hiking shoe, instantly rechristened as 'bankrobbers' in Jamaica) in 1971, they practically flew off the stockists' shelves straight onto the album covers of reggae's most influential singers and DJs, dreadlocked Rastas and razor-trimmed lyrical gangsters alike. "

Edwin Houghton in Vogue discusses the popularity of Clarks Desert Boots in Jamaica.