THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, July 17, 1996 TAG: 9607170352
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Guy Friddell
LENGTH: 53 lines
An article Tuesday noted that men's attire no longer follows fashions in the movies.
When did it ever?
Oh, now and then there's a brief spell of influence exerted by film costuming, as in 1977 when males dressed themselves in the style of John Travolta after `Saturday Night Fever,'' in which he danced in white polyester.
Trouble is, very few looked like John Travolta, a slick, sallow fellow with a hint of glitter.
Most disco kids who dressed in white and went dancing with dates looked like a chimpanzee act dressed in white for the third ring in the circus. I prefer the chimps. The original always is better.
In 1980 a rash of cowboy boots spread after the premiere of ``Urban Cowboy.'' Although a strain of John Wayne broke out among males, few looked like rugged Wayne - though they tried to talk his way and lumber around as if they had just fallen from one horse too many.
Fellows from Texas and thereabouts are inclined still to the Wayne sway. The question, when you see one in boots and a cowboy hat, is where is the horse?
Sort of spoils the effect when there's no whinnying and arrival of Tony (Tom Mix), Trigger (Roy Rogers) or Silver (The Lone Ranger) in a clatter of hooves. Did the Cisco Kid or Zorro ride El Diablo?
``You don't dress like your father anymore,'' one stylist said. The heck we don't. Some of us dress yet in our fathers' clothes.
Just now one of my father's two seersucker coats - one of brown stripes, the other of blue ones - is handy in the car seat beside me. Both are faded from years in the sun and occasional rains. Sun-faded? How would that go for a commercial?
The great thing about seersucker suits is they are meant to look wrinkled. In the genuine cotton variety, one looks as if one has just struggled to one's feet after breaking up a fight between a bulldog and an Airedale. If you were in a seersucker, all you need is to brush yourself off, the way dogs shake themselves before trotting away.
Here and there, stores bring back stout-hearted styles. One day last week, dawdling outside an office building waiting for a young fellow, I looked up to see him approaching, clad from tip to toe in a seersucker suit, a smile on his face.
In it he bore a startling resemblance, not to his father, thanks be to the gods, but to his grandfather, the very picture of the way he looked in his mid-40s when I was 10 or so.
``When you get ready to give up that suit,'' I told him, ``let me have it.''
There's nothing like a hand-me-down - or up - to give one a fleeting sense of immortality conjoining generations. by CNB