Author: Nick Hilton

Suzy Menkes, the doyenne of fashion journalism, started it. Writing about fashion for the International Herald Tribune, she tells a world-wide audience who is on and who is off in the latest Paris runway presentations. She’s the Siskel and Ebert of fashion, the first and foremost critic of clothes; she might even pan a designer’s efforts once in a while. She considers designers to be real artists; she conceives the whole women’s clothing industry to be an artistic endeavor, and her opinion is that of an art critic writing for any medium. It is interesting to consider how to distinguish art from commerce; but the modern runway show has blurred the lines. Did the Brand Name world we live in now evolve because of talent, or hype? Rarely do you hear of a fashion product that gained fame by being the proverbial better mouse trap. The extreme cases of this are things like make-up lines with super-model brand names. The more outrageous and extravagant the fashion show, the more “artistic.”  The more outlandish the outfits on the runway, the more the fashion press corps saw “art” in the presentation and so justify printing the pictures. That kind of news was sure to be picked up by the Kansas City Star.

So eventually these shows would be done for men’s clothing. The catch, however, was that menswear that actually sells in stores is pretty predictable. Men don’t relate to clothes as artistic. Men are into function, for the most part. Propriety. Practicality. Show a regular citizen of Middletown a picture of a guy in harem pants and a tunic and he’ll think you’re putting him on.  No one ever has the chutzpah to say this. In menswear everybody is so respectful. Even the humdrum offerings from the industrial likes of Tommy Hilfiger and Perry Ellis (who’s been dead for decades) get gushing tributes. It’s a combination of fear of damaging fragile egos and the threat of losing ad revenues. No one ever says anything bad. No one knows what would happen if a writer panned a men’s wear show. It’s never happened. It’s The Emperor’s New Clothes with a twist. Because the “newness” in men’s fashion shows is mostly unwearable. Instead of stimulating business, this PR has the opposite effect.

            Let’s face it. Menswear design really doesn’t take the kind of talent required to make a gold lamè-trimmed, silk tulle hooded, sleeveless evening gown with slippers, cape and matching Rolls Royce interior. That’s for the geniuses in Avenue Montaigne: the real designers. The editors and journalists who cover menswear want to be the Suzy Menkes of their side of the aisle. They don’t find a pair of grey serge trousers or a blue broadcloth shirt to be of any interest; not even the more obvious news stories, like the disappearance of the “enormous,” or the changing size of shirt collars, gets much attention. All this would amount to little more than a curious characteristic of the fashion journalism business, except for the fact that someone needs to tell men about the tides of change, about the evolution of style. Weird, useless “art” clothes – skirts, kimonos, and the like – in magazines and newspapers don’t help men or help the men’s clothing business. Aside from adding to the notoriety and hype surrounding a designer’s name, aside from the self-congratulation among industry insiders, they leave the average guy, young, old, straight, gay, urban, suburban, hip, callow, all of them, at best uninformed, at worst, turned off completely. 

Someone could write a book about Alan Abrams. I mean he’s at least as interesting a character as Frank Abagnale, Jr., the Catch Me If You Can guy. Maybe I’ll do it; in my next life. I wonder what happened to him, assuming he ever got out of jail… Because aside from his criminal shenanigans, the man was a personal harbinger of the menswear revolution of the 70s.

Back in the day, before commuting became a pre-dawn survival sport, there were “club” cars – private parlor cars attached to commuter trains that left Red Bank at seven thirty and returned from Penn Station at five-fifteen, delivering the Monmouth County captains of industry to their wives’ waiting station wagons (whence the name, see?) And these suburban titans paid handsomely to ride in a carpeted car with uniformed attendant, plush easy chairs, newspapers, pastries and coffee in the morning, newspapers, card games and a full bar in the evening. They played gin rummy; talked about cars, politics, bond prices; made bets on Yankees and Giants, fights and horses; whispered the latest Rumson gossip. Boy, did they dress well; Don Draper has nothing on these guys. Suits from Huntsman, de Pinna, Meledandri; sportswear from the original Abercrombie’s. Locke hats; Lobb shoes; Charvet shirts; ties from Sulka. The real deal.  A guy like Abrams, fellow traveler, who happened to be married to my father’s first cousin, was grist for their mill.

Once in a while my old man asked me to come to the city and help out during market periods, so I got to ride with him on the private car. My lesson in mid-century American Cool. Pocket watches and fobs, pocket hankies, vests and tie-tacks, hats in winter and summer, raincoats, umbrellas. Cuban cigars, Cartier lighters and silver pens, engraved cigarette cases, Peal briefcases, money clips. One old guy named Scudder, who owned the Newark Evening News, wore white linen, three piece suits and panama hats, like a coffee plantation owner.

But nobody did it – any of it – better than old cousin Alan Abrams. Mysterious in the Gatsby-esque way, movie-star-handsome, Prep-School-groomed, world-travelled, debonair, Ivy League, Jewish. (Which, in 60s Rumson, was noteworthy to say the least.) Seeming To The Manner Born, he was a man without a past. Even my family knew nothing about his past. The Manner shone from him like a Hollywood marquis, from the brim of his Borsalino to the tips of his New & Lingwoods, this guy was the shit. So it was somewhat surprising when he was arrested, charged with and convicted of felony forgery and sent to the state lockup, and, with characteristic flourish, when allowed to work on the Department of Corrections farm outside of Trenton, was last seen running toward the waiting station wagon of, not my father’s long-suffering, faithful first cousin, but none other than the daughter of the Rumson mayor, his secret (and secretly pregnant) girlfriend.

Before he got busted Alan was a club car regular. He played Alain Delon to the WASP-y nabobs’ Robert Mitchums; rat-pack panache versus country-club hauteur. The tenor of the conversation would lower as he passed through the car. Envy, anti-Semitism or just amazement. Who knows?

One summer evening in the summer of 69, as the train rattled to a stop in the Red Bank Station and Alan got up to disembark, my old man poked me, asked under his voice, “What do you think of the suit Alan’s wearing?”

“Huh?”

“The suit? See how it’s tight at the waist? The hourglass shape? The side vents? It’s English.”  

I was stuck for an answer. My dad may have been dismayed to realize, although scion of a great American clothing family, I had no idea what he was talking about. I had never looked at the shape of a suit jacket before. Every jacket I had, every one Norman had, and every one any one I’d ever met had, had the same shape. What was there to look at?

“That’s what they’re all talking about.”

I didn’t think to ask who “they” were. “Um,” I managed. “It’s nice.”

“That’s what Lauren wants,” he said.

The great escape was the last anyone heard of Alan Abrams. A clean getaway. Totally vanished, to my family’s great dismay, along with the mayor’s daughter. Until years later, probably because a young sales woman in the Burberry organization told be she’d been burned in a massive commodities futures Ponzi scheme by a phony operation known as J. Carr. Ltd., who fallaciously claimed to trade on the unregulated London exchange, did I recognize in the typical “perp” photo in the New York Times a handsome and impeccably dressed man being led in handcuffs from a fancy Boston town house, Alan Abrams, aka J. Carr.

Read this as a philosophical comment on the possibility of being totally wrong when you’re completely right; or it might be a comment on the nature of a certain generation of Italian men; maybe you’ll see in it a depiction of the self-assurance of a young designer that is emblematic of a certain genius; or maybe it’s a business fable with a familiar moral. Anyhow, here are the facts of the case:

In 1967 my father sold his shares in Winnebago Industries to invest $75,000 in a company called Polo Fashions, the brainchild of an employee of his named Ralph Lauren. My father had an instinct for the next big thing. (Eight years later he took on the U.S. agency for Burberry, then selling a few raincoats to a few stodgy men’s specialty stores.) Lauren had already achieved some notice for his extrvagant, 5-inch wide, richly textured and colored silk neckties, and his idea was to expand the line into dress shirts and furnishings, sportswear, and, finally, tailored clothing. Since Norman’s family owned Hilton Manufacturing, a clothing factory built by my great-grandfather in the 20s, this was to be a win-win all around.

Mike Cifarelli was the “designer” at Hilton Manufacturing. Today I think he would be called a pattern-maker, but back then the guy (always a guy) who made the “paper” was The Man. He always wore a crisp white shirt and a necktie, black, in mourning for his father, and he never laughed. He never really spoke much, in fact, as his English was as bad as his self-importance was large. But he was unquestionably The Man. It would be easy for me to go off on any number of tangents right here, but this is a blog, not a book. Suffice it to say that Cifarelli created one really great jacket model, at Norman’s behest, which had been the reason why my father’s business, in 1967, was unbelievably good. Everything he made subsequently, however, was this one model with minor variations.

The “kid” (Lauren) had a definite idea in mind for his clothing, down to the lapel width, the shape of the notch, the waist suppression, where the coat should button, the length of the vent, everything. He’d told my father the inspiration was Adolphe Menjou and his romantically classic style, and this idée-fixe was the driving force of Polo from the start. Cifarelli didn’t know from Adolphe Menjou or anything like romantic anything, but he knew (or thought he knew) what made clothing sell at retail. I suppose a series of encounters took place, at the last of which Cifarelli, unable to verbally convince Lauren of the folly of such a skinny-waisted, low-button jacket, threw the garment on the floor and stomped on it like it was a live animal, yelling “Not in-a my shop!” and so on, at which Ralph walked disgustedly out, went to Lawrence, Massachusetts to the waiting arms of Leo Lozzi and Lanham Clothes, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Wait. There’s more.

Cifarelli retired eventually, leaving no one trained to be his successor, but the head tailor in the Hilton shop was then another Italian Mike, this one surnamed Cruscito. The retail icon Danny Zarem was a friend of Halston’s and a fan of the legendary quality of Norman Hilton’s tailoring. Halston had apparently been convinced by Zarem that his name would sell men’s clothing as well as women’s, and Hilton was selected as the manufacturer. ( A footnote here would mention that the timing of this was crucial, because by 1975, more fashionable lines like Polo were eating our proverbial lunch, and the factory was literally working hand-to-mouth.) Following Halston’s instructions, a freelance pattern maker had given the factory a paper pattern for a man’s jacket with very distinctive lines and a feature as yet unseen in the men’s tailored clothing business: a one-piece back, together with trousers designed with rather narrow legs.

So we made the sample, amid a lot of bitching and moaning about having to make so strange a garment, with no center-back seam and all, and the day came to bring it to Halston, then ensconced in a five-story townhouse cum design studio cum residence in the East 60s. Butler, houseboys, the works. You get the picture. A cloudy spring afternoon. Me and Cruscito and Frank Cuzzola, the guy who drove us. This was the industrial equivalent of a scene from the Beverly Hillbillies, except that I alone among the three of us, actually knew who Halston was, and what he stood for, and the Liza connection and all the rest. To my colleagues he was just a rich finocchio with a strange finocchio suit.

After a few minutes of pleasantries it became imperative in Mr. Cruscito’s mind to explain to Mr. Halston the myriad problems with the one-piece back. To which Mr. Halston responded with I have to say a supercilious remark to the effect that the problems with alterations and fit were not important to him, a spark to the Italian’s tinderbox. “I am a professional,” Cruscito says, to which Halston’s initial flustered response is “I am a professional, too.” Hardly worthy of the more famous man, but sufficient to tank the meeting pretty much altogether; and thus after a few more minutes of very tense chit-chat from me, the three of us headed back down the stairs, into the Cadillac and back to NJ.

The Twin Extremes of Menswear Disappointment

I went to a men’s store recently because I wanted some new clothes. I’m upset because…

Either:
They told me that styles had changed, and that to keep up with the latest trend I should “update my wardrobe…”

Or:
They told me that I should wear the classic styles and that suit a man of my age and position in life. They told me that fashion is nonsense and that I’m better off with the old “tried and true…”

So:
I bought some stuff that makes me look silly. When I wear it I feel like I’m standing out, like I’m in a weird costume, not appropriate for my life. I spent a lot of money and I trusted those guys and I regret it.

Or:
I came out with clothes exactly like I’ve always had. I really can’t tell the stuff I bought from my old stuff. It might be better quality, but there’s no way I can tell. I spent a lot of money and I trusted those guys and I regret it.