Gentleman - A Timeless Guide To Fashion

There was a time when being a gentleman involved rather more than owning a novelty bow tie and remembering not to eat soup directly from the saucepan. It required standards: polished shoes, properly tied neckwear, a coat that fitted across the shoulders and an instinctive understanding that socks bearing cartoon characters were best kept within the privacy of the home.

In Gentleman: A Timeless Guide to Fashion, Bernhard Roetzel conducts an extensive tour through the traditional male wardrobe, explaining the history, purpose and proper use of everything from bespoke suits and dinner jackets to brogues, braces, hats, handkerchiefs and those mysterious little implements found in expensive shaving sets. This is not merely a catalogue of clothes, but a substantial illustrated guide to the customs and rituals surrounding them: how a jacket should fit, which shoes belong with which trousers, what constitutes genuine quality and why apparently insignificant details can separate the impeccably dressed man from someone who appears to have won his outfit in a pub raffle.

Roetzel ventures into the tailoring houses, shoemakers, shirtmakers and specialist shops responsible for preserving the finer points of masculine dress. Along the way, he considers fabrics, patterns, accessories, grooming, luggage and leisurewear, offering enough information to make the reader inspect his own wardrobe with mounting disappointment. Even the apparently straightforward business of buying a shirt turns out to involve collars, cuffs, cloth, construction and proportions—proof that civilisation rests upon a far more complicated foundation than most of us had realised.

The book belongs firmly to the world of timeless style rather than passing fashion. There are no instructions for wearing trousers that appear to have suffered a disagreement with a lawnmower, nor any suggestion that a plastic sports watch should accompany a dinner jacket. Instead, it champions garments made properly, chosen intelligently and worn for years: an admirable philosophy that sadly requires rather more money, patience and personal discipline than buying three multipacks from the supermarket.

Lavishly illustrated and reassuringly authoritative, this is both a practical reference work and an enjoyable piece of wardrobe-based escapism. It can teach an aspiring gentleman how to distinguish Oxford shoes from Derbies, understand the mysteries of black tie and recognise why his existing suit never looked quite like it did on the mannequin. Whether it will persuade him to iron his shirts is, naturally, beyond the power of any book.

Ideal for devotees of classic menswear, students of costume, reluctant wedding guests, habitual overdressers and anyone who has ever wondered whether a pocket square should match a tie—the answer, delivered with the silent disappointment of generations of tailors, is generally no. It is also excellent for placing on a coffee table, where visitors may conclude that its owner possesses impeccable taste without being allowed sufficient time to inspect his actual socks.

This 2009 HF Ullmann edition is in Good condition. A handsome and comprehensive guide to dressing like a gentleman, behaving like one being regrettably outside the scope of the volume.

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