Classic Style

The bottom half today.  Pants by Brooks Brothers, socks by Dapper Classics, and shoes by Allen Edmonds A warm one this afternoon and, naturally, also the day we had to take our son to meet his new teacher and school principle.  Blue and red short-sleeve Madras shirt, navy chino shorts, and light blue and yellow tennis shoes for the Young Master.  The Grand Duchess wore a tan linen sundress with sandals, and yours truly wore a navy hopsack blazer, a lightweight white cotton button-down shirt with navy pinstripes, linen pants, green socks by Dapper Classics, and a pair of Allen Edmonds tassled loafers.  A brown braided belt and a silk pocket square featuring an orange edge, and an orange, smoky gray, and white geometric pattern completed the picture.  First outing for the pants, and they were indeed comfortable and breezy.  Wrinkled like a charm too.  Very happy with my thrifted purchase from two (?) years ago.  Hmmm.  I think a linen sui...

Ward Cleaver -- one of my favorite TV dads and played by the late Hugh Beaumont -- sets Wally, The Beav, Eddie Hascal, and Lumpy Rutherford straight. A new university semester starts in just a couple of days, and as I make the final finishing touches to my online course management pages and look over my class lists (I've got 150 students ranging from freshmen to seniors this term across three courses), thoughts turn to polite behavior.  Hopefully, politeness on my part will beget polite behavior from my students.  We'll see.   I should probably post the photograph above in a prominent place for each one of these online course management pages, but there is probably a university regulation somewhere that says we shouldn't.  I am, nevertheless, a firm believer that there ought to be a required two-semester course sequence on most college and university campuses in the United States on basic etiquette and polite decorum.  Most (though certainly not all...

  A few photographs from our Berlin sojourn this past summer.  We rented an apartment in a quieter section of Berlin-Tempelhof, a few blocks off the bustling Tempelhoferdamm, a major north-south artery in the southern part of the city along the U6 line of the Berlin Underground, the extensive, convenient, and very clean U-bahn.  Here is an old villa around the corner and down the street from our apartment building. A different kind of post today featuring only a dozen, or so photographs (I promise) from our stay in Berlin during July and August.  I am aware how mind-numbing it can be sitting through someone else's vacation pictures and videos, so I've included only a few specific to where we stayed in the city.  No Brandenburg Gate, DDR TV tower, or, for that matter, pictures of anyone making the goofy and ubiquitous Sicilian horn curse sign with his or her fingers and hanging the tongue out of the mouth, ala Gene Simmons from KISS or Miley Cyrus, to demon...

Harrison Ford as Professor of Archaeology Henry Walton 'Indiana' Jones, sporting a bowtie and three-piece tweed suit no less. W ell, after a week on campus at Michigan State University, attending various orientations and workshops for new faculty, I am happy to report that there are quite a few men on this sprawling campus who seem to 'get it.'   While I have not seen anyone in a tweed suit (hey, it is still too warm for that kind nonsense) like the one worn above by Professor Jones, I have seen various male faculty, staff, and administration in suits with neckties, decent shoes, and more casual sports jackets or blazers worn with odd wool pants or crisp chinos.  Heck, I've even seen a few Panama hats around campus as well as fathers at my son's school arriving to drop off or retrieve Junior and Juniorette in suits, neckties, and dark leather dress shoes without the dreaded square toes.   It would seem that we have come to the right place.  Thus ...

The old East German TV tower in downtown Berlin. W ell, we arrived home a few days ago from our almost seven weeks in Berlin, and I have a number of style thoughts to share based on my own experience and just looking around at the people around me.  Ready Freddy?  Here we go! 1) The citizens of Berlin, many of them at least, dress very colorfully.  The men as well as the women.  I could have easily gotten away with my mossy green and Nantucket red shorts and pants.  Sadly, I left these in my dresser at home, opting instead for khakis and olive drab. 2) Many young guys and even a few older ones seemed to be sporting a modified version of the northeastern beachside/bayside look., i.e. khaki shorts, a short-sleeved knit polo or madras shirt, and either leather deck shoes or rubber soled shoes with canvas uppers not unlike Keds.  Hey, you cannot argue or go wrong with a classic look like this during the summer months. 3) The weather was so warm for ...