Beautiful, Out of Place

All the folks jumping onto Italian menswear, linen blazers, and European tailoring on the streets of New Delhi and Bangalore are forgetting something fundamental:

Fashion, beauty & aesthetics have historically been tied down to their context.

Many of the world’s greatest works of art were never intended to be viewed in museums. They were created for specific places, people, and purposes.

Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” was not painted for an art gallery. It was painted onto the wall of a monastery dining hall. Every day, as monks gathered to eat, they found themselves seated beneath Christ and the Apostles at their final meal.

The painting drew its power from where it belonged.

Fashion works the same way.

A linen blazer in Naples belongs to a climate, a culture, a pace of life, a particular quality of sunlight, architecture, and street life. The garment is only one part of the composition.

Good style is not the art of collecting beautiful clothes. It is the art of placing beautiful clothes in the right context.

This does not mean long coats, tailoring, or Mediterranean menswear are bad. Far from it. Many of them are beautiful. I personally love and enjoy seeing them.

But style is more than beauty.

Style is coherence.