Advertising agencies are forced to hire so-called ‘creative’ people. They are artists, writers, musicians, radio and television directors, and the like. They are sure to give you trouble. … The writers are thinking about the books they plan to write exposing advertising (and probably you) …The agency has tried to make it easy for you by keeping you away from these people. It has provided keepers or overseers called Account Executives. They are hired for their rugged good looks, their flair for wearing clothes, and their skill — sometimes brutal but always effective — in handling creative people.
This vision of soft-shoulder, narrow lapeled, two buttoned, smokey glory is Marcello Mastroianni in La Dolce Vita (1960).
What you see draped over that drop-dead handsome Italian is called the Continental style which gained popularity in the midcentury thanks to movies like Roman Holiday and Vita.
As we have established through wild eyed adoration of Gregory Peck and Cary Grant that by 1962 the smaller suits, with flatter trouser, and thinner ties were considered standard but modern dress for the upwardly mobile man in Manhattan (this will be on the test, people!). But the truly daring man, the fashionable, trendseeking man, could have verged towards the Continental style made popular through the Brioni shop.
Brioni was an Italian designer who outfitted the olive tanned men of Europe and, most importantly for our purposes, tailored the suits for American movie stars wore whenever they appeared in an Roman romp (Henry Fonda, Gregory Peck, Rock Hudson).
The Brioni/Continental style suits have an even slimmer silhouette to their American counter parts, slanting pockets, without patterns or pins, double cuffs, looser collar and usually comes in cool colors (Brussels blues and Geneva greys), and the general aloofness that comes with riding scooters by 800 year old fountains.
Now think back to that dreadful number Don wore when he and Betty played their little game of pick up in Rome. He was wearing a bright blue sack suit! No wonder Betty called him ugly. Only in a place as hip as Rome could Don be a square.
In the number “A Secretary is Not a Toy” you can see an uncanny resemblence to the Sterling Cooper floor plan as the men in gray suits stroll up and down the rows of steno machines reminding one another that
A secretary is not to be Used for play therapy. Be good to the girl you employ, boy. Remember no matter what Neurotic trouble you’ve got A secretary is not a toy.
She’s a highly specialized key component Of operational unity, A fine and sensitive mechanism To serve the office community. With a mother at home she supports; And you’ll find nothing like her at FAO Schwarz.
These play was produced in 1961. The Tony Awards: Best Musical, Best Book; Pulitzer Prize for Drama; Drama Critics Circle Award were all snagged by it before the movie version came out in 1967. Aspirational lyricism!
A few times when I’ve mentioned this blog and the book and the show, before I can finish the sentence some one will blurt out “OH! IT’S LIKE ‘HOW TO SUCCEED IS BUSINESS WITHOUT TRYING!”
And I say, “Sure! I guess!..?”
I haven’t seen the musical since I was a tot, I remembered men in suits singing (one of them happening to be Robert Morse aka Bert Cooper at an insurance office and some flowy skirts) but until now haven’t really gotten around to re watching it.
The design..
The interiors…
Robert Morse singing….
Moral of the story: WHAT AN ABSOLUTE FOOL I HAVE BEEN!
While reeling from the Kennedy killing Betty witnesses the on-camera murder of Harvey Lee Oswald and now, she is onthe verge.
Frantic, she turns to Don hoping some one can make sense of what she just saw or at least share in her despair. No use, Don seems unfazed. He and can only offer her some vague stoicism. Betty’s out the door! She drives to see her boyfriend, the Snug Like a Daddy’s hug Harry Francis. He can’t make sense of it either. Betty says doesn’t know what to do. Maybe see a movie? She tells Francis her favorite movie is ‘Singing in the Rain’
Oh, Betty! What’s there not to love about ‘Singing the Rain’? While Don’s at the art house taking in those mopey black and whites, there’s Betty watching Gene Kelly splash around on MGM lot. I love it!
Kelly, Kelly, Kelly. Look at him. He was a different kind of leading man/dancer than Fred Astaire. Kelly was more adventurous and athethetlic; Brawnier, even. As David film Oracle Thomson put it, ‘As a dancer he is not equal of Astaire. Kelly is balletic, Romantic, and sometimes mannered as a dancer who thinks and feels, where Astaire is a man who dances before he thinks.”
But like all great men, there’s a darkness to Kelly. For me, and for Thomson there is a creeping chill Kelly’s performances (perhaps that’s why he was less successful as a straight leading man). There’s a nascent aggression Kelly that gets blown up on the screen. You can also hear it in his singing voice which was always just a bit strained.
Thomspson wrote of it: “Too often, Kelly’s teeth glared out at us, as the filling for a smile.’
The title song, and the best number in the movie, is set at night; Kelly is alone, for the most part, doing what you would expect. He is impervious to the elements because of his cheerful mood. Beyond the intricacy of the dance, perhaps one of the reasons why that scene is so indelible is because it’s what so many Americans, like Betty, wanted from the movies: a quick respite from the hard rain falling outside, alone, in the dark.
1960 trailer for The Apartment. The narrator keeps insisting the story is warm and delightful but according to our beloved film critic David Thomson:
“In hindsight, I have the impression that The Apartment feels very sour… Its world (like that of Psycho) is unrelievedly bleak—Sheldrake (MacMurray), for instance, is a very cold blooded-fellow.”
We’ve seen it. And we wept in that way you do when you know he will never leave his wife but you still love him. And you feel very alone.
“How about a movie? I hear The Apartment is good,” Joan baits Roger, waiting for an opportunity to describe the misfortune of Fran Kubelik, a congenial elevator operator played by Shirley MacLaine who sleeps with the married men her office building. “The way those men treated that poor girl, handing her around like a tray of canapés?” Joan snaps when Roger says nothing, “She tried to commit suicide”.
This exchange comes on heels of a hotel room tryst where Roger suggests Joan get her own apartment so they could stop sneaking around.
“Don’t you like things the way they are?” Joan asks while re-adjusting her dress.
“Are you kidding?” Roger responds. “This has been the best year of my life. Do you have any idea how unhappy I was before I met you? I was thinking about leaving my wife.”
Released in 1960, Billy Wilder’s The Apartment likely sparked similar spats between professional men and the women who loved them (no, not their wives—the other women who loved them). Jack Lemmon stars as a hapless middle-manager whose apartment is considered community property by his bosses: use the pad to conduct extra-marital liaisons. The suicide attempt to which Joan refers comes after MacLaine’s Kubelik, object of affection to Lemmon’s C.C. Baxter, is faced with the grim realization that Baxter’s Sheldrake, played by Fred MacMurray, is, despite his apparent interest in her, is cold, rational, and unlikely to leave his wife. Sound like anyone we know?
You guys! We’ve never discussed the Most Important Outfit of All: Don Draper’s uniform! The gray flannel suit.
So the gray flannel suit gets a bad wrap; the single breasted, three buttoned, narrow lapelled, tapered trouser is cultural short hand for the stultifying conformity of the 1950s and early ‘60s (with the accompanying necktie serving as a metaphorical noose. ) No other dress style of the modern era elicits with such scorn as the gray suit.This is thanks in part to the 1960 book The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and the Gregory Peck movie based on the novel . The suit in Sloan Wilson’s story is emblematic of pervasive soullessness in the mechanized world,making men numb to themselves and their families and their morals.
Yet the reason for the mass adoption of the suit was not likely due to thoughtless conformity. Before the late 1960’s men didn’t really own very many clothes! As men moved off the factory floor and into a corporate building the new standardized uniform became the gray flannel suit. From lowly office drone, to FBI spook, or IBM engineer, the men riding the train into Grand Central wore the same wore the same thing (sometimes accented with a brimmed hat, tweed overcoat, and a handy umbrella).
The gray suit was an acceptable wardrobe to wear daily that didn’t require much upkeep nor varied season to season. And while yes, the suit was a type of uniform, to make the historic verdict that men who donned the outfit did so out of unquestioned conformity is too simplistic.
According a Time magazine article “The Masculine Mode,” from 1964, the American male over 30 actually preferred to dress similarly to everyone around him. “If one of his colleagues — or two of them — turns up in the same outfit he is wearing, he does not feel embarrassed, as would his wife. He feels reassured.”
In Don’s case, as for most men in gray flannel suits, their business uniform allowed them to singal a sense privilege and status that a farm boy on Madisonwould not generally be able to access.
One of the things that grabs Ladies of a Certain Age about Mad Men is the authenticity of the seriously fraught gender dynamic of the era.
Take Peggy for instance, through each season we watch her get squeezed between her two desires to be liked by men and respected by them. Given the setting, it seems she can only pick one.
Well, here’s a fantastic post by art critic Carol Diehl about the sexuality of the era, featuring appearances by Brigitte Bardot, Ann Margret and Mad Men:
“Last night, after the turkey, we watched two films from 1963-64 back-to-back: Brigitte Bardot in Jean Luc Godard’s “Contempt,” and “VivaLas Vegas” with Elvis and Ann-Margret. To my male friends it was high camp, but for me, watching them produced flashbacks of what it was like to grow up in that era: wanting men, wanting them to like you, wanting them to want you, but at the same time having to fend them off on a daily basis, the frustration of having your strengths ignored while being valued for your sexual potential…”
![This vision of soft-shoulder, narrow lapeled, two buttoned, smokey glory is Marcello Mastroianni in La Dolce Vita (1960).
What you see draped over that drop-dead handsome Italian is called the Continental style which gained popularity in the midcentury thanks to movies like Roman Holiday and Vita.
As we have established through wild eyed adoration of Gregory Peck and Cary Grant that by 1962 the smaller suits, with flatter trouser, and thinner ties were considered standard but modern dress for the upwardly mobile man in Manhattan (this will be on the test, people!). But the truly daring man, the fashionable, trendseeking man, could have verged towards the Continental style made popular through the Brioni shop.
Brioni was an Italian designer who outfitted the olive tanned men of Europe and, most importantly for our purposes, tailored the suits for American movie stars wore whenever they appeared in an Roman romp (Henry Fonda, Gregory Peck, Rock Hudson).
The Brioni/Continental style suits have an even slimmer silhouette to their American counter parts, slanting pockets, without patterns or pins, double cuffs, looser collar and usually comes in cool colors (Brussels blues and Geneva greys), and the general aloofness that comes with riding scooters by 800 year old fountains.
Now think back to that dreadful number Don wore when he and Betty played their little game of pick up in Rome. He was wearing a bright blue sack suit! No wonder Betty called him ugly. Only in a place as hip as Rome could Don be a square.
Related links:
History of Brioni Style [A Modernist]
Ivy League Jazz Style [RL Magazine]
Iconic fountain scene [Youtube]](http://27.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l5i2tdzm6e1qzlum5o1_400.jpg)
![You guys! We’ve never discussed the Most Important Outfit of All: Don Draper’s uniform! The gray flannel suit.
So the gray flannel suit gets a bad wrap; the single breasted, three buttoned, narrow lapelled, tapered trouser is cultural short hand for the stultifying conformity of the 1950s and early ‘60s (with the accompanying necktie serving as a metaphorical noose. ) No other dress style of the modern era elicits with such scorn as the gray suit. This is thanks in part to the 1960 book The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and the Gregory Peck movie based on the novel . The suit in Sloan Wilson’s story is emblematic of pervasive soullessness in the mechanized world, making men numb to themselves and their families and their morals.
Yet the reason for the mass adoption of the suit was not likely due to thoughtless conformity. Before the late 1960’s men didn’t really own very many clothes! As men moved off the factory floor and into a corporate building the new standardized uniform became the gray flannel suit. From lowly office drone, to FBI spook, or IBM engineer, the men riding the train into Grand Central wore the same wore the same thing (sometimes accented with a brimmed hat, tweed overcoat, and a handy umbrella).
The gray suit was an acceptable wardrobe to wear daily that didn’t require much upkeep nor varied season to season. And while yes, the suit was a type of uniform, to make the historic verdict that men who donned the outfit did so out of unquestioned conformity is too simplistic.
According a Time magazine article “The Masculine Mode,” from 1964, the American male over 30 actually preferred to dress similarly to everyone around him. “If one of his colleagues — or two of them — turns up in the same outfit he is wearing, he does not feel embarrassed, as would his wife. He feels reassured.”
In Don’s case, as for most men in gray flannel suits, their business uniform allowed them to singal a sense privilege and status that a farm boy on Madison would not generally be able to access.
Related Links:
* Somewhere in Time: Conform and Function [Ivy Style]
*Man in a Gray Flannel Trap [LIFE archive 1956]
*Brooks Brothers Don Draper Edition [Colider]](http://26.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l1iyx0r7rD1qzlum5o1_500.jpg)
