Younger Well-Dressed Law Prof Notes Clothing Generation Gap
Fashion observers are noting something of a clothing generation gap between baby boomer men given to wearing sloppy dressed-down duds and the younger generation of men who are embracing cutting-edge fashion.
Among the observers is Samuel Rascoff, a 36-year-old law professor at New York University who sports a tie and dress suit in the photo for his law school bio. “The fashion gene skipped a generation,” he tells the New York Times.
The Times notes that the hippie movement took pride in shunning the corporate look. “Now the tie is on the other neck,” the story says. “Today the well-off 55-year-old is likely to be the worst-dressed man in the room, wearing a saggy T-shirt and jeans. The cash-poor 25-year-old is in a natty sport coat and skinny tie bought at Topman for a song.”
Clothing stores are responding to the trend. The Gap is selling neckties and American Apparel is selling bow ties. Paul Stuart is reporting most of its growth is in its “trim-tailored, dandified (and expensive) Phineas Cole line, courtesy of customers in their 20s and 30s,” the story says. Topman is doing well with its “smart” clothing line and Brooks Brothers has gotten a boost after designing the dress suits for the show Mad Men.
Rascoff told the Times he has seen the new fashion consciousness in his students. “There’s a sense that this return to style, or to a consciousness of how you look, is an attempt by young men to recover a set of values that were at one point very much present in American society and then lost,” he told the newspaper.
“It strikes me as being of a piece with the way young people buy their coffee or their food: paying attention to authenticity or quality, and to whether something is organic or local. They stand for a rejection of the idea that all consumer goods are ephemeral and inevitably made in China and bought at Wal-Mart.”
