NEW YORK, Oct 2 — Though roughly 330 million deities populate the Hindu heavens, there are only a handful most people worship daily and know by name. Similarly, though there are about 330 billion images of celebrity divinities floating around the web empyrean at any given moment, when it comes down to it we seem inevitably to worship the same group of guys. This is meant in terms of style.

One hardly needs name them. Just utter the words “male style icon” and images inevitably form of celestial beings like Cary Grant, Paul Newman or Steve McQueen.

At least they do among that segment of the population that came of age before all manner of visual information was streamed directly onto the cerebral cortex by way of Instagram. That group would, of course, include most menswear designers, never in any case a culturally progressive group and less so when it comes to frame of reference — or, as image theft is often euphemised in fashion, “inspiration.”

“A lot of designers latch on to the same handful of guys,” designer Michael Bastian noted recently, declining to point any fingers, both for diplomacy and because he himself has made frequent withdrawals from the familiar image bank. “It’s Steve McQueen, it’s Paul Newman, it’s Cary Grant and Fred Astaire, all done to utter death,” Bastian said.

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It is probably worth pointing out that there are good reasons why the same small group of men continues to exert a disproportionate influence on what we think of as men’s style.

US actor Cary Grant poses during the XVIIth Biennale del Cinema in August 1939. — AFP pic
US actor Cary Grant poses during the XVIIth Biennale del Cinema in August 1939. — AFP pic

Not only were Steve McQueen, Paul Newman and Cary Grant uncommonly handsome humans, they were also possessed of that certain ineffable quality we categorise as cool. They looked great in clothes seemingly no matter what they wore. In part, this was because they looked as if they gave clothes and fashion not a moment’s thought.

“Perhaps the first thing I learned about style was that if something makes you feel good, chances are you look good,” Remo Rufini — the 54-year-old Italian billionaire who made his fortune by restoring cool to Moncler, a fusty and largely forgotten ski-wear label — said during the recent New York Fashion Week. “I think what makes people ‘icons’ is the confidence they give off wearing whatever it is they love to wear.”

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Preternatural confidence is a signal quality of the male icons under discussion. And it is, to be sure, a highly limited group, lacking altogether in racial and social and gender diversity.

“So few black leaders have been allowed to shine forth” and find an enduring place in the style pantheon, said Horace D Ballard Jr, an essayist on black style and curator of education at the Birmingham Museum of Art. “Where is Marvin Gaye or Paul Robeson?”

The available images of each of those men, no less than those of Newman, McQueen and Grant, convey a powerful sense of the difference between wearing one’s clothes and having them wear you. And in this they are all starkly unlike the dress-up dolls turned out in borrowed tuxedos at the Emmy Awards or any of the now ubiquitous and wholly purgatorial red carpet events.

“The distinction between then and now is this idea that celebrities, the supposed role models, tend to be styled,” Josh Sims, author of “Icons of Men’s Style,” said by telephone from London. “They have assistants and their look is a professional, very deliberate creation of a team.”

That is not to suggest that the male Hollywood stars of the last century were unconcerned about image, he added. It is well established that Steve McQueen required that his blue jeans were tailored in such a way that one of his favorite assets, his behind, was well accentuated.

Photo dated October 13, 1960 of American actors Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward in Paris to present their film ‘From the Terrace’. — AFP pic
Photo dated October 13, 1960 of American actors Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward in Paris to present their film ‘From the Terrace’. — AFP pic

The Italians have a handy term — sprezzatura — for sartorial gracefulness achieved through artful nonchalance. The concept behind sprezzatura was first codified by Baldessare Castiglione in his 1528 treatise, “The Book of the Courtier.” In it he steered young Renaissance gentlemen away from dangerous shoals of artifice and affectation, guiding them toward the safe haven of a public comportment predicated on making all a man does or wears “seem uncontrived and effortless.”

Naturally, sprezzatura is abused all the time in modern practice.

Think of a necktie deliberately knotted that slight bit wrong. Think of the absurdity of a half-tucked T-shirt. Think of shoes without laces or sneakers with suits. Think of the overwrought pocket square. The great cinematic icons would never have been caught dead betraying the amount of care that went into transforming, say, Paul Newman — a middle-class kid from suburban Shaker Heights, Ohio — into the quintessential sexy rebel or the archetypal cowboy of “Hud.”

“The personas stars created fulfilled a particular need of the times,” said G Bruce Boyer, a menswear expert and the author of the recently published “True Style.” “In ‘30s stars, what was needed was an overt sex appeal and an extrovert personality necessary to cope with the Depression. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was expressions of rebellion against corporate consumerism, but safely and acceptably.”

It hardly matters that often the great style gods portraying rebels and adventurers and sportsmen were putting on a performance. What counts is that they kept us from noticing it all was an act.

“The best thing in style is a man who pulls off wearing a pair of jeans and a T-shirt perfectly,” Gert Jonkers, the co-editor of the influential menswear bible, Fantastic Man, said by phone from Amsterdam. “That is almost the ambition everybody has. Every fashion designer you ever speak to says: ‘Oh, men shouldn’t wear fashion. Men should wear just jeans and a crew neck sweater.’ These style icons are the ones that did that first.” — The New York Times