🚀 go-pugleaf

<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-VMQnQrtSjfQ/UmaMkWqtX_I/AAAAAAAAMSo/mxFuQji4HAU/s1600/Best+Dressed+Man.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-VMQnQrtSjfQ/UmaMkWqtX_I/AAAAAAAAMSo/mxFuQji4HAU/s400/Best+Dressed+Man.png" width="327" /></a></div><br />Into even a clothing book reviewer’s life some light must fall. It’s thus been a pleasure to read and review Dan Flores’ new <i><a href="http://www.blurb.com/b/4608993-the-best-dressed-man-in-the-room" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Best-Dressed Man in the Room</a>, </i> an extensively illustrated monograph on the flashily dressed American gangsters of the early 20th century. Flores has previously written a history of the defunct clothing brand Sulka for this site and blogs about clothing under the name An Uptown Dandy.For this new book, he turned to the history of the neighborhoods where he had grown up in New York City, some of whose favorite sons were as infamous as they come.<br /><br />Interest in gangster style has never been far out of fashion. While Dick Tracy may have had a grotesque rogues’ gallery, flashily dressed hoods occupied the popular imagination at least since the 1920s and made cinematic forays as early as those played by Jimmy Cagney and George Raft, all the way through Warren Beatty’s turn as Bugsy Siegel and even, of course, the various movie incarnations of Gatsby himself, the bootlegger Count of Monte Cristo. Raft, who never quite shook his ties to real-life gangsters, and Bugsy appear in <i>The Best Dressed Man in the Room</i>, as does Arnold Rothstein, who was both a real crime boss and a current fictional one in Boardwalk Empire, which I understand is a sort of 1920s cosplay show. Indeed, Flores notes that his book covers a time when a generation of Irish and Jewish mobsters saw itself mowed (mown?) down and replaced with the Italian mob that made it big during Prohibition. As such, along with Bugsy, Rothstein, Rothstein’s celebrity attorney William J. Fallon and Legs Diamond, <i>The Best Dressed Man in the Room </i>features Lucky Luciano and Machine Gun Jack McGurn (suspected of having organized the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre), who adopted an Irish pseudonym to replace his Italian name when he started out as a boxer.<br /><br />But it was Pittsburgh Phil Strauss, a founder of a group called “Murder Inc.,” who lent this book its title when his magnificent attire at one arrest, including a “pearl-grey fedora” and velvet-collared chesterfield overcoat, drove New York police commissioner Lewis Valentine to call him “the best-dressed man in the room.” Flores informs us Strauss was known as “the Beau Brummell of the Brooklyn underworld.” Rather ironically, in a different age Strauss might have been tasked with breaking Brummell’s knees for nonpayment of gambling debts. Faced with his sartorial splendor, Commissioner Valentine could only suggest his cops hit the gangsters where it hurt, by ruining their clothes and their carefully cultivated look: make them bleed on their velvet collars and “Don’t be afraid to muss ‘em up. Drive ‘em out of the city.” <br /><br />Many of the mobsters discussed are pictured gazing out at us from their wanted posters and even mug shots, of all places, with enormous panache and, it must be said, rather lovely clothes. Flores even provides a picture of two mobsters shackled together on a train on their way to “the death house” at “Sing Sing,” the colloquial name for the prison at Ossining, New York, rumpled but smiling raffishly in herringbone overcoats and insouciantly, sharply tilted fedoras. It’s easy to wonder whether this book risks glamorizing violent criminals, especially when we learn that, for example, one of Lucky Luciano’s well-dressed lieutenants ran “a network of murderers, rapists, kidnapers, loan sharks and extortionists” or that Lepke Buchalter, overseer of the ominous-sounding “enforcement branch” of a crime syndicate, was “the preeminent garment industry racketeer in New York” and thus “undoubtedly had his choice of the finest tailors in the city.” Lucky Luciano himself appears cocksure and dashing, with an overcoat rakishly thrown over his shoulders while being deported from Cuba, and “more amused rather than concerned by his arrest” in another photo. Bugsy Siegel, resplendent in a shiny double-breasted suit, looks surprisingly like Warren Beatty. On reflection, Flores rather adroitly juxtaposes the charisma his subjects conveyed with visual flair against anecdotes of the awfulness of their actions. <i>The Best-Dressed Man in the Room </i>isn’t long enough to provide full biographies of the many characters who sashay through it. But it isn’t intended to. Instead, its author doesn’t fail to inform us in brief but vivid detail that his fashion plates walked a more precarious, shorter catwalk than today’s runways. And most of them never got a chance to turn back. If the chapters are brief, so were the lives of their subjects.<br /><br />Dutch Schultz, whose suits didn’t do justice to his accessories, died of a gunshot wound from behind as he stood at a urinal in a Newark chophouse. Pittsburgh Phil Strauss, whose Murder Inc. assassins had dispatched Schultz, met his end in conditions similar to his antecedent Brummell. Unlike Brummell, Strauss’ babbling, disordered insanity was only a sham, and couldn’t keep him from the electric chair. Even Arnold Rothstein, who used his discreet distance from the action to sample the delights of Charvet ties and Sulka silk shirtings (sharing some with Lucky Luciano), died, if my math is right, at only 46. The last member of Dutch Schultz’s gang to die, decades later, was perhaps the lowest form of life of all: his grandstanding lawyer Dixie Davis. The most sordid of sartorial endings, however, could come as a warning to the more existentially troubled of today’s clotheshorses: Machine Gun Jack McGurn, gunned down in three-piece suit and spats and discovered dead in “a rundown bowling alley,” along with the poem<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><i>You’ve lost your job, you’ve lost your dough;</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Your jewels and cars and handsome houses!</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>But things could still be worse you know…</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>At least you haven’t lost your trousers!</i></div><br />I would not have thought it, but perhaps the last thing to go really is a sense of style. Highly recommended.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: right;">Words by Réginald-Jérôme de Mans</div><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><div class="feedflare">
<a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/ASuitableWardrobe?a=8xq8vdM-gao:fBnB7lig4qk:yIl2AUoC8zA"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/ASuitableWardrobe?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/ASuitableWardrobe?a=8xq8vdM-gao:fBnB7lig4qk:qj6IDK7rITs"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/ASuitableWardrobe?d=qj6IDK7rITs" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/ASuitableWardrobe?a=8xq8vdM-gao:fBnB7lig4qk:gIN9vFwOqvQ"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/ASuitableWardrobe?i=8xq8vdM-gao:fBnB7lig4qk:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/ASuitableWardrobe?a=8xq8vdM-gao:fBnB7lig4qk:4cEx4HpKnUU"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/ASuitableWardrobe?i=8xq8vdM-gao:fBnB7lig4qk:4cEx4HpKnUU" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/ASuitableWardrobe?a=8xq8vdM-gao:fBnB7lig4qk:63t7Ie-LG7Y"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/ASuitableWardrobe?d=63t7Ie-LG7Y" border="0"></img></a>
</div><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ASuitableWardrobe/~4/8xq8vdM-gao" height="1" width="1"/>
<p><a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ASuitableWardrobe/~3/8xq8vdM-gao/book-review-best-dressed-man-in-room.html">Link</a>