Life in the time of coronavirus has raised at-home footwear to a place of paramount importance in my life. I’ve always been an outdoor-shoes-are-for-outdoors kind of person, but haven’t thought much about what was on my feet while indoors. When I was living in New York, I only barely had enough room in my apartment for my bed plus my removed shoes on the floor. But since leaving New York, I’ve enjoyed such amenities as porches and couches, and have found slippers greatly add to the pleasures of both. One slipper style I have come to particularly enjoy is the Venetian furlane slipper.
I was first introduced to the furlane by No Man correspondent Réginald-Jérôme de Mans. I was passing through Venice, and received a missive from Monsieur de Mans, asking if I could visit a small shop in one of Venice’s crannies, and get him a pair of purple slippers, for delivery to him at a yert in Mongolia, where he was then exiled as punishment for an appallingly vulgar #menswear review. So of course I wound my way through Venice’s canals and side streets (one does not disappoint Monsieur de Mans, if one can help it), found the right door to push, and entered what seemed a forest of banana trees, except the fruits were velvet slippers in jewel tones, each with stitched rubber soles.
The origin story of these slippers is supposedly that they were made from scraps during World War II: Venetians gathered together small bits of velvet (apparently Venice is never without at least some small bits of velvet) and rubber from bicycle tires and pieced them together to have footwear when their rationed allotment gave out or didn’t appear.
According to a recent Elle article, after the war, gondoliers realized that the slippers worked well as boat shoes, since they had good traction and didn’t damage the wood on the boat. And Venetian nobles wore them to be able to sneak silently to their secret lovers. I’m not sure I believe either of these (if the wood is so easily damaged, what about all the other non-furlane-wearing passengers? And aren’t the gondolieri and the nobles basically one and the same since the war?).
Anyway these days you can wear furlanes for whatever purpose you want, including on your porch. You don’t even need to go to Venice to get them – this pair is a click away. Monsieur de Mans informs me that his pair from several years ago is still going strong, having survived this pandemic just as its forbears survived World War II.
Some outerwear is meant to be worn over a suit. Some outerwear is meant to be worn over a T-shirt. But all outerwear is meant to be worn over a sweater. My man Josh in Louisiana has put up a Mount Rushmore of coat-and-knit fits, which show how comfortable and elegant this format can be.
The Teddy Roosevelt
This partnership of the Kaptain Sunshine Traveler Coat and a De Bonne Facture knit abounds with youthful frontier energy. It says, you can shoot me in the chest if you want, but I’m going to finish this speech. (Please don’t shoot Josh.)
The Thomas Jefferson
As President, Jefferson earned a reputation for slovenliness in buttoned-up Washington by entertaining guests in house slippers. Jefferson’s admirers, of course, saw this as an example of the Virginia planter’s “republican simplicity.” This De Bonne Facture coat and DoppiaA roll neck might well adorn a modern democratic statesman, relaxing at home with refinement but without pretension.
The Abraham Lincoln
Lincoln had such a distinctive look and attitude, it’s hard to imagine him in modern clothing. But the cream GRP roll neck comes closest, I think, to capturing the high shirt collars Lincoln wore to match his towering neck, performing the same function of putting a man’s face on a pedestal. That’s why the roll neck is, as Lou Junod says in the timeless style profile of him written by his son, “the most flattering thing a man can wear.” Josh wears the sweater here with another Traveler Coat, this one in green.
The George Washington
Saved the first for last. If you’ve got a houndstooth coat, and are worried about picking a sweater with a pattern that won’t clash, you can always pick the sweater that’s never wrong. Only enough room for four stars and ten stripes on this Monitaly Old Glory, so looks like we’re going to have to make some tough decisions about who’s in and who’s out. But that’s what the Inis Meain thinking cap is for.
Among the most exalted items of the Anglo-American menswear canon is the pea coat. It is versatile, being just as appropriate with blue jeans as with a coat and tie. It is navy, and therefore goes with just about anything. It is distantly military and retains the associated stylistic assertiveness of the double-breasted front and the distinctively shaped collar. But it is not militaristic. A man could live his life in complete peace with no overcoat but a pea coat.
And yet its very ubiquity leads the curious and the devious to seek out alternatives. This article suggests three coats that, whether as substitutes or complements, offer the pea coat’s virtues without suffering the vice of being too widely re-pea-ted. All of these styles are, like the pea coat, stylish and versatile. I find double-breasted overcoats attractive in general and also more warming, so all of these options are, again like the pea coat, double-breasted.
The Bridge Coat
The closest cousin to the pea coat is the bridge coat, which is just like a pea coat, but longer. This added length not only is more protective in difficult weather, but gives the coat a more dramatic effect. The extra length suits a tall man particularly well, endowing him with a more regal bearing; in the navy, the bridge coat the coat worn by officers, where the pea coat is worn by enlisted men.
The Great Coat
The great coat typically features more aggressive lines than the pea coat. The notch in the lapel is deeper and at a wider angle. The silhouette gathers at the waist more dramatically. The great coat has hip pockets but no side pockets. Unlike the pea and bridge coats, the great coat is not particularly associated with the navy, and thus it can be made in other colors (such as the pictured charcoal Frank Leder great coat) and does not feature other maritime details like buttons with anchors on them and the like. It goes by land as well as by sea.
The Trench Coat
By contrast, the trench coat’s lines are softer. The defining feature of the trench coat is its raglan sleeves. The trench coat is designed to be worn in the rain and is therefore, like the bridge coat, usually longer than the pea coat. The result is a more flowing, rounded garment. A trench coat is, again, not a naval item (there are no trenches at sea), and so is rarely made in navy; most often it’s made in khaki, but this olive version by Sage de Cret is by no means out of line.
Of course if you prefer the pea coat itself, there’s no need to deviate from it. But any of these coats offer stylish variety.
One fun thing to do is leer at the exorbitant prices ludicrously rich people pay for ugly or trivial things. This tradition goes at least as far back as George IV, whose clothes was sold at his death in 1830 for then-eye-popping amounts. It continues in this GQ article about Paul Manafort’s $1 million wardrobe full of exotic skins, and in friend-of-No-Man @dieworkwear’s tweets about $1,000 paranormal hoodies.
But I think I’ve found the best one yet: White cotton socks. Some fuchsia design flourishes on them, but nothing special aesthetically or technically. A brand you’ve probably never heard of. One size fits all, readymade. As of this writing, $86,450 a pair.
These socks aren’t sold in stores. And the price wasn’t set by the designer – they’re traded on a digital exchange, the Unisocks Exchange. The company has apparently made 315 pairs (only 13 are left unsold), and created tokens that can be bought and sold in any fraction.
Anyone who accumulates a whole token can trade it in for an actual physical pair of socks that look like they could be bought at Costco. So why doesn’t someone just produce a bunch of these socks, probably at a cost of pennies per pair, and sell them for tens of thousands? With each pair of socks delivered by the company comes a digital “nonfungible token” (NFT) – that is, a token that can’t be broken up into pieces and sold in shares. This NFT acts like a certificate of authenticity for the physical pair of socks. It’s the same technology that secures rights to digital art and NBA moments.
So the socks (and their accompanying NFT) act sort of like gold reserves for a currency that’s on a gold standard. This digital currency is on a socks standard. There are some differences: gold probably has more intrinsic value than a pair of socks. It’s rare in nature and can’t be produced by man. But for both the gold and the Unisocks, the main value comes from the social understanding of what they represent and what other people would pay for them. Just like fiat money! With the socks, the distinction between the commodity on reserve and the pieces of paper that have value only by virtue of what they represent becomes still more blurry.
If you wore gold jewelry during the gold standard era, you were very nearly wearing money. Maybe that was a thrill for some. I wonder if anyone has the fortitude to wear a pair of $85,000 socks. And if they did, would the socks lose value? Are they a collector’s item or a currency? A $100 bill doesn’t lose value when it wrinkles, but does an $85,000 sock lose value if it goes through the wash?
I would think so, but I’m not a player in this market. But these $85,000 socks do make me feel much better about socks that are 3 pairs for $85. They don’t come with an NFT. But they’re good socks.
In an 1838 speech, a young Abraham Lincoln lamented that his generation could never achieve a place in history equal to Washington’s. No glory could compare to the “display before an admiring world, a practical demonstration of the truth of a proposition, which had hitherto been considered at best no better than problematical; namely, the capability of a people to govern themselves …. This field of glory is harvested, and the crop is already appropriated.” Lincoln and his generation were left with only the more prosaic task of preserving the “political edifice of liberty and equal rights” for future Americans.
I wouldn’t call this nostalgia, exactly. Just as there are different sorts of satisfaction in the present—for instance, happiness from lack of want, fulfillment from exertion towards a higher purpose—there are different sorts of idealization of the past. Lincoln’s yearning is not for a beatific past but the opposite – a past of tumult, but also one of opportunity and perhaps more importantly, meaning and glory.
Though removed by an ocean and a couple of centuries, I get the same feeling from Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, now dramatized (the first two books, at least) in the TV series My Brilliant Friend. The story begins in post-WWII Naples, a time and place of extreme poverty and desperation. But also of great achievement, which many Neapolitans today look back on with pride. The city revolted against Nazi occupation during the War, and after the War launched decades of economic advancement unknown in Europe before or since. Reading the books at their publication in the 2010s feels, even in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, like a trip back to a time when one didn’t have to look hard for purpose in life. Survival itself was more than a day’s work. Being so close to death, the characters seem more alive.
Ferrante doubles the refraction by her placement of the narrator. Not only are we, the readers, looking back on a more gloried time, but the narrator Elena tells the story of her more gloried and more economically disadvantaged friend, Lila. Though Elena excels in school, she recognizes Lila’s brilliance as brighter than her own. Although, or perhaps because, Lila’s circumstances do not permit the path of academic advancement that Elena follows, Elena envies Lila’s ability to harvest and appropriate the glories of life. At one point, Elena recounts the various aspects of her life that she experiences only “quasi” –almost—but that Lila experiences fully.
Lila also does not suffer from any attachment to history, national or personal. The great exertions of her formidable creative power—a story she wrote as a young girl, the shoes she designed for her production with her brother—she quickly abandons. In both cases, she later explains them as only attempts to escape the desperate poverty and precarity of the neighborhood where she and Elena grew up. When Elena—always searching for a higher meaning—tries to show Lila the beauty in the story she wrote, Lila dismisses her, and says her interest in the story was purely mercenary. Elena is left to wonder whether her own appreciation of Lila’s story is silly or refined, whether seeing the artist’s work as more profound than the artist brings her closer to or further from glory. Whether she has overcome, or merely repeated, Lila’s fullness and her own quasi-ness.
History eventually found Lincoln, of course. If he revisited his Lyceum address in the summer of 1864, he may have read with a grimace his glorification of the “living history [of the Revolution] … found in every family—a history bearing the indubitable testimonies of its own authenticity, in the limbs mangled, in the scars of wounds received….” But decades later, Americans would look back at the Civil War, even their own mangled limbs, and see a field of glory.
Once upon a time, the obstacles to buying a new velvet coat included not only the expense but, if you were not born into the right family, laws preventing you from wearing certain fabrics or colors. Desiree Desierto of the University of Rochester and Mark Koyama of George Mason University have recently released a working paper on these laws, known as “sumptuary laws,” in pre-industrial Europe. Along the way they find some delightful language from various medieval laws, such as the 1485 French law that restricted the use of gold, silver, and silk cloth to “nobles living nobly who are born and extracted of good and old nobility.” (My close reading of this law suggests to me that it has something to do with nobility; what’s your reading?)
But the paper’s main argument is the relationship between sumptuary laws and income. “The purpose of sumptuary laws,” claims a 1963 book by Postan et al., “was in part to prevent the rich from ruining themselves through fruitless competition.” The idea is that luxurious clothes represent high status. If everyone is allowed to buy them, you get into a rat race where the truly wealthy have to keep buying more and more lavish clothing in order to demonstrate that they are, in fact, wealthy. It’s easier if everyone agrees that only certain people should buy certain things, which maintains the same hierarchy without the “fruitless” expense on ever more sumptuous raiment.
Desierto and Koyama demonstrate an inverted-U relationship between income and sumptuary laws. In their model, there are only two types of people, nobles and plebs. When society is poor, there’s no need for sumptuary laws. Only the nobles can afford silk anyway, so there’s no need for laws preventing the plebs from buying it. Poverty is doing the job just fine. When society gets rich enough that even plebs can afford silk, then the nobles pass sumptuary laws to prevent status competition. As society gets richer still, the cost of enforcing sumptuary laws gets high enough that the nobles finally give up and grant plebs entry into the wonderful world of lighting money on fire in order to win the admiration of their wastrel peers.
I know what you’re thinking. Won’t some great plague please come and relieve these people of their anxiety. Well, Desierto and Koyama have thought of that and it turns out that only makes it worse. In a nice demonstration of the left side of the inverted-U—where an increase in income leads to an increase in sumptuary laws—they show that waves of sumptuary laws follow waves of plague deaths. The idea is, the labor shortage following a plague outbreak raises wages, which allows plebs to afford more expensive clothing, which leads nobles to prevent them from buying it. (Incidentally, even without the status competition, not a bad perk to be able to block some of your competition on the demand side; not a few times in the past I would have been happy to pass a law preventing others in my size from buying from my favorite stores.)
Today, of course, there are no sumptuary laws. To paraphrase Anatole France, the law, in its majestic equality, allows the poor as well as the rich to buy, say, a $250 paperclip. Has this, in fact, led to fruitless wardrobe competition?
I hope not. Surely clothing does still serve as a social signal, and for some consumers the most important thing about a clothing item is that it shows the rest of the sidewalk, the club, the Internet, or wherever else they are, how successful and cool they are. But other consumers have achieved a more enlightened view of what they wear, and instead take joy not, or at least not only, in the status that their clothing signal, but in the wearing of it. Under this view, not only does one’s own clothing offer intrinsic pleasure, but other people’s clothing can be a source of delight and inspiration rather than anxiety and jealousy. That is truly living nobly.
I’m sure you’ll remember the scene in Adam McKay’s masterwork Talladega Nights in which the dastardly (French) villain Jean Girard challenges our hero Ricky Bobby to name one thing of value that Americans have given the world. Ricky meets this challenge with “Chinese food,” “pizza,” and “chimichanga.” (Jean Girard defends France’s honor with “democracy,” “existentialism,” and various sex acts.)
As a proud American, I’ve often wondered how I might have answered, were I in Ricky Bobby’s shoes. Of course today I could just say “Talladega Nights.” That option wasn’t available to Ricky, blocked by fourth wall. One tempting answer might be that classic of Ivy Style, the penny loafer. But this isn’t quite right. The penny loafer was born in Norway.
But it does claim some American heritage. In 1891, Nils Tveranger, the eventual creator of the penny loafer, left his native Norway for Boston, Massachusetts. There he learned to make shoes, including the Native American moccasin. In 1894, he returned to Norway, set up shop as a shoemaker in the village of Aurland, and a few decades later, combined the American moccasin and a local Norwegian style to give birth to the penny loafer.
Aurlands still makes those Tveranger’s penny loafers today, still in the town of Aurland, in the longest running shoe factory in Norway. Here’s how they do it.
Once you’ve selected a leather, you find the pattern you need and cut out the pieces:
Next you sew the pieces of leather together to make the upper:
Then you put the upper on the last and leave it for a while to round into form:
Then attach the heel and sew on the sole:
Then you’ve got yourself an Aurlands penny loafer:
Quite a cultural achievement. I’ll certainly take it over existentialism. Might even put it up there with Talladega Nights.
Some people embrace their family name; others attempt to escape it, but they rarely succeed. Clark Rockefeller was of this latter type. Scion of fabled wealth, collector of rare art, sophisticate, international financier. Except he was none of these things - the man known for a decade as Clark Rockefeller was, in fact, eventually revealed to be Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, a German national who came to the United States in 1978, and adopted a series of false identities until his eventual capture and conviction for several violent felonies.
But in some ways Herr Gerhartsreiter was more genuine heir to the Rockefeller clan than he knew.
John D. Rockefeller, progenitor of the Rockefeller riches, though perhaps of doubtful scruples in his business career, was a model of Baptist rectitude in his private life. But John D. Rockefeller’s father, William Avery “Devil Bill” Rockefeller, Sr., was a different sort of man. When John was young, Devil Bill spent months at a time away from his wife Eliza and their six children, occupying himself as a traveling salesman and itinerant con artist. His capers ran from the relatively benign—pretending to be deaf and dumb, or selling inert elixirs, advertising them as health potions but warning that pregnant women not consume them lest they lose their child—to the deeply disturbing—he was accused (but never convicted) of raping a woman at gunpoint.
As John reached adolescence, Devil Bill’s recesses from family life extended ever longer, until finally Devil Bill never returned. As it happened, Devil Bill had constructed an entirely separate life in another town, calling himself Dr. William Levingston and sharing a household with another wife, named Margaret Allen.
Devil Bill never entirely lost touch with his son—John’s investment in his first business partnership was partly financed by a loan (at 10 percent interest) from his father. The partnership, named, in one of those odd coincidences history never tires of providing, Clark & Rockefeller, was quite successful. But John’s towering success came to him after Devil Bill left the family, and though the filial relationship survived at fits and starts, it seems that John’s financial relationship with his father largely ended with the one loan, much to the detriment of Devil Bill’s bank account.
Maybe Ol’ Bill had no regrets. Maybe he wouldn’t have traded his life with Margaret for all the riches in the world. Or maybe he spent half a lifetime counting out every Standard Oil dividend he could have had. Who knows. But I think if there were any Rockefeller forbear that could have sniffed out Clark from across a ballroom, it was Devil Bill.
