MARK HOLGATE
Fashion News Editor of US Vogue
I think elegance is personality. And by this I don’t mean a person with an “elegant personality”. It’s more about an effortlessness and a lack of self-consciousness in presentation. That, to me, is the epitome of the word. I think oftentimes there’s this idea that elegance has to be very coded and considered. I know it can be reduced to following all sorts of rules about lapel width, collar size and the correct number of buttons or whatever, but none of that interests me. Those are rules, and rules always seem to me about exclusion, and I don’t like that.
The one person I always come back to, the person I’ve always said I want to be when I grow up, is Michael Roberts. He’s just incredibly elegant. I started going to fashion shows in the ’90s, and I always used to think he was absolutely the best-dressed man there. Michael’s look has never really changed over the years: a tweed coat, a sweatshirt, jeans or classic pants, polished brogues, maybe a cap. His clothes look like he’s really lived in them; there’s none of the fashiony self-consciousness of newness. That quality of allowing yourself to age without being thrown into altering your appearance is so elegant to me .
Other people have that too, such as Olivier Lalanne of
Vogue Hommes and the art director Franck Durand. They’re thoroughly elegant. But then so are the designers Victor Glemaud and Duro Olowu, with their amazing ability to casually wear and layer colour and print. It’s like all of these guys’ style speaks to their own ineffable (and unfailing) inner logic. They fully inhabit and wear their clothes in such an unconcerned yet considered way. But I don’t think elegance is only about that. Rick Owens is incredibly elegant too. His self-presentation has this absolute f astidiousness to it.
When I buy fashion, I do get self-conscious about it. I guess I’m just not that comfortable wearing really fashiony clothes. But if you give me a tweed coat or a scrubby, scratchy Scottish Shetland wool sweater, I’m super happy. When it comes to designers, I really miss Helmut Lang’s clothes, and his presence, from fashion. There were seasonal flourishes in his menswear, to be sure, but fundamentally there was an unwavering elegance to his tailoring and a rigour to his fabrications and cut.That’s hard to find in fashion nowadays, because currently it’s so much about fleeting ephemeral gestures, exciting though those can be. Elegance, to me, seems the opposite of that. You know, I’ll just keep wearing that old tweed coat!