Getting into character
peaky blinders, as devotees of the bbc gangster epic already know, takes its name from that of a real criminal gang, the terror of Birmingham at the turn of the 20th century, with interests in robbery, racketeering, illegal bookmaking and, most notoriously, dressing to kill.
Any stroppy bunch of hoodlums can earn a reputation for violence and venality. It takes an unusual degree of originality, and a real commitment to putting on a show, to be remembered, more than a century on, for your natty wardrobe. The ability to inspire trends from beyond the early grave is typically the preserve of pop stars, not villains.
The Peaky Blinders, of whom photographs still exist — mug shots, mostly — were streetcorner dandies, in the noble, and ignoble, tradition of urban and suburban working-class young British men determined to transcend their grim situations by adopting a highly codified, elaborate style of dress: clean living under difficult circumstances, as the Mods later sloganeered this impulse.
In the case of the Peaky Blinders, as in others, the style affected was an irreverent twist on formal menswear, taken to unlikely extremes. To law-abiding straights, it might seem that there is an intrinsic opposition between an adherence to fastidiousness, even flamboyance, in dress, and an equally powerful commitment to an aggressive amorality. But the dapper figures of the underworld, wiping innocent blood from polished toecaps with their silk pocket squares, seem never to have admitted this dichotomy — and neither have dandies throughout history, of whatever stripe and social class, from Regency St James’s to revolutionary St Petersburg.
The story that the Peaky Blinders concealed razor blades in the peaks of their flat caps — hence the name — is almost certainly apocryphal. (Sorry to disappoint.) What is not disputed is their considerable flair for self-presentation, and that was certainly one of the initial appeals of the TV show to us at Esquire, when we heard about it in early 2013. Other enticements included the fact that it was the passion project of the screenwriter Steven Knight (Dirty Pretty Things, Eastern Promises), himself a debonair Brummie, and that for his lead, the fearsome gang leader Tommy Shelby, Knight had cast the wonderful Irish actor Cillian Murphy (28 Days Later, Inception, Scarecrow in the Dark Knight films).
We don’t always get these things right, but we went big on the show that year, and it didn’t disappoint. What began as a slick genre workout deepened into something more interesting and less predictable. Peaky Blinders, which returns soon for its sixth and final series, became wildly successful, at home and around the world. It also developed into something of a men’s style phenomenon, so that you could, if the mood took you, dress from hat to heel in items named after the show’s characters. (Made in Britain Shelby Tweed waistcoat, £160.) And while we won’t have a word said against our cover star, Cillian Murphy’s barber has a lot of dodgy footballers’ haircuts to answer for, such has been the influence of Tommy Shelby’s striking barnet. The makers of the clothes named for the show are
careful to point out that Peaky Blinders gear is intended to be worn independently of any associations with the characters. The clothes, they say, are not costumes. But is that quite right? Isn’t all clothing, to an extent, costume?
Like the actors who would, generations later, play characters inspired by them (and the boys and men who would, in turn, buy clothes inspired by those actors), the real-life Peaky Blinders were, as we all are, performers playing their parts, enacting a specific type of maleness. In their case: nasty, brutish and sharp. Their caps were signifiers of belonging, part of a loose uniform, but also they were props, allowing brutalised, impoverished kids to get into character as fearless outlaws. If you can convince yourself of your masculine bonafides, maybe you can convince others, too. You don’t need to be a mobster to understand this. Anyone who has ever put on a suit and tie knows the power that clothing can hold, over its wearer and everyone else. No doubt this is true of a bikini, too.
masculinity, as we increasingly understand it, is performance. And menswear is costume. The wearing of even the most apparently functional, nondescript item — a white T-shirt, a faded pair of jeans — is a form of fancy dress, freighted with associations. Slip into that T-shirt, pull on those jeans: who are you now? A Springsteenian working man? A Castro clone? Marlon Brando? Are you a real man, or a person pretending to be a real man? Aren’t all real men people pretending? What’s a real man?
Next month, a major new exhibition opens at the V&A in London. It’s called Fashioning Masculinities: The Art of Menswear. In November, I was given a preview of some of the exhibits. These range from classical sculpture — still the strongest influence on the lines and proportions of traditional men’s clothing — to today’s designs. In the restoration room, where the V&A’s team was working on garments including frock coats, rock-star outfits and military uniforms, I was particularly struck by a tiny, delicate pale-pink outfit by one of the most influential fashion designers of the moment, Harris Reed, whose eye-catching experiments in gender fluidity can be seen on celebrities including Harry Styles. Styles, a startlingly pretty Bowie-Bolan tribute act, is perhaps the most visible British dandy of the age. His, too, is a performative masculinity, but a very different one from Tommy Shelby’s.
You can have your own sneak preview of Fashioning Masculinities, beginning on page 116 of this issue, and hear from the curators responsible. I came away from my conversations with them, and my encounters with the exhibits, with a head full of questions about the nature of masculinity, or masculinities, now and in the past, and the roles that clothes have played in its constructions. We have reached a potentially transformative moment in men’s style. Masculinity, the performance of it and the look of it, is once again up for grabs. Once, Harry Styles’s looks would have been dismissed as effeminacy. Today, such thinking is old hat. A bibbity-bobbity one.
(Sidenote, for those who think that perhaps all this verbiage doesn’t apply to them: a number of men I know, most of them, like me, bourgeois London media types, have spent much of their time since the pandemic began showing up on Zoom calls dressed in high-end fleeces and expensive anoraks and — I’m guessing, because I can’t see their feet — limited-edition trail-running shoes. These men greet each day as if they are shortly to embark on a polar expedition, despite the fact that the most daring trip they are likely to undertake is the school run, with maybe a coffee stop on the way home if they’re lucky. And if that’s not performative masculinity, then my name’s Ernest Shackleton. These men are cosplaying traditional maleness: rugged, adventurous, practical. It’s silly, sure, but no sillier than putting on a suit and tie and thinking that makes you suddenly sober, competent and businesslike. It just appears to make you seem that way. You hope.)
This issue also has journalism on subjects that have nothing to do with clothes, from Esquire’s unmatched team of writers, this time including Tabitha Lasley, Andrew O’Hagan, Georgia Pritchett and Caleb Azumah Nelson. We have Olivia Ovenden’s interview with Ben Whishaw, an actor in grave danger of becoming a national treasure, thanks to his roles as Q, Paddington Bear and, now, as Adam Kay in the TV adaptation of the runaway bestseller This is Going to Hurt. Ed Caesar sits down with the great Carl Cox, one of the most significant figures in dance music, and British pop culture, of the past 40 years. Johnny Davis speaks to Matt Reeves, director of The Batman, about how he intends to reinvent the Caped Crusader with a new star, Robert Pattinson. (If you’re looking for a story about a man who uses costume to construct a persona, look no further than Bruce Wayne.) And Miranda Collinge interviews Cillian Murphy as he bids farewell to Peaky Blinders, and takes on the biggest role of his career, the lead in Oppenheimer, a new biopic of the inventor of the atomic bomb, from Christopher Nolan (ask Matt Reeves about him). That’s Cillian on the cover, in a field in Ireland in November, photographed by Tom Craig and styled by Charlie Teasdale and looking, if he doesn’t mind my saying so, every inch the dandy. Another bravura performance. ○