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“Artists must first of all distinguish themselves from members of the adjacent professional classes typically present at art world events: dealers, critics, curators, and caterers. They must second of all take care not to look like artists. This double negation founds the generative logic of artists’ fashion.

The relationship between an artist’s work and attire should not take the form of a direct visual analogy. A stripe painter may not wear stripes.

The relationship between an artist’s work and attire should function in the manner of a dialectic, in which the discrepancy between the personal appearance of the artist and the appearance of her work is resolved into a higher conceptual unity. An artist’s attire should open her work to a wider range of interpretive possibilities.

The artist’s sartorial choices are subject to the same hermeneutic operations as are his work. When dressing, an artist should imagine a five-paragraph review of his clothes—the attitudes and intentions they reveal, their topicality, their relationship to history, the extent to which they challenge or endorse, subvert or affirm dominant forms of fashion—written by a critic he detests.

Communicating an attitude of complete indifference to one’s personal appearance is only achievable through a process of self-reflexive critique bordering on the obsessive. Artists who are in reality oblivious to how they dress never achieve this effect.

Whereas a dealer must signal, in wardrobe, a sympathy to the tastes and tendencies of the collector class, an artist is under no obligation to endorse these. Rather, the task of the artist with regard to fashion is to interrogate the relationship between cost and value as it pertains to clothing, and, by analogy, to artworks.

An artist compensates for a limited wardrobe budget by making creative and entertaining clothing choices, much in the way that a dog compensates for a lack of speech through vigorous barking.

Artists are not only permitted but are in fact required to be underdressed at formal institutional functions. But egregious slovenliness without regard to context is a childish ploy, easily seen through.

An artist may dress like a member of the proletariat, but shouldn’t imagine he’s fooling anyone.

The affluent artist may make a gesture of class solidarity by dressing poorly. She is advised to keep in mind that, at an art opening, the best way to spot an heiress is to look for a destitute schizophrenic. Middle-class or working-class artists, the destitute, and the schizophrenic can use this principle to their social advantage.

The extension of fashion into the violation of norms of personal hygiene and basic grooming constitutes the final arena for radicalism in artists’ fashion. Brave, fragrant souls! You will be admired from a distance.”

~ Roger White in I Like Your Work: Art and Etiquette, an essay on a bag

LIFE magazine’s October 13 issue from 1961 included a fascinating analysis on the sprezzidential style of John F. Kennedy and brother Robert. John L. Steele pokes a bit of fun at a few former presidents and their odd clothes choices like capes, floppy fedoras and Key West shirts before touting those infamous Kennedys. In true Brummellian spirit, JFK had the habit of chiding aides for poor style choices, but when it came to the man himself, Kennedy was above etiquette. The same dictum was practiced to some degree by brother Robert, and both Kennedys arrived in, say, white dinner jacket affairs in all-black. The piece also goes through JFK’s wardrobe; fabrics, colours, preferred cut and choice of tailor.

http://books.google.fi/books?id=slMEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA29&dq=”well+suited+for+the+white+house”&hl=en&sa=X&ei=ulYxU5rXGsjiywOT8YGoAg&ved=0CC4Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22well%20suited%20for%20the%20white%20house%22&f=false

Closed captions not available for the unitalianinitiated.

If there is no such thing as shirt store porn, let this little post give a name to a series. Claude Truong-Ngoc has shared a few dozen beautiful shots from the store that has no comparison in range of shirtings, and Wikimedia Commons has it all — bolt after bolt, collar after another.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Charvet_Place_Vendôme_novembre_2013