The Sharpest Men Of The Month

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The Sharpest Men Of The Month

Words by Mr Stuart Husband

31 August 2016

From Mr Jamie Dornan to Mr Jaden Smith – the street-style icons we’re keeping tabs on.

If dressing well is a form of good manners, as Mr Tom Ford once said, the latest entrants in our who-wore-it-best roundup have no need to resort to Debrett’s, Ms Emily Post, or any other etiquette guide. In fact, they are ever-prepared with polite small talk, they’re ready to pass the port to the left at all times, and they never board a plane before their row is called. In short, you can take them anywhere. Scroll down to see who hit peak protocol this month.

Mr Jack Huston is the scion of majestic forebears – his grandfather was the legendary Hollywood director Mr John Huston, and there are various Marquesses of Cholmondeley also in the mix – so it’s no surprise that he was chosen to play the storied prince, Ben-Hur, in the recent reboot. It’s also natural, given his provenance, that he should wear a suit with such smooth insouciance. Rather than quite-literally stepping into Mr Charlton Heston’s strappy sandals, Mr Huston proves he’s no one’s style slave by deploying a textured T-shirt and scuffed suede shoes to dial down the formality. There’s only one winner in this particular chariot race.

In life, as in style, Mr Jaden Smith has been all about consciousness-raising, tweeting his ruminations on everything from nature (“Most trees are blue”), to oral hygiene (“Umm who has the floss”), and displaying his non-binary credentials by wearing dresses. At Variety’s recent Power Of Young Hollywood bash, Mr Smith, who is currently starring in Netflix’s birth-of-a-hip-hop-nation epic The Get Down, did dizzying things with proportion, pairing an effervescent fro with a baggy biker jacket, whose hearts-and-flowers motif may have been referencing hip-hop pioneers De La Soul’s “D.A.I.S.Y. Age”, or illustrating another of his celebrated tweets: “All the rules in this world were made by someone no smarter than you. So make your own.”

Having recently completed back-to-back filming of Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed, it’s pikestaff-plain that Mr Jamie Dornan has become a leading authority on, well, let’s just call it that intermediate shade between black and white, as generally sported by ashes, lead, or business magnates with BDSM fetishes. Conclusive proof: the way he pairs this suit, at the paler end of the shade-in-question’s spectrum, with the crispest of white shirts and a pocket square, some creatively-patina’d Oxford shoes, and that familiar “get any further in my face and I’ll be happy to escort you to my red room of pain” look, set to take box offices by storm all over again when the sequels are released over the next couple of years.

Mr Joe Keery is one of the stars of Stranger Things, the Netflix series that takes various aspects of 1980s pop culture – Spielbergian suburban surrealism, Brat Pack badinage, Mr Stephen King-esque horror – and whizzes them through a creative blender to produce something quite spectacular. Style-wise, Mr Keery is staging his own personal homage to the 1980s; specifically the tawny leather jacket (with rolled-up sleeves), pegged black trousers, T-shirt, striped socks and chunky Derby shoes, as worn by Mr Michael Jackson in the celebrated video to 1983’s “Beat It”. Could Mr Keery’s clean, streamlined take reinvent the look for the 2010s and inspire a new generation to pull their cuffs northward? Stranger things have happened…

The band that Mr Josh McLellan plays in – when not busy modelling – is called Turbogeist; but the “geist” Mr McLellan is nailing here, at the premiere of Suicide Squad, is the one preceded by “zeit”. His souvenir jacket continues to be a mainstay at collections from Saint Laurent to Valentino this season, and he offsets it beautifully with a buttoned-up shirt and straight-leg trousers. The whole West Side Story-goes-Ivy-League ensemble is finished off with a purposeful pair of Oxford shoes doing their best winklepicker impression. Forget the Suicide Squad, and don’t even mention the awkward squad; Mr McLellan is heading up the mod squad.

If Mr Justice Smith – the second guy from The Get Down in this stylish list, proving that the show has plenty of (Grandmaster) flash – were arraigned before a jury of his peers, and charged with being just too out-and-out superfly, how would he plead? Consider the evidence: the ebullient fro and beard, channelling the mid-1970s pomp of Mr Stevie Wonder; the immaculately-fitted skinny suit and rep tie, channelling the early-1960s edge of Mr Malcolm X; plus the suede Oxford shoes, channelling the unimpeachable 1950s elan of Mr John Coltrane. He’s guilty – cool in the first degree. No need for a sentence: Mr Smith’s dapper poise is a form of community service in itself.

In his new film War Dogs, Mr Miles Teller plays a stoner Miami Beach massage therapist turned unlikely arms dealer, and some of that freewheeling sang-froid seems to have informed his demeanour at the movie’s premiere. It’s there in the choppy peroxide crop and “would you like some dumdum rounds with that Uzi?” swagger. It takes material form in his three-piece suit boasting the subtlest of checks, a direct hit for the upcoming season, along with the practically-patent, sure-shot sheen of the Oxfords. This is the formal look to emulate right now – at a clip.

Many of us, when faced with a pressing dilemma, have asked ourselves the question: what would Jesus do? One answer, at least, now presents itself: if you’re Mr Rodrigo Santoro, who plays Jesus, alongside Mr Huston in the Ben-Hur remake, you take a punt on the palest of grey, double-breasted suits for the movie’s premiere, but you pull it off spectacularly, thanks to the immaculate fit and the play of the muted shade against your darker colouring, which you further highlight with a plain white shirt and dark tie. The bold walnut shade of the shoes elevates the ensemble to a realm of the miraculous that could give the whole loaves-and-fishes thing a run for its money.

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