The Sketchbook Of A Gentleman and the artists who shaped the way men were drawn.

The publication of The Sketchbook Of A Gentleman by Mr Robin Lucas reminds us of the potency of the fashion illustration. In this Instagram age, the photograph dominates, and you’re either in the shot or you’re excluded from it. By contrast, there’s a generosity about illustrations that seems to invite us to imagine we’re a part of the scene that’s depicted.

The world created by Mr Lucas is an elegant and idealised London. Over a week in the life of an anonymous gentleman, he takes his readers to Savile Row for a fitting, Cecconi’s for lunch, the Royal Academy for some culture and a beautiful private dining room for dinner. The book is a rare reminder that there’s nothing more aspirational than subtlety, beauty and grace. I can’t think of another volume that makes a journey on the Piccadilly Line seem like a sophisticated aesthetic experience.

The relaxed and sybaritic lifestyle of Mr Lucas’s gentleman isn’t the book’s only echo from the past. The well-observed illustrations are inspired, according to Mr Lucas, by artwork from the 1950s, the elegance of the 1920s and the dash of the 1970s. However, the tradition of menswear illustration goes back much farther than that. An early historical highlight is the 16th-century The First Book Of Fashion, which consists of illustrations commissioned by a pair of German merchants to record their sartorial adventures over the years.

Three centuries later, Victorian fashions were subjected to scrutiny by Sir Leslie Ward, aka Spy, who filled the pages of Vanity Fair magazine’s 19th-century iteration with work that was part fond caricature and part beautifully observed fashion illustration. Created to poke fun at august Victorian subjects, his cartoons are now prized for the style and elegance of the men they capture. Fast forward three decades, and an American trade publication, the Esquire magazine off-shoot Apparel Arts, was wittily annotating illustrations depicting the golden age of tailoring. The best of these were by Mr Lawrence Fellows and, while they’re much discussed by tailoring aficionados, you’ll be hard pushed to find anything by Mr Fellows still in print. Copies of Apparel Arts, or the two books in which his work was reproduced, go for hundreds of pounds.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the outfits portrayed by the Italian illustrator Mr René Gruau were still formal but the mood was very different. Mr Gruau’s men weren’t dressing up for respectability or advancement at work, they were clearly looking for love with a candour that hadn’t been previously acceptable.

Contemporary illustrations can’t rival the overt sexuality on display in photographs, so have pivoted again. New York resident Mr Richard Haines captures specific garments in his wonderfully fuzzy drawings, which, unusually for the medium, focus on informal outfits. Meanwhile, London-based Mr Slowboy (aka Mr Fei Wang) injects a waspish sense of caricature into his illustrations of men wearing classic tailoring. The overall effect is fun, rather than overly formal and serious.

The illustrators mentioned here are separated by the nature of the clothes they depict, hundreds of years, thousands of miles and huge changes in social norms. But they’re united by their sense of joy and the way they celebrate masculine elegance while hinting at an awareness of its inherent ridiculousness.

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