Have you read “The Secret Vice?” It’s a wonderful article by the journalist dandy Tom Wolfe. Published in 1966 in the New York Herald Tribune, it’s about how men in the United States are hooked on the allure on custom tailoring.
“Practically all the most powerful men in New York,” Wolfe wrote, “especially on Wall Street, the people in investment houses, banks and law firms, the politicians, [and] especially Brooklyn Democrats, for some reason […] are fanatical about the marginal differences that go into custom tailoring. They are almost like a secret club insignia for them. And yet it is a taboo subject. […] At Yale and Harvard, boys think nothing of going over and picking up a copy of Leer, Poke, Feel, Prod, Tickle, Hot Whips, Modern Mammaries, and other such magazines, and reading them right out in the open. Sex is not taboo. But when the catalogue comes from Brooks Brothers or J. Press, that’s something they whip out only in private.”
