DAVID COLMAN ESSAY

If you’ve been nagged by a vague late-1970s feeling lately, you are not alone. It is not just that, with the cratering economy, there are scary parallels between the Bush and Carter administrations. The men’s wear scene is feeling it, too. Flip through the pages of a GQ from 30 years ago and you come across eerily familiar trends.
The magazine proclaimed 1978 “The Year of the Short.” On the May cover a model wore a “summer scarf,” and in November the men’s pants were all tucked into tall outdoorsy boots. For fall, the magazine celebrated a clash of layers, textures and colors that folded a European sense of sophistication into a sporty all-American look. All are current fashion trends.
This fin-de-1970s moment was the culmination of the fumbling style awakening called the Peacock Revolution, begun in England a decade earlier. Now, at this decade’s end, men’s fashion, following years of tentatively embracing things like vests and fedoras in the name of metrosexuality, is becoming unrepentantly stylish and sophisticated. Increasingly this impulse is driven by a younger generation who, as reported in a September survey in DNR, the men’s wear trade weekly, actually enjoy shopping, seeing far less stigma in it than men in their 40s do.
This fall’s men’s wear may seem a little on the safe side, but those clothes look better when you consider how confidently men now mix them, making their own statements. Again this mirrors the shift of 30 years ago, when a generation of upcoming designers, many of them American (like Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren), began emphasizing the idea of a “lifestyle” rather than trying to lure men into “high fashion” clothes coming from Europe.
So it will not surprise that designers and arbiters of style have been snapping up the fashion indexes of that time: vintage copies of GQ and the cultish guides of Charles Hix: “Looking Good” (1977, shot by Bruce Weber), “Dressing Right” (1978) and “Working Out” (1983).
Bill Cournoyer , the vice president for men’s tailored clothing at Barneys New York, bought several old copies of GQ on eBay a few months ago. “It was ones from ‘77, ‘78 and ‘79 that I was after,” he said.
“There’s a mood and sensibility in them that’s really applicable now,” he said. “It’s kind of classic. It’s all about layering, and there’s a certain masculinity to the fabrics and colors and a richness to the khakis and tans, the mixing of accessories and all the gauzy scarves that everyone is wearing now.”
Today designers like Tom Ford and Michael Bastian are reworking the moment, emphasizing classic looks with an emphatic, fashionable twist.
“I have all those Charles Hix books,” Mr. Bastian said. “Something from them has made it into every single collection. It’s not just the clothes, it’s the vibe, which was kind of supermasculine. It was one of the first times guys were culling elements from tailored clothing, sportswear and work wear and mixing them together. That’s something we just take for granted now.”
Mr. Hix, 66, is amazed that people remember his books and that a growing number of young men know about them as well. “I didn’t set out to do anything revolutionary,” he said.
His first book was not met warmly, however. His publisher did not like Mr. Weber’s pictures. “They said they were too gay,” he recalled. “It wasn’t that I set out to do anything particularly gay.”
Despite (and because of) the book’s best-sellerdom, he said: “It became a kind of sport of the day to make fun of it. It’s only in retrospect that it’s become this thing.
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