🔥FIRE SALE🔥 No. 13
🎥Notes on Tuxedos: The 95th Academy Awards🏆
When men are called to get suited and booted, there is a pull in every single one of us to go all out. To make a grand statement. To wear an obnoxious jacket with matching socks. To try to overcompensate for our lack of experience or comfortability with formal attire and make the cardinal sin of overdoing it. I am a gregarious person, and I often use my humor and an over-the-top disposition to put others at ease. “They have to like me now! I’ve made them laugh,” I’ll think.
Okay…this isn’t a therapy session, but the red carpet, or in this case, the champagne carpet, seems to have the same problem as me. Overcompensating often comes at the expense of confidence, and confidence is what makes the suit and therefore makes the man. In my time at the J. Crew suit shop, I had to talk numerous grooms-to-be off the ledge while they contemplated a double-breasted suit that made their chest look twice their size or a peak lapel collar that made them look twice as short. I steered them away from cutting corners or, even worse, trying something new and outrageous on their big day. When I purchased a tuxedo for a wedding I was going to in Sydney, I had a vision of who I could be. Big floppy tie. Double-breasted jacket with a big lapel. Sunglasses. Basically, Jack Nicholson at the 1976 Oscars. I had flown the cuckoo's nest, and my expectations didn’t align with my reality. The glamor had warped my perception. I took a long hard look and went with a simple shawl collar tuxedo in black and had it appropriately tailored. I felt like myself, confident, and though I didn’t emulate Nicholson’s look at those triumphant Oscars, I felt I channeled his energy.
So without further ado, here are 🔥FIRE SALE’s🔥 Notes on Tuxedos: The 95th Academy Awards:
Let’s start with Bill Nighy, who I feel wore essentially the platonic ideal of a tuxedo to Sunday’s ceremony. This is going to go ahead and do something that is daring in today’s red carpet landscape, which is to fit. Nighy is lucky. He’s long and tall, well proportioned, and clothes effortlessly drape off of him. The tuxedo is simple and elegant. His shirt perfectly peaks out from his jacket sleeve, and his pants are slimming but not taut. The slight structure in the shoulders broadens him but doesn’t misrepresent his figure. His frames are bold but neat. The blue ribbon, which he wore to commemorate the millions of displaced people in the world, is a restrained badge of support and adds a modest pop of color. Nighy’s tuxedo is perfectly discreet yet confident – it's the formal uniform of a man who is no stranger to occasion. If there is one thing you can glean from Nighy, it’s to dress like you’ve been there before.
😢Now, those who strayed the farthest from Bill Nighy’s light on Sunday.
🥊Jonathan Majors, whose tuxedo was an homage to Fredrick Douglass (who he is tapped to play in a new biopic), was fittingly out of time and place at the Academy Awards. His coat was tailored too tight on his admittedly massive arms, and the clown shoes emphasized an already disproportionate suit that looked more like a costume.
🧟Pedro Pascal has been running the same fashion playbook that every male celebrity who wants to have a “style moment” runs. There hasn’t been a premier or talk show where he hasn’t strategically donned some vaguely queerbaiting-Harry-Styles-core slutty shirt big pant combo. He’s not exploring the edges of masculinity. He’s exploring the edges of his middling stylists’ boring “gender-bending” mood board. When the same tired style philosophy is transposed onto a classic tuxedo, Pascal’s look is the result – an utterly confused mess that ends up looking like he walked out of Macy’s with off-the-rack pants that he didn’t have time to tailor and forgot to get a bow tie even though his girlfriend texted to remind him.
🥁Riz Ahmed admittedly had probably had the coolest wardrobe in film in 2019s Sound of Metal. His perfectly distressed vintage metal tees only enhanced his insanely ripped and inked-up physique. He has also slayed numerous red carpets in well-cut navy suits and wears a classic black tuxedo with the best of them. This particular look from Prada is not playing to any of Ahmed’s strengths. He is particularly lanky, and the jacket and collar dwarf his body. The size of his upper half makes the slim pants look completely out of step proportionally.
🏆And now the winners! Butler, Rocky, and Mescal were all able to emphasize certain facets of the classic tuxedo to extreme lengths without delineating from the tuxedo's fundamental principles.
🎸Austin Butler had probably the highest probability of things going horribly wrong on Sunday. The Elvis impersonator is a mythically embarrassing figure in American life, and Butler succeeded in disappearing into the role without coming across as tacky. Bravo! The same can be said for his Oscars look. The black tuxedo from Saint Laurent has overly structured shoulders that give Butler a statuesque silhouette and a larger-than-life presence. In short, he looked like a movie star which seems like a big ask these days for some reason.
🫦A$AP accompanied his partner, Rihanna, who performed “Lift Me Up” from Black Panther: Wakanda Forever on Sunday. He gave a charming champagne toast following her performance. Where the champagne came from is anyone's guess, though Rocky gives the impression that a bath of bubbly follows him wherever he goes. His look is a masterclass in the double-breasted tuxedo. It is roomy but not oversized. Snug but not tight. His lapel is big but not massive, and the contrast between the bone jacket and black pants and lapel animated the look and gave it some character but not enough to overshadow his date.
🍀Paul Mescal was by far the best-dressed man of the evening in a Gucci tuxedo that marries that silly Harry Styles silhouette with a dinner jacket fit for Humphrey Bogart. The Aftersun star, who brought me to tears with a once-in-a-lifetime gutwrenching performance that called for dad shoes, not a fat suit, matched his tuxedo with an elegant Cartier Tank Chinoise and diamond brooch. Mescal’s stylist Felicity Kay has been lights out this awards season and, with Mescal as her canvas, has created idiosyncratic and creative looks that mix and match different brands instead of simply using Mescal as a vehicle for promotional material. For Kay, Mescal is the promotional material.
In this clip from golden era normcore Seinfeld, Jerry makes light of the uniformity of a black tuxedo. Of course, a man can vanish into a tuxedo, his personhood lost behind a satin lapel, but on Sunday, those who stood out with slight and deliberate interpretations of the classic tux won the night.