David Nahill

As a beach city, San Diego's male style never seems to wander far from the brown-skin-and-tee look of the beach. Baja Henleys and roped Stokers. Gurkha shorts, cow-print denims.

Until recently San Diego could boast no Saville Row, no Place des Victoires. It was content to have a few designer shops dispersed among its pastoral malls and the odd British tailor tucked away in a safe, comfortable place. Eventually, however, the city decided that its sartorial philistinism was no longer a joke and decided to open a fashion mall downtown. the Paladion, a block south of Broadway. The result, it is hoped, will be a gradual mass conversion to style.

The Southern California male does find his center of gravity — where he is comfortable and swaggering — in the aesthetic of the gym and Great Outdoors.

The Paladion itself does not take its style lightly. In fact it wears it heavily on its own sleeve. As you enter the inner courtyard, between the Dunhill and Ferragamo boutiques (which is to say that you enter through a voluptuous corridor of windows filled with 1987 Harvest Crop cigars, traveling backgammon sets, and Stern watches), the first thing you see is a gigantic statue of a nymph standing in the center of a buffet restaurant, surrounded by carts laden with salamis and walnut salads. She is in the Second Empire style (swooning, snake-bitten, or orgasmic, one never knows). Beneath her splendidly Greek anatomy, a pianist is hammering away at the “Funeral March” on a Steinway, tossing his head this way and that.

Virtually no one is there. Are they all in the luxury fashion shops round about, or are they elsewhere altogether, supremely unconcerned? One can only say with certainty that, all in all, pianists plus nymphs equals Style. And if fashion in San Diego had ever wanted a wondrous, gaudy temple, this is it. There is nowhere better to forget your troubles in the Lethe of luxury. And at least — unlike the new malls in Vegas — there are no walking, talking statues of Aphrodite and Bacchus. Only Chopin and credit card machines.

The Paladion’s opening was well advertised to the Mexican market. Indeed it is rumored that there were two separate openings last November, one for Americans and one for Mexicans, so important are the wealthy snappy dressers from across the border. In fact, fashion is one of the few areas in which the usual logic of U.S.-Mexican tourism is roundly reversed. The American designer shops depend on Mexican business.

“It’s about 50 percent Mexican here,” the sales staff at Ferragamo admitted. “They come from all over Mexico, not just Tijuana — Mexico City, Monterrey, Guadalajara, all over. Some of them fly up especially for the clothes and nothing else. They can’t buy this stuff down there. You couldn’t buy it here outside of L. A. until we opened. Now San Diego is the closest place for them to stock up on the really exquisite European clothes. Mexicans are now making clothes trips to this city because of the Paladion. That was the idea.”

The Mexican male, it would appear, feels quite comfortable in the midst of all this indiscreet opulence. The native male, though, is going to be a bit shyer. Is he really going to wander around this sultry maze of mirrors and glass, feeling at his ease among the gold alligator skin Versace jackets, the Ferragamo pillows with their patterns of reclining tigers, the leopard motif towels, and the intricately tricky displays of ties and hazelnuts? Those sleek little black Versace boxes (what do they contain — designer bombs?) seem to bode ill for the cautious spendthrift. And what happens when this same cautious intruder — perhaps used to buying the odd Natural Style in Updated Design at Nordstrom across the road but nothing, well, excessive — takes a look at the price tag on that gold-and-black Versace thing, which looks from a distance like a beautifully dyed hide? Two thousand dollars! Will he be able to control his face, let alone his mouth? Will he be able to walk upright out of the store, frantically clutching his wallet?

Now it is well known that Versace has the most beautiful salespeople in the world. How is the terrified Updated Design guy going to actually parade himself in that yellow thing in front of the mirrors and look as if he can bring it off? The average man will have no idea in these situations whether he looks like Karl Lagerfeld or a cat’s dinner. Two thousand dollars! Yellow reptile pattern! He will merely purse his lips in anguish, quietly take the exotic object off. and sneak out of the boutique praying that no one will see him. It will have mattered nothing that the gorgeous saleswoman in her haute couture suit has declared that it is “really you.” The truth is that modern man does not want to be a peacock. He wants to be a groomed, quietly distinguished (but sexy) mouse. And a mouse is never yellow (that would attract too much attention); he is always grey, brown, or black. The colors of the prudent mammal.

However, it was not always so. In pre-industrial societies, it is nearly always the male who is the dresser, the self-displaying bird of paradise. The German ethnologist Eibl-Eibesfeldt has called the greying of male dress in industrial societies Vermausgrauung — that is, “greying like a mouse." “Man conforms to mass society,” he writes, “by depriving himself of virile and imposing displays.” Today, he notes. “Women have a monopoly of beauty,” while men have become plain, without decoration. Just as it is women who paint their mouths (in imitation. so it is said, of the rosy hue of a primate’s genitals), so it is they who display their sexuality in dress. It is difficult to remember the male extravagance and coquetry of, say, the Versailles court (the very word coquetry comes from coq, a cock). Or the cosmetic exuberance of men in medieval Japan. Samurais actually took makeup kits with them into battle, rouging their lips in preparation for a beautiful death. Yukio Mishima so detested the androgynous aesthetic of the classic woodblock artists that he lamented that in these traditional pictures it was impossible to tell men from women because their clothes and makeup were the same.

Only in the 19th Century did this change. As women became more sexually idolized and therefore more self-parading, so men became more chained to the sobriety of industrial work. Woman became the peacock and man the mouse. And as the homosexual culture that underlay this male dominance in the matter of beauty in both Europe and Japan was suppressed, so the dress of men and women became more and more differentiated.

Designers like Versace, Gaultier, and Miyake have certainly broken down the monochrome, tailored male image, lining their fluid garments with lush silk prints, importing an elegant femininity into their lines, using rich color schemes or billowing effects in their shirts and. in the case of Versace, allowing languorous tigers and leopards to make an appearance in their accessories — the towels, pillows, and sheets that men use as intimately as they do their clothes.

What this kind of clothing tries to do is to furnish the Dandy. The Dandy is a figure continually at war with the suburban English gentleman who has provided the model of male grey dress for the last century or so. And even if the true Versace client is not a Beau Brummel. that brilliant fanatic who showed that clothes are far more important than sanity, he will certainly be a Dandy. And the Dandy is a serious skeptic; he understands, at least, that clothes are not things that keep off the rain and snow. They are the very stuff of a person’s identity.

Beau Brummel died in a lunatic asylum in Normandy, having perhaps taken his way of life to its logical conclusion. Some people would not approve of such monstrosity. The people who run the Ascot Shop, for example — one of San Diego’s oldest men’s clothing stores and tailors. For here the suburban Englishman gentleman is king, and not the Dandy.

The Ascot, in La Jolla, was founded in 1950 by one Jack Metzinger, an exile from Chicago, and quickly set in motion a fashion for the “soft shoulder.” ultratraditional English look, which had been curiously unknown here until the end of the 1940s. Unlike the Paladion. Ascot relies on a San Diego County clientele that remains loyal to the imperturbable cachet suggested by its name (to anyone born on the other side of the lake, a terrible vision of badly dressed aristocrats in silly hats eating their champagne picnics in the back seats of their gaudy Rolls-Royces).

The clients here are treated as life-long customers, and their vital statistics are stored on the premises in files. These are altered gradually as age and girth increase. In this way. Ascot delicately avoids hurting their feelings and makes them feel that they belong. not to some clothes mail-order list or to an anonymous crowd in a mall, but to an exclusive, cultish club of impeccable dressers whose very flesh is lightly scented with mahogany.

The windows announce at once the quiet, refined La Jolla image that the boutique aims to preserve. Bottles of Royall Bayrhum all-purpose lotion sit with Panama hats. L.B. Evans slippers, bottles of malt. Yale University tankards, and little yellowed 19th-century cartographic globes. A discreet and polished nostalgia for a distant world of ivy-clad prep schools and cultured leisure reigns here. Surrounding the toiletries are vellum-spined books of the kind that must line the shelves of a thousand gentlemanly grandfathers: Graham and Dodd's Security Analysis, A History of Russia. etc. And under them, plans of St. Andrew’s legendary golf course and phials of Wood's of Windsor cologne.

The whole display encapsulates a sphere of male camaraderie, of father-son intimacy, that finds its most sacred expression in the handing down of a tradition. “Especially for you. Father,” reads the card with the picture of the swimming duck (soon to be shot?). Clothes are the cement that bonds this handing of tradition from father to son. One can imagine the young boy taken by his father for his first fitting — an initiation into manhood like the circumcision rituals of African tribes. And some vague, sentimental racial memory stirs at the sight of those British Byford socks, those Trafalgar braces, and Corbin belts — not to mention the dapper safari suits on display. They epitomize not a way of dressing but a way of life.

As for Ascot’s tailoring philosophy, it is essentially one based on the superlative breeding of materials. “What our customer wants,” the head assistant in the shop explains, "is a definite feel to the fabric he’s wearing. The fabric is everything. It expresses by itself everything that he wants to express about himself. A custom-made suit begins with a swatch, that is, a fabric sample that the customer feels with great care. Take the cotton shifts, for example. Gitman in New Jersey makes our shirts, with a cotton from Georgia known as Sea Island. The climate and soil of Georgia make for what we think is the best cotton in the world.

“But every cotton has a different denier or thickness. This is determined by the number of yams contained in each square inch of fabric. The higher the count, the thinner, the more refined the cotton is. And therefore the more expensive it is. From 80 denier up, a shirt can cost about $125, though usually people settle for a slightly thicker denier working out at around $70 to $90.

“Or consider the material used for our suits. If you take an all-wool tropical, the length and twist of the yarn in that wool determines the ‘hand’ that it has. Now. Southwick in Lawrence. Massachusetts, make our suits with an Australian wool woven by the Zegna mill in Italy. It’s the best there is. It feels like no other wool, and we can get it for you for $1300. I don’t think the designers can match that kind of quality in the material for the prices they charge. We can make small and very individual alterations to every article of clothing we sell because we have four tailors working on the premises.

“If you buy a shirt, you can actually choose the kind of collar you want.” He opens a catalog devoted solely to collars. “You can select your cotton and then your collar —a curved pinspread. an English spread, a straight pointer, or a brass tab. You can order for yourself exactly the shirt you want, with no compromises. Because what matters to us is not the designer, but the customer. It’s what the customer sees in his mind's eye that counts, not the almighty creativity of the designer.”

Whatever he sees in his mind’s eye (the aforementioned champagne picnics?), the Ascot client will need to be acquainted with a fairly formidable technical vocabulary. It is not enough for him to know his chambray from his poplin, his vegetable-dyed madras from his seersucker. Nor is it enough for him to know his brass tabs from his deniers. He will also have to know his fabric patterns, his sharkskins, shadows, and glens, his old school buttons, his British regimental ties and that unnameable quality that makes an Alan Paine cashmere sweater superior to all others.

Those ties, for example. In Britain itself, the wearing of the wrong tie at the wrong place at the wrong time can be a social catastrophe for the wearer that will instantly mark him out as a malodorous Hun, a dirty barbarian such as might well have sacked the Great Library of Alexandria. To avoid this terrible outcome, and to spare the unwitting American tie-wearer who just happened to like the pretty colors from being spat on by enraged ex-Regimentals at the Ritz, the stripes in the U.S. are reversed. Thus Robert Talbott, king of tie-makers, has turned the proud colors of the Argyle and Sutherland Highlanders, the Royal Dragoon 8th, and the Lothians and Border Horse into innocuous fashion accessories for the California cognoscenti of Rancho Santa Fe and La Jolla.

Ascot, however, draws the line at collegiate ties. Inverting the colors of an Old World regiment is more chic. It fits more snugly into the English feel of the place.

“Oh yes.” the assistant goes on, “the British feel is very important. It's an association with a lack of hurry, a deliberateness in the way we do things. [He is not referring to British sloth.] We can make up a suit in four to six weeks, but we'd never hurry the customer himself. That’s unthinkable. No one here earns a commission. There’s no pressure on any of us to sell anything. That's not how it works. The customer knows what he wants, and we just help him arrive at it. We’re like an amanuensis. And we sell a timeless style to a loyal clientele. None of our customers is going to come here to experiment with anything. Our popular colors never change. True, olive is the color of the moment right now. but the old dark blues, greys, and glen plaids are right where they’ve always been. Only black has dropped out of it — too funereal.” Not many people even in La Jolla can be seen strutting about in a beautiful Southwick two-piece, but at least here the Southern Californian man can anchor himself in a mythic past that soars above the scruffy present world of flapping beachwear, sloganized baseball caps, and demagogic crop-tops. And the whiff of ineffable English public schools, of hallowed regimental messes, of plodding punts on the Cam and the soggy snobberies of elite race-courses is irresistible. In fact, isn’t it enough to be grateful for any rebellion against the tyranny of baseball caps (that universal sign of mental debility)? Isn’t it enough to be grateful for the smallest resistance against the ever-encroaching aesthetic of the Dancing Gangster?

And there is one more thing that Ascot gives us that is irreplaceable. It gives the wearer of a Gitman shirt to which a few unique alterations have been made the sweet illusion that — in this department if in nothing else — he is as unique and individual a being as Michelangelo.

That the elusive “average male” harbours a secret dread of buying his clothes in public seems to be a universal assumption among sensitive tailors. One of the most sensitive of the sensitive tailors is the Tom James Company, which has its San Diego offices on C Street. Tom James has long known that man is a timid animal when it comes to style and feels a certain anguish when it comes to making a decision, as it were, under the bright lights. And so they send their prospective customers a bright and breezy letter full of exclamations and capital letters, which goes rather like this:

Dear Sir,

I have heard some very nice things about you. Including the fact that you are an incredibly busy man as well as very sharp DRESSER (our client needs to be reassured about-this last point). This is an application for the job of your CLOTHIER. My service is focused on people like yourself who are extremely BUSY and don’t have the TIME to go shopping, or for that matter the INCLINATION. For twenty-five years now....”

And so on.

With this letter will come a Tom James color catalog that explains the clothing philosophy of both company and San Diego general manager Walter Erikson. “Servicing your apparel needs at your convenience is the cornerstone on which our company is built. We Come To You!” The company, in other words, takes its wares to the man. not the other way round. The customer, faced with this bewildering gamut of Allen-Edmonds brogues. Investment Collection suits, and 100 percent silk Royal Classic sport coats, will make his nerve-racking decision in complete privacy. No mirrors, no sneering beauties laughing behind his back, no superior clients casting him sarcastic little looks as he pirouettes in front of his tutting wife in a lumpy pair of Faconnable “elastique” golf pants with adjustable side tabs. Complete solitude. Utter relief.

The burly, affable manager, descendant (or so he jokes) of that redoubtable Viking who discovered America in the l()th Century, explains it thus: “It’s not just that they don’t have the time. It’s something else. It’s that they actively dislike being in a public space for so intimate a function — I mean, buying or being measured for clothes. They may well not have the confidence. And there is definitely a desire in men to talk things over confidentially with his tailor or fitter. It’s one of the few intimate things a man has.

“On the other hand, what we deliver for the most part is not a custom suit as such. What we offer is made to measure. That is, not a suit that has been built up from the swatch up. but a suit adapted to the peculiarities of each individual. We process all our clients’ vital statistics through a computer — it’s like the coldcalling used by insurance salesmen. It’s very detailed. We even include different figures for measurements made before and after lunch. We then add the preferences and adjustments needed onscreen, before anything is done. Six weeks later, the client has his customized suit for anything from $500 to $3600. In other words, the system is so efficient, so sophisticated, that it bypasses traditional custom tailoring.

“We can get 70 percent of our clothing right on the first fitting. And so, all in all. you get the choice between, on the one hand, a customized fit and. on the other, good designers that you might really want in your wardrobe. Why not wear a Ralph Lauren or a Brioni suit if it can be perfectly adapted to your figure? And of course, we do make up shirts and suits from swatches. In fact, we have hundreds of them. The point really is that even if a man isn’t ordering a custom suit from the swatch up. he likes to be measured in private. Men don’t like shops, period, because they make them feel anonymous. And. as they say, clothes are the man. Who wants to be anonymous?”

The James Company now has over 300 salesmen in the U.S. and 67 outlets in 26 states. Its “cold-calling” insurance man techniques are cunningly aimed at male insecurities. Take, for example, the little leaflet it posts at random to prospective clients entitled "How to Tie Classic Knots.” The unknowing client-to-be gets this indispensable document through the mail and discovers that, after all. he has no idea whatsoever how to tie. say, a bow tie or an ascot. Enter the magisterial James know-how. Six diagrams take him through the half-Windsor knot, the four-in-hand, and the dreaded ascot. More esotericaliy, it tells him how to make the elusive dimple. “The perfect knot,’’ it says, “should have just below it an oval-shaped indentation known as a dimple.” A subtle operation involving the forefinger is explained, and we are given to understand without a perfectly executed dimple a man is, well, quite simply naked. A naked ape.

“We do anything to get a man interested.” Erikson admits. "We know how to educate men without making them feel humiliated. Why not learn how to tie a knot properly? So we tell them, discreetly, how to tie a correct ascot. And then we give them detailed advice on the color scheme that will go with their skin tone and hair color. Most people don’t think about color, but color is a rather precise science. And also heavy with social history. Did you know that there are areas of this country where it is impossible to see a brown suit? In New York or Boston, for example. Why? Because brown was the color worn by the peasants in England hundreds of years ago. Somehow they haven’t forgotten it, even if only subconsciously. They’ll wear brown in winter in the Midwest (but not in summer), and year-round, sometimes, in California or the Southeast. But on the East Coast, never. Too close to England! Brown equals peasant and that’s that. It’s the kiss of death."

If ever Eibl-Eibcnsfeldt needed proof for his darling theory, the Tom James “Pattern and Color Guide for the Well-Dressed Man” would be it. We are taken through six male types, from Fair Skin (with freckles) and Dark Blond Hair to Olive, to Black or Very Fair (pink tone) with Black Hair. For each type, there is a palette of acceptable colors for suits, shirts, and sport coats. Men with little or no hair are discreetly informed that “we need to use eye colors.” For example, a man with “brownish-pink" skin or freckles with light skin, bald with blue eyes would need to choose a suit in midnight blue or beige, a shirt in light salmon or light ecru, a sport coat in camel or burnt brown, and a light-blue shirt with stripes or checks. Grey, he is advised, “is not your best color.”

Erikson goes on. “San Diego is not a sophisticated city in toto. There are pockets of sophistication. Only now is the fashion landscape beginning to shift a little. Grey is our most acceptable and popular color, but there is a move now towards patterns and away from solids, towards stripes and windowpanes; olive is now as popular as anything. Men are beginning to feel more comfortable with clothes, and as they do, they feel they can venture away from a classic solid grey.

“Fashion in San Diego will basically follow the city’s development. If the city really develops itself, becomes more aware of itself, more cosmopolitan, builds more museums and galleries and concert halls, and attracts money from the Midwest or the East — I mean money invested in culture — then so the clothing industry here will flourish and find a new local market. If none of that happens. then it probably won’t.

"Personally, I stay in touch with the East and with Europe. I go to London almost every year. Fine place. Wonderful Scottish oysters. I had lunch in a restaurant with Robert Wagner once. What was it called...ah. let me see...a place near Horton’s....”

As Mr. Erikson tries to remember where he had lunch with Robert Wagner, you might well take a sly look around his office, where you will be amazed to see a videotape library devoted solely to garments, the titles as exotic as those in any sex shop: The Effects of Incorrect Shoulder and Incline Readings, The British Odyssey II: Huddersfield Raw Wool, Viewing a Coat that Is More Square Than the Client, and so on. And it is suddenly made clear to you what a priesthood these tailors are. Like the Sanhedrin, they speak a language unintelligible to the uninitiated. Mr. Erikson has given up on the elusive London restaurant, but he does suddenly lean over and say rather triumphantly, “Did you know that Leif Ericson discovered America?”

And he leans back majestically, fingering the edges of a beautiful poplin suit. Leif Ericson. at least, never wore one of those.

The Tom James company may well be confident that its computerized systems have superannuated the subtle masculine intimacy that bonds a client to his personal tailor. But the mystique of the latter is still very strong. The rich and powerful of this country are never without one. Robert Krasnow. the chairman of Elektra Entertainment, says, “Your tailor reads you.” Frank Mariani, Ronald Reagan's tailor since 1937, confesses. “I don’t see swatches. I see faces." “The image-conscious," says the tailor Lewis Faber, “just love to say, ‘I can't talk now. my tailor is here.’ " Tailors like Alan Flusser, who clothes celebrities and power lawyers, know exactly how to nurture this confidential and cozy rapport. What the wealthy client is paying for is not just a piece of cloth, but also a singular luxury — that of being dressed, like some preening courtier, by another human being.

But in San Diego, the ritual of dress rarely reaches this level of self-idolization. Indeed, the city at first glance seems one that is unsure of whether it ought to dress at all. As a beach city, its male style never seems to wander far from the brown-skin-and-tee look of the beach. Baja Henleys and roped Stokers. Gurkha shorts, cow-print denims. Los Mochis shirts are what you see perambulating under the palm trees, and the sexual bravura they emit has nothing to do with Roman streets. The tank top. for example, that classic exercise in planned self-exposure (the garment equivalent of Brut aftershave) has not been designed to clothe the honed pecs and arms it is attached to so much as to surround them, frame them, and glorify them. The clothing itself fades away into insignificance. Why was Lycra invented if not to make possible the strange conjuring act of being both naked and clothed at the same time? Why were side-mesh shorts devised if not, as the manufacturers would have it, to “give well-sculpted legs great visibility”?

Kym Milbum. one of the city’s bright young designers, who works out of a small shop on K Street, laments its lack of male fashion.

“It’s very difficult to make men’s clothes in San Diego and make a profit at the same time. There just isn’t the depth as far as the market goes — you wouldn't be able to sell enough pieces. Like most designers. I’ve given up on men's wear here. If I move to New York eventually, then perhaps I’ll take it up again. But here I’d go bankrupt."

Another young designer. Roxy Moine. who works in La Jolla, agrees. “I’ve stopped doing men's stuff because I couldn't get the customers. Men in San Diego generally like the tailored look. They are rarely going to take a leap into the concepts of a designer who is very individual in the way that women do happily. Women simply wear more clothes, wear more daring clothes, experiment more, and are not afraid of boldness. That is what they are brought up to do."

But even if this is true, the Southern California male does find his center of gravity — where he is comfortable and swaggering — in the aesthetic of the gym and Great Outdoors. And there are places that serve up what he wants. International Male on Fourth Avenue in Hillcrest is not devoted to solar-flair Las Flores midcut beach shorts and nothing else, but it does take the indigenous flirtation with muscular nudity to its greatest heights. Here is the cheap body-worship gear that the San Diego boy wants to wear most of the lime, and all of it piled high in a steel-girdered dungeon that is the nearest thing to a Carnaby Street hole that is offered in America’s Finest.

International Male does sell one-button suits, nuovo-mesh loafers, and sanded poplin pants, but there is no escaping the fact that its reputation rests fairly and squarely upon the extravagance of its undergear. Double-strap unitards (looking like one of Victor Mature’s outfits from Samson and Delilah). zipper string tanks, high-cut Speedo. meshed velvet and steel-stud bikinis, neon floral thongs, side-split shorts and French Contour briefs are what I.M. makes its business.

The hippie beach aesthetic gets its airing in the piles of Khyber. San Benito, and Fimo psychedelic beads, the braided sandals and canvas espadrilles. the madras gauze shirts and fish-print drawstring pants. But side by side with this is a fantastic repertory of male boudoir frills: opulent lace squarecuts and sultry thongs, semi-transparent leopard boxers, an incredible ultra-sheer polyester leopard-pattern chiffon robe (“patterned after the animal in you”) that you could certainly wear with the insolent little matching leopard thong, fundoshis, fishnet bikinis. Buns bikinis. Italian cutaways. and silk panties.

The boutique calls this section of its business "Animal Instincts.” and here more than anywhere the joys of sartorial androgyny are celebrated. A man may be wearing hunky beachwear and jeans on the outside, but who knows if inside he is wearing a pair of those scandalous lacy briefs or — even better — a chiffon leopardskin thong? Who knows, for that matter, what percentage of the San Diego male population is secretly wearing these flimsy provocations under their tailored Southwick suits, happy in the knowledge that the inner animal and the outer suit-wearer are not always the same thing?

The assistant at l.M. laughs and says, “You never know. Of course, there is a gay presence in this kind of clothing, because gays are not bound by the same fears and restraints when it comes to clothes. Self-exhibition and peacockry are not exceptional. On the other hand, as you can see. there are plenty of grandmothers here buying underwear for their husbands. I can tell you that the French thongs and the Buns line are immensely popular across the board, as is the Calvin Klein underwear. The fringed buckskin swimwear doesn’t do too badly either. I would say that people in this part of the world dress much more extravagantly on the level of underwear than they do on the level of appearances. Perhaps that 's what they feel comfortable with, I don’t know. Perhaps it’s the only area they feel they can really let go with. The Animal Inside!"

In the cheerful gaudiness of International Male, at least, the California man doesn’t have to spend money he would rather be spending on his car or his surfboard. He can creep into the boudoir of his own making and know all the feelings that female skin is usually familiar with. He can step out of his tailored male image and wear the spots of imaginary chiffon leopards. He can become a sex object and an androgyne. He can lose his mouse-like grey and step into the dangerous world of color. And best of all, like the samurai of medieval Japan, he can dress like a peacock (even if only with his underwear) until the day he dies. Perhaps one day he will even wear those lacey briefs in public.