Word: bashford
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...California assembly, Brown had agonized over which of three designer suits to wear to his swearing in. He finally decided to have Polaroids taken to see which suit would photograph better. The winner: a $2,600 single-breasted charcoal-gray Brioni with a brown pencil stripe. Haberdasher Wilkes Bashford, a longtime Brown outfitter, provided the final, Caesarean touch at a preinauguration party: a wreath of laurel. "I take my job pretty seriously," said Bashford, "and I missed one accessory." The ebullient Brown...
Long derided as a symbol of button-down regimentation fit for only a nerd or an IBM lifer, white shirts are back in style. At Wilkes Bashford, San Francisco's tony clothiers, sales have boomed as executives invest in convenience. "A line of white shirts in the closet is comforting to face when you're in a hurry," observes Salesman Jay Haley. "They go with everything, so you can just pull them out of the closet with no fuss and bam! you're out the door looking good...
...jacquards. Among the latest variations are snowy shirts with thin, widely spaced purple or teal stripes. Says Barbara Kirk, a men's-furnishings buyer for the Seattle-based Nordstom stores: "A plain white shirt isn't just a plain white shirt anymore." Nor is it cheap: at Wilkes Bashford, the price can reach $235 for a French-cuff Charvet shirt, made of Sea Island cotton and imported from Paris...
Readers of Caen soon learn more than they may want to know about his dietary habits (Shredded Wheat for breakfast), his haberdasher (Wilkes Bashford) and his favorite restaurants (Le Central and the Tadich Grill). Some of his word gags not only time eggs but also lay them ("bumpersnickers," for the compendium of auto-born humor that he occasionally shares with readers; "LActress," for L.A. actress). But Caen comes up with more than his share of winners. He claims to have coined the word beatnik, and his elegies on the bygone charms of San Francisco are usually models of crisp journalistic...
Buttoned-down American men, of course, are dourly and durably resistant to the whims of fashion; but they too are succumbing in increasing numbers to the "schlepped in" look. When Wilkes Bashford, San Francisco's priciest men's store, ran full-page ads featuring a man whose linen suit looked as if it had escaped from a disaster movie, it was a sellout. Italy's Giorgio Armani is generally acknowledged to be the greatest evangelist of male unkempt. A disarming, blue-eyed Milanese, Armani, 43, is a canny tailor who knows precisely what each fabric...