Word: flannel
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Calders have been artists for four generations-his great-great-grandfather, a funeral mason from Aberdeen in Scotland, helped carve the Albert Memorial in London before settling in Philadelphia in 1868. But Alexander Calder, looking at 78 like a rumpled dugong in a red flannel shirt, belongs to a hallowed American type: the bike-shop genius, cousin to Henry Ford or Wilbur Wright. Except for the big commissions of the past 20 years, his sculpture is still mostly improvisation-tin-snips and pliers stuff, made in his studios in Connecticut and the south of France...
...professions, the staid, gray flannel world of accounting last week erupted in a name-calling civil war. The contestants: Chicago-based Arthur Andersen & Co. v. the Securities and Exchange Commission, an industry self-policing board, and five other companies that, like Andersen, are members of accounting's "Big Eight" firms. The issue: How far should the Government go in monitoring the standards used in auditing a company's books...
Sloan Wilson reports in these amiable memoirs that in 1955, after the vast sales of his novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, tailors sought him out and begged him to accept, gratis, suits of fine gray flannel. Wilson's book had already confirmed what everybody knew-that the gray flannel suit had become the uniform of some sort of success in a tall building in New York. Wilson felt that to wear one would be to indulge in ridiculous self-advertisement. It says something about the careful, rather unimaginative Wilson, as well as about the doleful plumage...
...life, he wonders dimly, than crawling up the salary ladder, moving from suburb to classier suburb? If the process by which a novel becomes a bestseller is not simply a random phenomenon, like the winning of a lottery-a dubious proposition that wise old publishers brood about-then Gray Flannel owed its vogue to the fact that a lot of sad young men were thinking the way Tom was. Presumably they must have liked the novel's reassuring answer, which is, more or less, cherish your wife, vote yes on school bond issues, and existential despair will stay away...
...wear, he is perhaps the most purely American of all. For the "thoroughbred, American-looking girl who really takes care of her body," he creates clothes that are "part of living, earthly, tweedy." He is a masterful tailor and a lover of fabrics such as Harris tweed and British flannel. His slim, sleek adaptations of English blazers and hacking jackets are, he says, "unfashionable in a way, yet fun and exciting in their function." His women's wear brought in $10 million retail last year and Polo, his menswear firm, another $16 million...