This article originally appeared in GQ here.
By Jeremy Freed
If looking good in a suit is a science, then Alan Flusser is one of the field’s pre-eminent PhDs. Flusser is known for outfitting generations of men at his eponymous NYC haberdashery and designing the power suits Michael Douglas wore in Wall Street, but his most lasting legacy might be his genre-defining menswear book, Dressing the Man.
Published in 2002, Dressing the Manis a richly illustrated 300-page tome covering every aspect of classic men’s clothing from suits to socks. Unlike other how-to guides, however, Dressing the Man is less concerned with telling you what clothes to wear than teaching you how to assemble a wardrobe that works with your face shape, body type, and skin tone. From what shade of blue best suits your complexion to which tie knotcomplements your jawline, Flusser lays out a formula for looking good in your clothes based on his decades of experience dressing men.
“Learning how to dress is not as complicated an enterprise as most people think,” explains Flusser. “It's not so difficult to teach somebody how to wear a dark suit, a white shirt, a dark tie, and dark socks and shoes. What's difficult is for individual people to get that kind of input relative to themselves.”
Flusser lays out his thesis in chapters like “Proportion: The Foundation of Style.” (Example tip: “Since the breadth of the jacket’s shoulder guides its lapel width, a broad-shouldered man will naturally require a fuller lapel for proper balance.”) Looking good in tailored clothing, Flusser posits, comes down to a sort of divine mathematics of the myriad relationships between your clothes and your body. “It’s the relationship between the shirt collar and the person's face, the width of the shoulders in relation to the person's head, the length of the jacket and the relationship to their legs, and a whole series of other relationships that are unique to that person,” he explains.
Dressing the Man isn’t a particularly easy read, but Flusser compensates for his academic writing style with a bevy of well-captioned illustrations that offer almost as much utility as his dense blocks of text. “I tried to capture all of the questions that I've either been asked, or I think should be asked about how to dress and find pictures that helped convey each of those points,” he says. “I also spent a lot of time on captions, because 90% of the people who buy the book—maybe they read it, maybe they don’t—but they’ll look at the pictures and the captions.”
While Dressing the Man’s subtitle is Mastering the Art of Permanent Fashion, it’s still very much a product of the 20th century (its idea of “modern” menswear ends with Ralph Lauren and Giorgio Armani, and its cast of style icons could use a lot more diversity.) Despite its fustiness, however, Dressing the Man’s continued relevance lies in its assertion that—with a few tweaks—the same things that made a suit look good in 1924 still apply in 2024.
“I give Alan an awful lot of credit because he really got more guys interested in dressing well than almost anybody I can think of, apart from Ralph [Lauren],” says veteran menswear writer Bruce Boyer. “He introduced them to good British-style tailoring, custom shirts, and things like that. Alan's books were the first books which tried to popularize the subject for the ordinary guy.”
A lot has changed in the years since Dressing the Man was published, from the rise of streetwear and athleisure to a general relaxing of the rules around dressing for work and formal occasions, and Flusser concedes that our current moment of fashion presents challenges that the book doesn’t address. “It’s easy for a man to put on a suit and choose a white or blue dress shirt and put on a tie,” he says. “But if you're asking that same guy to put on a sports jacket and then match a pair of pants to it, and then match a shirt that goes with both of them, it’s much more difficult.”
There are also a lot more places to get the kind of info contained in Dressing the Man than there were in 2002. “Dressing the Man came about when guys were not sure where to look in terms of inspiration and understanding a lot of the rules,” says Max Papier, director of e-commerce for The Armoury NYC. “But now you have so much in terms of short-form video and social media where you can get a different understanding of these things in real life. It's handy to read these books, and they give you a set of rules, but they won't necessarily get the feel or the vibe across.”
Lack of vibes aside, between inspo photos of Gianni Agnelli and Gary Cooper, time-tested theories of proportion and a glossary spanning everything from accordion pleats to zoot suits, Dressing the Man remains an important resource for anyone interested in learning about the foundational tenets of tailored menswear. “I'm not trying to teach people how to dress like Fred Astaire,” Flusser says. “Everything that I write is about coming up with something that's going to be your own. The rules are there so that you know how to break them.”