William F. Buckley Style, R.I.P.

William F. Buckley, Jr., Icon of Style

Wha? William F. Buckley, Jr., who died last week at 82, a paragon of masculine style?

Well, yes. Believe me on this one, because I was there to witness firsthand the great conservative’s impact on the sartorial ambitions of my generation.

Buckley’s style was extremely reserved but deliciously unfussy. It was based on a simple premise: the natural-shoulder Brooks Brothers sack suit. Unlike its European counterparts, this simple, two-piece uniform was designed for unpretentious comfort and endless durability. It’s called a sack because that’s what it looks like. There is no padding in the shoulders to make a man look broader. The waist is not suppressed to seem narrower. There is no darting—a tailoring technique—to give the suit shape. The trousers are not pleated. The suit, introduced by Brooks Brothers in 1900, embodied a simple philosophy: What you see is what you get.

For decades, whenever you saw Buckley, in person or on TV, you also saw this suit, along with its typical companions: a Brooks Brothers oxford-cloth button-down shirt and a narrow Brooks Brother striped Repp tie. The get-up is sometimes erroneously referred to as “preppy,” due to Brooks Brothers association with East Coast society and the Ivy League. But in fact, it was standard-issue attire for a much more serious and intellectual type of guy, the American traditionalist. This personality enjoyed his heyday from roughly the end of World War II to the advent of the peacock era in men’s style, when coincided with cultural events such as Woodstock and The Beatles’ album “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” Don’t take my word for it; visit the style forum of a website called Ask Andy About Clothes, where a group of American “trads” gathers at all hours to discuss the look.

Buckley’s version of hardcore trad has other elements: khaki pants, Shetland wool crewneck sweaters, seersucker, all well-worn and rarely impeccably pressed. It’s a wardrobe that’s the antithesis of dandyism and that requires almost no thought. (Unfortunately, Brook Brothers has moved away from the style, but you can still find it at J.Press). Trad provided the blank canvas on which Buckley painted his unique personal style. What’s the lasting image of him that we have? Slouching in his chair on an episode of “Firing Line,” in his rumpled sack, shirt-collar twisted, tie askew, sleeves riding up, hair untrimmed, a $1 clipboard on his lap and a cheap red pen between his less-then-white teeth as his searched for the correct riposte to his (often liberal) guest.

Buckley trad was engendered at Yale and later became the default form of carefree non-chic adopted by, among others, the CIA and the FBI, as well as by most government prosecutors (for a contemporary, and more lawyerly example, check out Ken Starr, Dean of the Pepperdine Law School and Special Prosecutor scourge of President Bill Clinton). It was the house style of uncompromising anti-communism. Like many good things about menswear, it was wrecked by the 1970s and never fully restored during the preppy revival of the 1980s. However, if Buckley was your Virgil, as a young conservative during the high point of Reaganism during the mid ’80s, the look was what you strived to emulate.

I was not a young conservative during the Reagan years. I was instead a young liberal at a large state college in South Carolina, an out-of-towner plopped down among what I considered to be a impressive number of young conservatives. I wore jeans and tweed jackets, going for a kind of Woodward and Bernstein professional counterculturalist thing. My good friend and thoroughgoing Buckleyite—who was also the editor of the school newspaper, as well as a frequent jousting partner in our political science classes together—was trad through and through. He even went unapologetically for the clipboard and the red pen. He kept whiskey in his desk.

The whole underlying point of Buckley’s style was that it was completely transportable and utterly carefree. It was the uniform of the ruling class, who would of course have opportunities to move from office to dinner party to speaking engagement to TV appearance to vacation home to concert hall to personal yacht, quite possibly all during the course of a single day. The genuine proponents of trad are rarely seen these days outside of isolated social quarters, and when they do show up, in numbers and in uniform, the effect is shocking. It’s as if you’re watching a movie set in 1955. You can’t take you eyes off them. You imagine them to possess inner and outer lives in the Buckley mold: reasonably patriotic, affectionately martial without being militaristic, literate, musically sophisticated, able to tell a Constable from a Turner at 50 yards, sailboat-owning, tennis-playing, curious about but still basically disgusted by Fidel, enthusiastic about the young, essentially romantic, sexually frisky, delighted by the Martini, insatiably curious, and, inevitably, rich enough to pursue Renaissance interests, such as starting magazines and writing spy thrillers, with great verve and inexhaustible vigor.

Buckley was the last great exemplar of all this in the public eye (on the lefty side, it was George Plimpton). Nowadays, to be on television, even as a political intellectual, is to be airbrushed and styled by professionals. You need to try to look cool, in furtherance of your brainy brand. Buckley was completely different and I would argue massively more influential. By looking as if he could care less, he commanded attention. By looking as if nothing really mattered, he made sure that many, many things did.