56 min listen
S3E28: Aesthetic Moments with JJ Lee
S3E28: Aesthetic Moments with JJ Lee
ratings:
Length:
60 minutes
Released:
May 28, 2013
Format:
Podcast episode
Description
Colin Marshall sits down in Vancouver's Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden with JJ Lee, menswear writer, broadcaster, and author of The Measure of a Man: The Story of a Father, a Son, and a Suit. They discuss where to buy pocket squares in Vancouver (and whether to just have your kids make some); what to wear during the city's "false start summer"; his own uses of color, and his gradual approach toward "weird clothes"; our coming age of wide-open, postmodern suit-wearing, a recovery from men getting stupid about dressing in the sixties and seventies; his own early dislike of suits, when they to him represented all that went wrong in society; his father's quick rise, painful fall, and the undiagnosed, self-medicated depression that laid under it; his realization that people are highly aesthetic beings, always creating aesthetic moments; the adoption of tragic versus comic narratives, and which one led his father to stop dressing well; the way precision has replaced instinct for well-dressed men; Montreal and its status as Canada's style capital; his favorable impression of Toronto's dress, textbook though it may be; Vancouver's athleticism-influenced casualness and its limitations; how he starts conversations with clothes, even in New York; the lie behind the idea of "truth" in dress; how men now wear suits, but often defensively, out of fear; the decline of Chinatown tailoring culture; the way men today don't quite know how to be in a tailor shop, never having had that sort of interaction before; and his current project of essays on fatherhood, and the importance of leaving a legacy of ideas for his sons.
Released:
May 28, 2013
Format:
Podcast episode
Titles in the series (100)
Litblogger and novelist Mark Sarvas: A conversation about book criticism, the Los Angeles Literary scene and Michiko Kakutani with Mark Sarvas, author of popular weblog The Elegant Variation. Harry, Revised, his first novel, hits shelves in May 2008. by Notebook on Cities and Culture