G. Bruce Boyer

Pretty thin. You get the impression our Bruce needed to put his retirement fund on a firmer footing, or some similar motivation, because a lot of this is paint by numbers, checking off bullet points on a list of chapters such as weather gear, suits and Ivy Style. There are a few flashes of genuine inspiration where Bruce awoke from his torpor and found himself genuinely engaged with his subject, such as the sections on the variations in Italian tailoring and how the soft shouldered Southern Italian jacket came to be, and here he shows himself to be more the infinitely knowledgeable and erudite guide that we might have expected throughout the whole book, given his lofty reputation in menswear circles.… (mehr)