What’s It All About, Gucci?
Imagining Michael Caine is a cottage industry in fashion. We are talking about the early Michael Caine, the little-known British actor who became an international star in “Alfie,” a 1966 film that The New York Times critic of the era said “bubbles with humor and ripe modern wit’’ and that only those who now qualify for Social Security benefits are likely to have seen in its first run.
“I was thinking about Michael Caine of the ’60s,’’ Frida Giannini, the Gucci designer, said backstage today before her spring 2012 show. “The unconventional, relaxed Michael Caine of “Alfie,” the way he wore his suits with an open shirt.’’
What makes that statement amusing is that Caine’s Cockney Lothario took his sartorial cues from a pair of other East End types of the era, the gangster twins Reginald and Ronald Kray.
Like Alfie, the Kray twins have proved a lot more durable in memory than most of their associates in crime (arson, shakedowns and brutal murder were Kray specialties; they were known to have nailed one enemy to the floor) and largely because they were clotheshorses almost pathologically fastidious about what they wore.
Movies have been made and books written about the Kray twins. Ray Davies of the Kinks and Blur both wrote them into their songs. Keith Richards makes admiring note of the natty Kray Twins in his autobiography, “Life.’’ So it was not a stretch this morning to conjure an image of the Ronnie and Reggie David Bailey photographed once dressed in something resembling Ms. Giannini’s pipe-cleaner trousers with slash pockets, or else her narrow cut glen plaid suits or the lightweight quilted bombers she claimed were inspired by the gear equestrians wear, an assertion that holds up if only you can picture a Cockney gangster getting kitted out for a fox hunt.
It was the evening clothes that best evoked the era’s slick and dangerous dandies, though, particularly a suite of crisp dinner jackets with tight, rolled shoulders, high armholes and neat lapels. In one stylish instance, Ms. Giannini paired a lightweight black jacket with trousers in a boxy gray tartan and paired them with patent leather loafers with micro-versions of the signature Gucci egg-butt snaffle and thick cushioned soles — just the thing, it might seem, for someone who dresses to kill.