With more quality available to the American man than ever before, there are also more pitfalls. To help you navigate our expanding sartorial world, here are Esquire’s fifty new laws of fashion. Commit them to memory. Break them if you like. (We’ll tell you how.) Then go undaunted.

1. YOU WEAR THE CLOTHES, NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND.

2. INVESTING IN QUALITY OFTEN MEANS INVESTING IN THE THINGS YOU CAN’T SEE. Like the movement inside a mechanical watch, the full hand-canvasing in a jacket or single breasted suits, or the hand-stitched uppers of your shoes.

3. BLUE JEANS ARE GOOD; DARK-BLUE JEANS ARE BETTER. Leave the boot cuts to cowgirls and black denim to ex-cons.

4. CELEBRITIES LOOK GOOD IN CLOTHES FOR TWO REASONS: a) They’re famous. b) They have someone whose full-time job is to dress them. Don’t get discouraged. Get famous. (more…)

Dress For Your Figure

Coming up with the perfect outfit to match our figure can be difficult at times. Not all women are built alike, so what may look good on someone else may not look good on us, especially when the other woman’s body type is different from us. Also, it is not always good to rely on the fashions displayed by runway models on the catwalk. Let’s face it: designers generally love stick-thin women, and runway models are several sizes smaller than the average woman.

But whether we have the body that makes for a walking mannequin or not, there is no rule out there that says that we cannot wear clothes that flatter our figures and remain fashionable. After all, it is us ordinary women that make fashion designers rich. All we have to do is to choose carefully the clothes we wear so that they enhance our assets and play down our liabilities. (more…)

Here I am. That was the only line uttered by Veruschka—famous enough in 1966 to play herself—in her classic scene from Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup. But here was a case where action—those three minutes of leggy writhing on the studio floor for David Hemmings’ Bailey-esque fashion photographer—truly spoke louder than words. Forty-odd years later, the enigmatic German supermodel still looms large over the zeitgeist. Outsize both in persona and physical person (vital stats: 6′1″, size 13 feet), she is now the subject of a limited-edition, cloth-bound monograph from Assouline that fully illuminates her career and impact on the fashion world. Included are the model’s own musings; interviews with editors like Diana Vreeland and Grace Mirabella; and photographs from Richard Avedon, Francesco Scavullo, and Franco Rubartelli. (The latter was a sometime lover with whom she would alight in exotic locales to produce trippy fashion spreads that often involved more body paint than clothes.)

Born Vera von Lehndorff, Veruschka arrived in New York in the early sixties, looking to escape a traumatic childhood in Nazi Germany. After a slightly rocky start in the modeling game, the Vogue covers (11, to be exact) came rolling in. As the decade ripened, her Amazonian Barbie looks were a welcome counterpoint to wide-eyed cutie pies like Jean Shrimpton and Twiggy. These days, aside from the odd runway gig (most recently for Buddhist Punk in 2005), Veruschka is content to live a low-key artist’s life in Berlin. But her dramatic flair is still a go-to reference for designers from Tom Ford to Michael Kors—and, of course, an evergreen inspiration for teenage boys the world over to enroll in photography class.

—Evelyn Crowley

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