FASHION Magazine

Last summer, when J.Crew opened a store in Toronto—its first store in Canada, or anywhere outside the U.S. of A.—the guys in town were left boo-hooing when they learned that that shop is only for women. But Canadian men can dry their eyes: J.Crew is opening three more stores in Canada—Vancouver in April, Edmonton in May and Toronto in September—where the offerings will include menswear.

So, OK, maybe big boys don’t cry. But they do care about clothes, and they let it show. They’re no longer bashful or embarrassed about matters of style.

“Men’s fashion has moved more quickly in the last 10 years than it has over the last 40,” Millard “Mickey” Drexler, J.Crew’s CEO, told The Wall Street Journal last fall.

In 1953, the Museum of Modern Art in New York mounted a show that treated the automobile as an aesthetic achievement. In a Talk of the Town bit published in The New Yorker, the writer Brendan Gill played the Philistine, thinking old-fashioned thoughts about function and price as he was led through the exhibition by a curator from the museum’s department of architecture and design. The punchline of the piece occurred when, stopping by a Siata, the cool—Steve McQueen owned one—Italian sports car, Gill asked, “Handle nicely, does it?” The curator answered, “I don’t drive.”

Bill Blass, the American fashion designer, told a similar kind of joke in his memoir, Bare Blass. He confessed that “for eighteen years, beginning in the mid-seventies, I endorsed a line of Lincoln Continentals for the Ford Motor Company without knowing how to operate one.”

After reading those things, I—a non-driver for whom torque is something that happens on an ill-fitting T-shirt—felt less like a poseur going off to interview Max Wolff (page 78), a car designer now relishing his opportunity to reimagine the Lincoln.