Knit slacks Armitage: Brief thoughts on that new photo

[Sorry for the unplanned absence; I was too exhausted after work yesterday (the stuff we’re reading is relatively unfamiliar to me and thus more demanding to teach) to publish anything. Reminding myself that I didn’t commit to Project 365 for just this reason. I feel less guilty about missing a day than I used to as there are so many new blogs for you to visit. Grading tonight, uch. I teach again tomorrow and after that I’ll return to the North & South series, which requires a bit more analytical power than I have to spare today.]

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Richard Armitage, summer 2011, from as yet unpublished Recognise Magazine shoot. Styling (whatever that means) by Daniel Higgins. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

Another great picture. One thing I really appreciate about this photo (and all of the Recognise photos we’ve seen so far — way to go, people who put together that shoot) is that Mr. Armitage looks really adult in them. Part of that is the beard, but not all of it; the clothes make a decisive contribution. Don’t get me wrong, I also love the boyish side of my hero, and he usually looks really good in casual clothes. But dress clothes are supposed to make the wearer look more adult, and in my opinion, fit issues with his dress clothes have tended to make him look like his demeanor was at war with the clothes. Dress clothes should enhance your aura — not conflict with them, or make you feel uncomfortable. If you don’t have the comfort to carry off the dress look, you’re almost always better dressing slightly down than further up, unless it’s an occasion where a particular level of formality is written in stone. The 2010 BAFTA appearance has really marked a positive change in his public appearances in dress clothes. Whoever dressed him for that figured out how to back just slightly off the black tie standard in ways that enhanced Armitage’s aura rather than masking it. It didn’t hurt that they also found or made a suit jacket that fit him through the shoulders while still correctly hitting the waist. Clothes that fit well, enhance comfort, and allow you to forget yourself really enhance your self-presentation — it’s like they intensify the nicest pieces of you.

From the Recognise photoshoot. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

Mr. Armitage looks really good in this photo that surfaced today, in spite of the fact that the style choices may initially appear counter-intuitive. I don’t know the context of the shoot, and what this looks like to me is an outfit that had a jacket, and he’s now taken the jacket off for an additional pose. I’m guessing it’s the jacketless version of the grey suit with blue shirt pictured above, at left. I can’t get a close enough look at the shirt to say much, but my impression is that it’s a knit shirt or a slightly textured knit blend and thus more forgiving to his upper body fit issues he has than a natural fiber or permanent press shirt (of the kind that Lucas North wore) would be. The result is that in the places where we are accustomed to see his shirts strain from time to time (over the shoulders, over the upper chest), we see pleasant draping, a cascade of pleasant lines that outline his upper body and show its fitness and power, but subtly. The effect is particularly nice at what we can see of the waist, which doesn’t cut in severely in the way I’m accustomed to seeing men’s shirts from the UK doing. Together with the trousers this gives him a much more typically masculine silhouette than many of the casual combinations we’re used to seeing him in.

What not to wear: this jeans and shirt combination makes his rear look big, his hips look oddly wide, his waist look girlishly waspish, and his upper body disproportionately small. I do still love you, Mr. Armitage, just not Lucas’s jeans. Lucas North (Richard Armitage) tells Oleg Darshavin that Sarah’s “just” his girlfriend, in Spooks 8.4. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

So, yes, the trousers are the real coup here, and I’m emphasizing this because I can’t imagine any stylish man in my age range (Armitage is 2.5 years younger than I) voluntarily picking a pant like this one for normal wear. (This prejudice is why I assume this is the pant element of a casual suit.) We are accustomed to seeing Armitage in jeans that fit his posterior and upper thighs really closely, and occasionally in men’s low rise jeans, which I would argue are not a good choice for him. This is not to say he should avoid jeans (I keep collecting info for a post on his jeans choices and then not publishing it), but rather that the massive quality of his upper thighs and the relatively generous posterior mean that certain styles that have been popular recently are not great choices for him because they overemphasize his mid-section and either make his waist look oddly feminine or distort our perception of his upper body. This probably has something to do with the belts he often wears, which create the effect of chopping his midsection in half in odd ways. See above.

Annotated version of photo credited above.

This is an “old man” pant, no question, starting with the waistband and the overlap closure. They bear striking similarities to the slacks from John Porter’s regimental uniform, which I really like because of the way that they enhances Armitage’s mouth-watering verticality (in contrast to the jeans, which tend to interfere with it). Now, if what you want is blatant, screaming sexuality, you won’t get it from trousers like these. Jeans in general, and low rise jeans in particular, put the contours of the male “package” front and center. There’s nothing wrong with that either as a goal or a practice of dressing — I like looking it at, too — it’s just that the price Armitage pays for the wrong jeans can be comical in terms of the profile of the rest of his body.

Here, in contrast, everything about the trousers says “subtle power, in control.” The higher than usual waist gives him a less curvy, more typically masculine silhouette than many of his jeans choices have, and slims his hips and posterior. The close fit from waist to hips over the stomach and groin emphasizes his extreme fitness there. What’s really unusual here, however, is the cut of the thigh. We don’t often see him in slacks with this much play in them — even the BAFTA 2010 suit had a very tight-fitting pant, and in closeups, you could see the material strain across his inner thighs. Some people liked that, because they felt it pointed to his strength. I thought it was an indication of poor fit. And I would argue that this style of pant with a more generous thigh does at least as good a job as jeans or narrowly cut dress pants of underlining what is for me one of his most attractive figure features — precisely those massive thighs. Looking at his left thigh, which is slightly flexed, we see that the way the drape of the pants catches on the widest point of the hip, then at the widest point of the thigh, and then again at the knee, makes clear the contours of those muscles (without tracing every detail of them, as tight jeans would). The drape is pleasant over the right (straight) thigh as well. The only question I have about these trousers is how the break looks — but that’s something that is fairly easy to fit on Armitage.

The same photo, annotated to show obvious long visual lines. Look at the general parallel or close-to-parallel motion of the long lines on the right side of the body. These indicate a stable base, in contrast to the diagonals visible along the flexed left thigh, which indicate potential for motion held back by the positioning of the left foot. The picture says, “I’m relaxed here, but there’s dynamism under the surface.” Casually confident Armitage. Yum.

For the photographer, the draping effect of both pieces creates a series of long and short parallel lines that are reflected in the photo’s exploitation of light and shadow. They make this an amazing photo look at because the viewer is not distracted by short visual lines or bunching up or a feeling of stress. Instead, it’s just a very long body in a well-fitting drape that shows power and charisma under control. The casual crossing of the arms enhances this feeling of someone in a suit that he can totally forget. This outfit as pictured here is a clear example of just exactly how well-fitting, effective clothes can work to release and project a man’s inner magnetism.

~ by Servetus on February 8, 2012.