The death of style

Just as I finished complaining last week about the inability of Americans to string together a complete sentence, I realised that they make up for it by being the worst dressed people this side of Ukraine. J. Crew has been in the news lately because the company has changed hands, with hacks waxing nostalgically about preppy style and all that 1960s stuff. All I can say is: how can they tell? Hacks wouldn’t know what style is. They thought that Gianni Agnelli’s unbuttoned button-down shirt was the result of carelessness.

The last American newsman with style was Joe Alsop, now long gone, a cousin of Roosevelt and a DC insider who, unlike the motley group of grifters and wokesters assembled by the Bagel Times, was born a gent. Style is the most overused word in English, usually attributed to fashionable people who lack it – Vogue’s Anna Wintour being a prime example.