GQStyle 1 OF 45

STYLE GODS
YVES SAINT
 
Proof That a Man
Can Be Elegant
The Saint Laurent
line is now known
for toothpick 

LAURENT
jeans and leather
jackets, but YSL
himself preferred
GQStyle

suits so elevated
they felt regal.

(THE MAN, NOT THE MARK)

2 OF 45
In his heyday, he understood modern women better than they understood
themselves. But Michael Hainey argues that the monumental French
designer with the three most famous initials in fashion dressed nobody
better than he dressed himself

Patent Your
Style
Whether it’s  
a thick pair
of frames or a
haircut that  
never changes,
you don’t  
need your
own designer
monogram  
to have a
trademark look.

GQStyle
3 OF 45
Y
yves saint laurent spent his life
working in the fashion business, but
the man made no secret of the fact
that he hated “fashion.” He believed
only in style. And his ability to divine
the difference between the two is what
made him a genius. “Fashions pass,”
he liked to say. “Style is eternal.”
GQStyle
4 OF 45

If you are a man who must
dress for work—suit and tie—
Yves Saint Laurent should be your
patron saint. And if you don’t
have to suit up every day, well,
Monsieur Saint Laurent will
make you want to—will make you
understand that stepping into
a suit and tie (and wearing it the
right way, as an individual) is
not just the most sophisticated,
creative move a man can make. It’s
also increasingly the most radical.
These days, the dress code for
a man is as fractured as ever; you
can go sockless to the opera and
eat a four-star dinner in a T-shirt
and jeans. Paradoxically, then,
choosing to wear a suit becomes
a real act of subversion. For many
Life Isn’t
All Black
and White
And your
wardrobe
shouldn’t be,
either. Yves  
kept things
simple, but he
knew when  
and how to  
flash some color.
men, the suit is no longer
a Monday-to-Friday straitjacket
but rather a statement of their
personality. And the statement
says: “This is my personal style.
I like the way a suit feels.” Yves
knew that some men will always
stride a little more confidently in a
GQStyle
suit, will always want that feeling.
He wore his own clothes—
even his suits—with the subtle,
individual flair of an artist. The
man hated sloppiness. He may
have worn his hair long, but it was
kempt. He knew jewelry gave
a man an air of sophistication. He
had those eyeglass frames—the
5 OF 45
perfect balance of dramatic and
discreet, with enough suggestion
of bookish bohemia to make
 EVEN ALL BUTTONED UP, HE LOOKED BOHEMIAN—
EQUAL PARTS PARIS AND MOROCCO.
PART OF THE MAGIC WAS IN HIS TAILORING,
THE OTHER PART IN HIS ATTITUDE.
you look twice—and he was
never without his supremely
elegant Cartier Tank watch.
There are photos of him through
the years, maybe one of him
reaching for a sketch or another
of him directing a model, his
arm outstretched, and there it is,
the watch. The fancy watch and
the shaggy hair, the impeccable
suit and the hipster glasses—
it’s the contradictions that made
the look his own, and that make
those photos feel so modern today.
I’ve always believed true style
emerges when a man is not
only aware of his roots but remains
true to them. Embraces them.
Especially the paradoxes that are
so often in our roots. The trick
is in finding comfort even in the
parts of your identity that, as a
younger man, you might’ve
rebelled against. If you can see
your past as a source of stability,
a foundation from which you
can evolve, you are miles ahead
of other guys. Certainly that was
Yves Saint Laurent. As he said
years later, looking back on his
life, “The greatest change came
when I discovered my own style,
without being influenced by
others.” It’s almost too easy these
days to forget how transformative
an individual Saint Laurent was—
or even that he’s truly gone,
having died in 2008. Long before
Hedi Slimane was given dominion
in 2012 over the house Yves
founded in 1962, there was Saint
Laurent himself.
He had grown up in Oran,
a city in Algeria, back when
Algeria was still part of the French
colonial empire. His ancestors
had escaped the Prussian invasion
of France in 1870, and in their
new land they were among the
pieds-noirs, or “black feet,” a
term for people of French origin
living in Algeria during French
rule. From the beginning, Saint
Laurent would always seem to
be a man straddling two worlds.
One part of him was French and
upper-class—his father was an
attorney, making his money from
real estate deals and managing a
chain of movie theaters spread
across North Africa. The other part
of Saint Laurent was something
of an outsider, a stranger making
his way in a world that didn’t
always welcome him.
He was educated in a Jesuit
GQStyle
school where he was a tall,
gangly boy, tormented for his
homosexuality and his shyness.
He found his refuge and joy
and purpose in sketching. He
loved to sketch designs for clothes
and seemed to always believe
he was destined for greatness.
Indeed, as Alicia Drake recounts
6 OF 45
in her book The Beautiful Fall,
as a schoolboy Saint Laurent even
wrote an imaginary newspaper
 GQStyle

 
Head-to-Toe YSL
7 OF 45

Big specs. Small watch. Yves in 1971  

is a study in how to dress modern (no
matter what brand you’re wearing).
review of his first fashion
collection, wherein an imaginary
reporter extols “the launch of a
young couturier, Saint Laurent,
who, with one collection, hoisted
himself in one bound to the ranks
of the greatest.”
It didn’t take him long to turn
the fantasy into reality. In 1954, at
only 18 years old, he found himself
summoned from Oran to Paris,
having won a design competition
seeking France’s next generation
of haute couture talent. From
there, his rise was meteoric. He
became an assistant at Christian
Dior one year later, and within
four years he was handpicked to  
take over Dior’s atelier. After a Always Look
disastrous detour in which he was Back
drafted into the army (he suffered Yves was a student 
a breakdown during basic training
GQStyle
of history, art,  
and was discharged), he and his and culture—
companion, Pierre Bergé, started and his style
the house of YSL in 1962. From reflected it. If
his very first collection, in January you watch a great
of that year, Saint Laurent drew a documentary or  
line between ancient and modern. visit a new
Here was a man who not only country, steal
understood the forces shifting the best of what
society and style in the ’60s but
8 OF 45
you see and
seized them and articulated them. incorporate it.
He gave women clothes that were
radical (like his Mondrian-inspired
dresses), and he gave them
clothes that (as on Catherine
Deneuve in Belle de Jour)
embraced the sexiness they
longed to reveal. Saint Laurent
loved women and their bodies and
understood that women wanted
to show their bodies. Tellingly,
some of his biggest breakthroughs
with women’s clothes came
through his feminizing of men’s
pieces: the peacoat, the safari
jacket, and of course, the tuxedo
jacket, which he famously
transformed into his Le Smoking
jacket—and which became a
staple of every Helmut Newton
mid-’70s photo shoot. Claudia
Schiffer later posed in Le Smoking
sans shirt, just a tux cut to the
navel, sharing her cleavage.
The clothes were that rarest of
things: an object of fantasy for both
women and men. Saint Laurent
understood both sexes. He knew
what they both wanted, and
harnessed the power of the gaze.
From the moment he arrived
in Paris, it was his talent as well
as his personal style that set him
apart, that caught the eyes of
what the French call the faiseurs
de feu (the “fire makers,” or power
brokers; the people who make
things happen). He was a young
man from the provinces who still
retained the influences of his
breeding and his upbringing. It
was a time when a man still wore
a suit every day. But instead of
seeing the suit as something
limiting, Saint Laurent infused it
with his own sense of style and
transformed it into something
limitless. And in Paris in the early
’60s, he seemed utterly apart.
Diana Vreeland’s first impression
upon meeting him: “a thin,
thin, tall, tall boy in a thin suit.”
Or as Pierre Bergé said when
he thought back to meeting
Saint Laurent: “He was an
extremely mysterious individual,
very introverted and with many
different facets and secrets.…
He wore very tight jackets as
if he was trying to keep himself
buttoned up against the world.
He reminded me of a clergyman.
Very serious. Very nervous.”
I can’t prove it, of course—
this is just my own theorizing,
speaking as someone who spent
enough time, like Saint Laurent,
as a boy at Catholic Mass—but
I would wager that his time
among the Jesuits, among those
vestments of black and white, it
influenced how he dressed for
work. He not only saw the power
in a suit but saw the suit as his
own vestment, something worn
by a man who had the power to
create and to conjure.
That clergyman’s rigor would
inform Saint Laurent throughout
his life. But the other part of his
heritage would be awakened as
the 1960s turned into the ’70s,
when he started taking holidays
in Morocco. At first, it was a quiet
refuge, a place where he escaped
with Bergé and a few friends. It
was also a place where he felt at
home, where he felt the echoes
of his childhood in Algeria and he
started to embrace the louche
side of style. This being the ’70s,
he embraced other things, like
kif, a Moroccan hashish. The
GQStyle
languorousness of the place,
combined with the whole mise-en-
scène of the ’70s fashion scene—
Mick Jagger jetting in to join them
on holiday, Loulou de la Falaise
with her duffel bags of astonishing
clothes and her bricks of hash—
brought out the side of Saint
Laurent that was all about sex.
9 OF 45
And it transformed his personal
style. As he later said, “It’s wrong
to mistrust one’s sensibility. It is
 GQStyle

Five out of Five

Women Agree
From longer hair
10 OF 45

to louder patterns,
there’s sex appeal in
a man who presents
himself fearlessly.
the richest, finest, and most
effective thing we have.” That
buttoned-up young man now
was wearing shirts unbuttoned
to mid-chest. It was a period
that didn’t last long, but that
perhaps he needed to fully own
his sensibility—his own duality.
Like all great artistic
breakthroughs, Saint Laurent’s
was about stripping style down
to its core and making us see
it all fresh. We talk a lot at GQ
about “style,” and yet even after
all my years here I know it is still
a mysterious art to many men,
the sense that style is like a good
head of hair: Either you’re born
with it or you’re not. I believe
anyone can learn it, as YSL proves
as well as anyone. What you have
to understand is the difference
that emerges in the details. Start
with the suit. Remember that Saint
Laurent was wearing a jacket and
pants, but the last thing anyone
would ever do is lay the insult
on him of calling him “a suit.”
Even all buttoned up, he looked
bohemian—equal parts Paris and
Morocco. Part of the magic was
in his tailoring, the other part in
his attitude. If you get your own
suit tailored so you feel perfectly
comfortable in it—so you are
wearing it, as opposed to it
wearing you—then you’ll start to
develop your own point of view.
Saint Laurent, like all geniuses,
understood that style is all about
one or two well-chosen details—
details that become part of a
man’s style signature. Look at his
suits. You’ll notice he wears them
cut a bit trimmer. Not boxy like so
many American suits. The shirts
are always white or pale blue, and
the ties are always monochromatic
or an uncomplicated pattern. He
has the watch, hair, and glasses,
of course, and like any good
midcentury Frenchman, he often
has a cigarette in one hand.
Saint Laurent’s ability to focus
on the details, to not overthink
getting dressed, and to embrace
the possibilities a suit afforded him,
rather than seeing its limits—this
is his style inspiration. He shows
men that it is not about how much
you can buy and how many pieces
you own. Style does not come from
acquiring. It comes from editing.
With knowing that less is more. Or,
as he said, “When I am working, my
mind is set on paring things down.”
YSL’s legacy lives on in Slimane.
On the one hand, the designers’
personal styles couldn’t seem
more different. But in truth, they
are brothers. Yves was in love with
the street, with the modern, with
the new. He once said, famously,
“Down with the Ritz, long live
the street.” His work was based in
the classic, but it was as rebellious
and modern as the house Slimane
rechristened Saint Laurent Paris.
Yes, Slimane’s designs are skinnier
and more aggressive, characterized
by leather jackets and studded
boots and Laurel-Canyon-in-the-
’70s suede jackets, but Slimane has
shrewdly kept the line elevated,
with luxurious materials and sky-
high prices, making it coveted by
a creative class of musicians and
actors and cigarette-smoking
art-world types that Saint Laurent
himself would recognize. And even
GQStyle
now, the line still makes suits—not
business suits, but the kind of dark,
tailored, rebelliously chic suits
meant for men who’d wear them
as a kind of statement, perhaps
with long hair and a Cartier watch.
11 OF 45
The Art of Tweed
Herringbone is 
a lot like Basquiat’s
artwork: respected
by the uptown
swells and the
downtown cool
kids alike.

GQStyle
12 OF 45
 Like his art, Basquiat’s personal style was equal parts classical and
street, remaining authentically his own even as he went from homeless
graffiti kid to the richest, most celebrated artist in America—all by
the age of 25. Here, Alice Gregory considers the man who blew away
Warhol and seduced Madonna

GQStyle

 
13 OF 45

Ready for Combat

Yes, the way you dress can be subversive, too.
For instance: Sneak a T-shirt into any social
setting by wearing it under a suit.
T
there ’ s video footage , for a
long time thought to be the only
that existed of Jean-Michel Basquiat,
shot in 1982 at his studio on Crosby
Street. He’s 21 years old and still
basking in the success of his fame-
elevating and critically acclaimed
museum show at P.S.1 the year before.
GQStyle
14 OF 45
Make Your Clothes
Your Canvas
You can dress like  
an artist (down  
to the paint-splattered
jeans) even if you’re
an accountant. In  
fact, it’s that throwing- 
it-away spirit that
makes it artful.

GQStyle
15 OF 45
Marc Miller, an art critic, is talking
to him, microphone in hand, about
the recent reception to his work.
Basquiat is wearing a Wesleyan
jersey; his hair is dragged up into
a pair of lopsided pigtails. Arms
crossed, he rocks slightly between
the balls and heels of his feet and
maintains, for minutes on end,
a bored smile.
There’s a moment a few minutes
into the tape when Miller asks
Basquiat to respond to what other
critics have called “some sort of
primal expressionism.” Basquiat,
still smiling, eyes glassed over
in gentle and almost invisible
disdain, says, “Like an ape? A  
primate?” Miller, surprised and Undone Ivy
embarrassed, stammers back, Next to John
“I don’t know.” Basquiat, voice no Sex and Keith
louder than before, responds,
GQStyle
Haring, Jean-
“You said it, you said it.” Michel looked
The exchange is awful to watch. like a Princeton
As a viewer, you’re vicariously student on  
offended on behalf of Basquiat a downtown
and defensive on behalf of Miller bender.
(who was, after all, only quoting
other people). But the parrying,
besides for animating a thicket
16 OF 45
of issues—ageism, racism, the
powerlessness of the journalistic
subject, the self-loathing of the
critic—also shows, better of course
 GQStyle
17 OF 45

 
Forever Slapdash
Basquiat’s tie knot, like his brushstroke,
looked beautifully accidental.
 HE LIVED LIKE A RAPPER DECADES BEFORE
RAPPERS WOULD HAVE THE SOCIAL CAPITAL
TO NAME-CHECK HIS WORK AND THE REAL
CAPITAL TO BUY IT AT AUCTION. BASQUIAT
PAINTED IN $800 EUROPEAN SUITS AND THREW
WADS OF CASH OUT LIMOUSINE WINDOWS.

than any still image, Basquiat’s
seductive blend of antagonism
and comic self-regard. It’s not
inconceivable that a person could
watch the short video and fall in
love with him.
Looking at archival photos and
footage of Basquiat provokes
in the viewer a hyper-awareness
that’s immediately familiar to
anyone who was uncool in junior
high. Nobody has a keener eye for
detail than the striving adolescent.
They notice how their peers cuff
their jeans; where at the ankle
they break their track pants; and
that it’s somehow possible, on
the popular kids, for pimples to
seem well-placed. To observe
Basquiat, even posthumously, is
to remember what it was like to be
in the presence of people whose
not shop, whose clothes just
happen. A man who appears to
be—in the biblical, not the
aesthetic sense—immaculately
dressed. We all know these
men. Often they’re poorly put
together: faded socks, oddly
fitting pants, one of those weirdly
ubiquitous sweaters with the
single horizontal stripe across the
chest. And that is charming in
its own way. But there are also
those men, similarly impossible
to imagine shopping, who
look like aristocrats even in rags.
Basquiat was one of them.
His paintings, which now
routinely sell for close to $50
million at auction, are beloved
for their ease of gesture—a
phrase that sounds as though it
would appear in a bogus press
GQStyle

clothes and cadence seemed release but is actually true in

excruciatingly natural.
Where did Basquiat even get
his clothes? A denim tank top?
A nautical tunic fastened with
toggles? Opera-length puka
shells? Everything he wore looked
borrowed, maybe even found—
the case of Basquiat. With layers
of color, smudged text written
(and often crossed out) with a
ham-fisted hand, frenetic figures
drawn with a childlike urgency,
and aggressively large canvases,
Basquiat’s paintings are, more
18 OF 45

perfect but impermanent, less than most other artists’, impossible

clothes than incidental ornament. to forge. They are so clearly the
There is nothing more attractive physical product of a particular
to a woman than a man who does person’s energy that the question
 GQStyle
19 OF 45

 
The Andy Effect
Warhol made conservative clothes feel rebellious. And
Basquiat pushed that idea further toward the edge.

of whether they are even any good
is more or less irrelevant. They are
cool—which, in the context of art
criticism, is usually a derogatory
word meant to imply bad faith,
lack of technical ability, or a
suspiciously canny understanding
of an already insular social order.
But why should it mean that?
Basquiat’s cool—like Miles Davis’s
cool and Lou Reed’s cool—is not
incidental to his work: In many
ways the two are synonymous.
For a century now, at least
since Duchamp submitted a urinal
as sculpture, art has been, for
better or worse, usually nothing
more than what a person can
convince others is art. And what
is that ability if not a certain
kind of charisma, a weaponized
(and eventually monetized)
form of cool? It’s something
more magnetic than intelligence,
more ambitious than kindness,
more confrontational than good
Art Walk
Basquiat hits  
the Comme  
des Garçons
runway in ’87.
taste. It’s an elusive property,
but not necessarily one that, in and
of itself, is any more rare or complex
than what makes a prepubescent
kid popular. Basquiat had it, and
it’s as evident in his paintings as it
was on his body.
Dead, like so many twentieth-
century icons, at 27, he seems,
especially in retrospect, like
a fictional character from a Tom
Wolfe novel. Isolated by his
celebrity, addicted to heroin,
victim to the culture industry’s
GQStyle
soft but persistent racism,
Basquiat was an on-the-nose
embodiment of his era.
The son of an accountant,
Basquiat was private-school-
educated and a junior member of
the Brooklyn Museum. His later
semi-homelessness and attendant
20 OF 45
feral appearance were both
voluntary and performative. After
running away, at the age of 17
(from a three-story brownstone in
Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, worth about
$4 million today), he decamped for
downtown Manhattan. He shaved
his head into a sort of trompe l’oeil
male-pattern balding (“I thought
it would be a good disguise”),
couch-surfed, and graffitied the
city streets with the tag SAMO©.
He subsisted on a Cheez Doodles–
heavy diet and made a substantial
percentage of his paltry income
by searching the floor of the
Mudd Club for dropped change.
It’s a testament to the potency
of Basquiat’s flash that he was able
to overcome such a biography.
I mean, Jesus. Imagine meeting a
person like that today.
The hardscrabble existence
didn’t last long. By 1981, Basquiat
had a critically acclaimed solo
show, and within only three
years his paintings were selling
for upwards of $25,000 to
S. I. Newhouse, Richard Gere,
Paul Simon, and the Whitney
Museum of American Art. He was The Godfather
only 23. Basquiat’s youth, which Basquiat eventually
would constitute the entirety developed William
of his short life, was almost Burroughs’s taste
parodically of-the-moment: He for heroin. He
produced a record with Fab 5 wouldn’t survive it
Freddy, played in a band with as long.
Vincent Gallo, dated Madonna,
walked in runway shows for
Comme des Garçons, lived with
Larry Gagosian, starred in a
Blondie music video, and was
GQStyle
close friends with Andy Warhol.
Any one of these circumstances
would be the most memorable
of another person’s life. Henry
Geldzahler, the late curator
of twentieth-century art at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art,
described his “very attractive”
21 OF 45
personality as both “charming and
disdainful.” Maripol, the creative
director of Fiorucci, recalled that
girls were “glued” to him.
 GQStyle

And Then Tumble

22 OF 45

Out into the Night

Basquiat painted  
and partied in  
the same clothes.
 Of course they were. He lived
like a rapper decades before
rappers would have the social
capital to name-check his work
and the real capital to buy it at
auction. Basquiat painted in—and
subsequently ruined—$800
European suits; threw wads of cash
out limousine windows; was known
to drop $30,000 on drugs in a
single night; bought 1961 Lafite
at Sherry-Lehmann (“cheaper
than drugs”); and drank Kir Royale
at Mr. Chow. He had what seems
to have been a lifelong propensity
for throwing food on authority
figures (a cream pie in the face of
his high school principal, a bowl
of cereal upon the head of a
predatory art dealer), and once
conducted a studio visit in a
girlfriend’s black dress. “There
was a period of about a year and a
half when it was impossible to
wake up in the morning and not
hear about Jean-Michel Basquiat,”
gallerist Mary Boone told The New Outfit as Music
York Times in 1985. When he died Basquiat (with
of an overdose in 1988, the year Francesco
after Warhol, his memorial, in Clemente) loved
Manhattan, was attended by more both jazz and
than 200 people. absurd clothes.
The look he created—in his The connection:
paintings and his person—didn’t total spontaneity.
vanish with him; it proliferated.
A person could spend years trying
to re-create Basquiat’s wardrobe.
Many a misguided art-school
GQStyle
student probably has. Desired
items would include pleated ecru
linen pants; a flannel shirt, washed
to a mint green blur; a herringbone
blazer short in the sleeves; a thin
Jimmy Cliff–style polo shirt with
a too long placket; one of those
oversize black leather jackets that
23 OF 45
inexplicably brown rather than
gray with age. Unsurprisingly,
contemporary streetwear brands
have attempted to capitalize
on—in the most literal of ways—
Basquiat’s urban appeal. In an
effort to both telegraph cultural
savvy and appropriate his effortless
style, Reebok released sneakers
with his signature chicken scratch,
and Supreme has put out shirts
and hoodies emblazoned with
Basquiat’s iconography.
It’s a sad but true fact of the
world that, just as anything looks
good on a thin woman, anything
looks good on a confident man—
even, regrettably, heroin-induced
skin lesions, tooth rot, and
bloat. Picture Basquiat—paint-
splattered, smiling—jaywalking
across Broadway with a pocketful
of singles supplied by his first
gallerist, Annina Nosei, to get
lunch at Dean & DeLuca. Or better
yet, with a bouquet of lilacs
en route to Bianca Jagger’s
birthday party. Before he himself Sartorial
would become an icon, Basquiat Expressionism
painted them: kings, athletes, Basquiat’s derelict
warriors. And like them, he was look—and
coronated. Though his dreadlocks lifestyle—wasn’t
changed length, from aloe-like real, exactly. Nor
spikes to horns to bramble, he was it a pose.  
is best remembered as existing It was all part of  
beneath a head of hair that looked his life-as-art-
GQStyle
like nothing so much as a crown. project approach  
And like King Midas, who to existence.
could turn anything he touched
to gold, Basquiat was capable
of transferring his magic aura not
only to canvas but to completely
arbitrary items. A suede Jacuru
hat on his head, a tiger-print
24 OF 45
bandanna around his neck, even
a docile Siamese cat in his
lap—all are anointed merely by
being chosen by him.
 Keep Going
West, You
Wind Up East
Dennis in ’71.  
If he didn’t invent
the badass
California-biker
thing, he
popularized it.
And right now,
Americana-
obsessed
Japanese labels
(we’re looking  
at you, Visvim)
are keeping it
very much alive.

GQStyle

DENNIS HOPPER
25 OF 45
Who was Dennis Hopper? Outlaw, actor, artist, screenwriter, villain, wild
man, party monster, and, yes, style icon.... But was Hopper’s look his own,
or was he just borrowing it from his characters? Glenn O’Brien, who first
met Hopper at the Chelsea Hotel back in 1972, takes a closer look

Andy and the

Cosmic Cowboy
GQStyle

Andy Warhol shot

this Polaroid of
Hopper—a major
collector and artist
in his own right—
in 1977. (They
probably partied
their asses  
26 OF 45

off afterward.)
W
w hen you see pictures of Dennis Hopper in
real life, he often looks like he’s in costume.
That’s because in real life he was playing Dennis
Hopper, a bigger-than-life character that is at
least as complex as any of the fictional roles.
Photos of Hopper as Hopper often bear more
than superficial resemblances to his most
memorable characters, like Max, the acid and
pot dealer in The Trip (1967); Billy, the biker
sidekick of Peter Fonda’s “Captain America”
in Easy Rider (1969); Kansas, the cokey
GQStyle

cowboy in The Last Movie (1971); the crazed

photojournalist and Colonel Kurtz apologist
27 OF 45

in Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979)—

a performance as unsettling as Brando’s;
or the sexual psychopath Frank
in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet
(1986). Remember Frank? Shirt
with silver collar points, leather
jacket, gas inhaler. “I’ll send
you a love letter straight from my
heart, fucker. You know what a
love letter is? It’s a bullet straight
from a gun.…” Hopper got the
role of Frank by calling up Lynch
and saying, “You have to let
me play Frank Booth, because
I am Frank Booth!”
What a villain he was! Don’t get
me wrong. Nobody ever played
those characters better: the stoner,
the biker freak, the psycho villain—
eyes glittering with insanity, the
cattle baron’s bad-seed son.
Nobody was a sharper thorn in
the sides of the big movie studios.
Nobody was a more effective ad
for Bolivian marching powder.
Hopper defined many
roles in the emergence of ’60s
pop culture. Maybe it’s because  
his education, as a young The New
contemporary of James American
Dean, took place at the Actors Outlaws
Studio. This was the American If you weren’t
wellspring of Method acting, alive in ’69, go
a school in which performers back and watch
were taught to inhabit the Easy Rider,
thoughts and feelings of the starring Hopper
characters to create realistic and Peter Fonda.
portrayals. Hopper threw himself It put a bullet  
into his roles body and soul, in the ’60s and
and he had a special ability to
GQStyle
ushered in  
make bad look good, to make the wilder, more
insanity interesting—and dangerous
possibly a career move. ’70s—when
Dennis Hopper made me Hopper was in
a biker. In ’67, I saw The Glory his prime.
Stompers, a film that seemed
pretty real in that real outlaw
bikers did the stunt riding and
28 OF 45
populated the wild parties,
and as Chino, Hopper seemed
to be improvising his nasty
chitchat with ease and smoking
 The Lewder Side
of Pinstripes
Hopper in 1976,
doing the whole
gangster-pinstripes
move. (Now we’ve
just gotta find a
replica of that tee.)

GQStyle
29 OF 45
his joints like he’d put in a lot of
practice. But it was the 1969 film
Easy Rider that transformed
the one-percenter biker into
a national obsession.
I think I saw that film six or
seven times in two weeks, and it
wasn’t long before my Triumph
ride had sixteen-inch ape-hanger
handlebars and megaphone
mufflers that amplified rather
than muffled. I had cutoff denim,
shoulder-length hair, and a full
beard to go with the machine.
Easy Rider not only popularized
the chopper well beyond the
Hells Angels demographic, it was
the On the Road of reefer and the
first big PR for cocaine.
“The cocaine problem in the
United States is really because of
me,” Dennis Hopper bragged.
“There was no cocaine before
Easy Rider on the street. After Easy
Rider, it was everywhere.”
Hopper was a friend of my  
former boss Andy Warhol. They Back at the
met in 1963, and the actor bought Homestead
one of his Campbell’s Soup With third wife  
paintings. And a Mona Lisa. When Daria Halprin
Andy drove from New York to and daughter
L.A. in the fall, Dennis promised Ruthanna in  
him a “movie-star party,” and 1977. If you can’t
Warhol said “it was the most pull off the full
exciting thing that ever happened deranged-biker
to me.” At the time, Hopper was look, a black  
a kingpin of young Hollywood tee, blue jeans,
rebel actors, and he was already
GQStyle
and a Stetson  
an accomplished photographer is easy enough.
and one of the key Pop Art
collectors in L.A.—or, for that
matter, anywhere. He had a house
in the pop style before it caught
on. Warhol wrote in POPism: “It
was the first whole house most of
us had ever been to that had this
30 OF 45
kiddie-party atmosphere.” Warhol
recalled how impressed he was
with Dennis, then married to
Brooke Hayward, the beautiful
 The Eight-
Day Second
Marriage
Hopper was
hitched to the
lovely Michelle
Phillips for
a grand total
of eight days.
“Seven of those
days were pretty
good,” Hopper
said. “The
eighth day was
the bad one.”

GQStyle

HOPPER THREW HIMSELF INTO HIS ROLES

BODY AND SOUL, AND HE HAD A SPECIAL ABILITY
31 OF 45

TO MAKE BAD LOOK GOOD, TO MAKE INSANITY

INTERESTING—AND POSSIBLY A CAREER MOVE.
daughter of Hollywood power
broker Leland Hayward.
“I’d first seen him playing
Billy the Kid,” Andy wrote, “and
I remember thinking how terrific
he was, so crazy in the eyes.”
Billy the charming maniac, the
hipster-as-sociopath. Today the real
oddities in Dennis Hopper’s well
over a hundred film appearances
are his Warhol movies: The Thirteen
Most Beautiful Boys and Tarzan and
Jane Regained…Sort of.
I met Dennis Hopper in 1972,
when I interviewed him for Andy
Warhol’s Interview about The Last
Movie. The film was an avant-
garde Western, and Hopper, in
demand after Easy Rider, got
almost a million (then a lot of
money). He directed and starred
in the picture, which was shot
over the course of a whole year
in Peru, one of the world’s largest
cocaine-producing countries. It
was a full-on art-film Western and  
every bit as cultish as Jodorowsky’s Rebel with
El Topo, with a cast that included a Big Budget
Peter Fonda, Kris Kristofferson (in After the success  
his first acting role), and Dennis’s of Easy Rider,
then wife, Michelle Phillips of the Warner Bros.
Mamas and the Papas. gave Hopper a
Hopper said to come up to bunch of cash to
his room at the Chelsea Hotel, make his avant
where he was staying with his Western, The
new girlfriend, Daria Halprin, who Last Movie. He
had just starred in Antonioni’s spent most of
Zabriskie Point and left the
GQStyle
1970 editing
notorious Mel Lyman’s cult. (Her in Taos, New
co-star Mark Frechette wasn’t Mexico—where,
so lucky. He robbed a bank with as always, he
the cult and died in prison from a dressed the part.
“weight-lifting accident.” Yikes.)
I arrived discreetly well after
lunch and knocked on his door.
Dennis answered promptly and
32 OF 45
said he’d be right with me. What
ensued was several minutes of
bizarre sound effects, clearly
audible through the flimsy door
 His Signature
Look? That Look
For his role in
1978’s Flesh Color,
Hopper’s style
was mellower
(less hair, less
adornment), but
the wild eyes
remained.

GQStyle
33 OF 45
as I waited in the hall—wheezing,
throat clearing, nose blowing,
coughing, hocking, loogie-ing,
and snorting I assumed he was
just getting up.
When the door opened,
he looked pretty much like Billy
from Easy Rider. He was still in
cowboy mode.
A lot of craziness surrounded
The Last Movie. It won the Critics
Prize at the Venice Film Festival,
but Warner Bros. hated it and
wound up putting it into limited
release after Hopper refused to
relinquish the final cut he’d been
guaranteed in his deal. It’s still
hard to find a copy of it today, but
Dennis was riding high anyway.
His career followed an up-and-
down trajectory, but he was
relentless: five marriages, conflicts
with directors and producers,
Oscar nominations (as screenwriter
for Easy Rider and supporting
actor for Hoosiers), going missing
in the desert, a conceptual-art
performance involving twenty
sticks of dynamite…and, of course,
the heroic benders. But after a stint
in rehab in 1983, his career settled
into a more steady period. The
roles were still there.
As Hopper aged, he careened
from one casting extreme to
another. I think his hard work in
acting resembled Andy Warhol’s
prolific painting production: It was
about bringing home the bacon.
Andy had movies, magazines, a
whole company to support. Dennis
had a series of families and an art
habit to support. He built a big
Frank Gehry–designed compound
in Venice, L.A., and added a
neo-Quonset hut to display his
extraordinary art collection. He
returned to photography with
a vengeance and began making
paintings of his pictures. He
continued to act in and direct
films, including the acclaimed
L.A. cop film Colors with Sean
Penn and Robert Duvall.
His own acting profile evolved.
No longer the wild-eyed rabble-
rousing rebel, he played more
mature psychos. He was seen more
and more as a studied villain with
an agenda, perhaps a peculiar
and unbalanced agenda, but still
some goal big enough to inspire
sophisticated badness. He played
the bad guy in the first season
of 24, delivering perhaps the worst
Serbian accent in the history of
moving pictures but somehow
pulling it all off. For one thing, he
always looked the part.
The early Dennis Hopper
look, from natty artist Angeleno
to in-character cowpokes, can
be seen in fashion today in places
like Berlin and Greenpoint, but
he’s also an influence in his later
oligarch/archfiend/master-villain
style. Bohemian, slightly strange,
and surprisingly neat. His look
resembled his personality, a
strange blend of psychic volatility
and explosive potential mixed
with formal, polite, almost tranquil
gentility. Dennis Hopper didn’t
follow fashion; it tended to follow
him on his zigzag path through
pop culture. But his look always
had one very special quality.
It was slightly unsettling. You
always found yourself wondering
GQStyle
what he was really thinking—
and who he really was.
34 OF 45
 Got a full head
of thick dark
hair? Show this
photo to the
best barber in
your town.

ELVIS PRESLEY
GQStyle
35 OF 45
On the way to becoming the world’s first rock star, Elvis also set the tone
for what men’s style would look like today, some sixty years later. In the
age of the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, the King-to-Be showed up wearing
short sleeves and greaser hair, singing about blue suede shoes. He later
made Hawaiian shirts cool, turned spectator shoes into a young man’s game,
and did it all with raging sex appeal. (As the late, great Lester Bangs once
observed, “Elvis kicked ‘How Much Is That Doggie in the Window’ out
the window and replaced it with ‘Let’s fuck.’ ”) Here, GQ correspondent
Chris Heath honors the icon of icons

GQStyle

 
Much as he’s been
36 OF 45

mocked for it,

Elvis’s suspended
adolescence fueled
his exuberant style.
W
w hen someone like Elvis Presley comes along
and the world reshapes itself around him, is
he the first or the last to understand what he’s
doing? Look closely at Elvis’s story and two
things that appear to be contradictory seem to
have been equally true: that he never really knew
what he had until it surprised him by appearing
(in his first professional recording session on
July 5, 1954, it was only toward the end of a long
Memphis evening in Sun Studios that he burst
into Arthur Crudup’s “That’s All Right” on little
GQStyle

more than a whim, and the musical stopwatch

by which we still measure time started ticking
37 OF 45

upward from zero), but also that he never

doubted for an instant that he had something.
 This photo is from
1956, but the closer
you can get to
dressing this way
right now, the better
you’re doing.

GQStyle
38 OF 45
 GQStyle

Much the same applies to how contradictory of each other, but  

he looked and what he wore. In his also weirdly illuminating. Elvis wasn’t
public utterances, Elvis rarely said The first comes in response to known for
a word about clothes or his sense an interview question about his wearing a  
of style. (Well, not until near the favorite color: ton of color—
end, anyway, in the days when his “As far as clothes, I like black. As he preferred
judgment was slipping and he took far as cars, I like white.” black—but
39 OF 45

pride in commissioning his own The second is from a recording when he did, he
take on karate-style jumpsuits.) he made for his fan club: made it count.
But here are two exceptions, “They ask me why I wear the
from the late ’50s: trite, slightly clothes I do. What can I say? I just
 GQStyle

Clothes (like this

pitch-perfect
print shirt)
are important,
40 OF 45

but style is at
least as much
about curled-lip
attitude.
 THE INFLUENCE
AT WORK
Four Looks from the
2014 Runways
That Channel Elvis

TOPM A N D E SI G N DAVID H A RT & C O.

GQStyle
41 OF 45

SA I NT L AU RE NT BA L MA IN
like nice clothes, that’s all. I like
color and such. Is there something
wrong with that?”
You could say that Elvis dressed
almost as if he didn’t care. Almost.
Like he had been born again
each new day and just happened
to be wearing whichever new
perfect slick rebel uniform, or
devil-may-care twist on casual
opulence, he had awoken
into. That is to say, he looked
as though he had spent hours
preening himself, but also as
though he could convincingly
deny any knowledge of what
preening was. (He was once
asked, in his pre-army days, how
often he had a haircut. “Not
often,” he replied, “and when
I do, it doesn’t look like a haircut.”)
There was a story Elvis used to
tell about his junior year in high
school, the year he had grown his
sideburns for the first time and
had started to keep down his hair
with Vaseline. He’d tried out for
the football team, and some of
the other players cornered him
one day (he wasn’t popular at
school) and threatened to cut his
hair. Eventually, as he would tell
it, the coach also demanded he
cut his hair and threw him off the
team when he refused. Never
mind that the coach, when later
asked, said this was nonsense and
that Elvis had left the team of his
own accord when he got an after-
school job. That was the way Elvis
told the story.
And that is the way the story
fits into who he became. Because
once Elvis became famous, he
dressed as though he were daring
some authority figure to throw him
off the team—but he also dressed
with the assurance of someone
who knew he’d never come across
another team who wouldn’t be
thrilled to include him.
We see him smiling at us in those
old photographs (or perhaps
more accurately, smiling to
himself as we watch) as much as
ever now. Maybe more so. Elvis
Presley’s stature as an icon grows
and grows, which in some ways
is strange, because in terms of
what he actually did in life, a good
argument could be made that few
legends’ foundations are shakier.
Look at his actual achievements.
He never wrote a song of note.
There may be the occasional
flash of accidental glory in his
movies, but mostly they’re kitsch,
insincere debacles. And the
moment in which he truly did
transform pop music and change
the world, when he jolted the past
into the future, is just a historical
blip now. (People may still talk
about The Sun Sessions, but as
stirring and loose and vibrant as
those songs are, when is the last
time you actually walked in on
someone listening to them?) In
fact, the music of Elvis’s that has
survived best, and seems to be
most treasured these days, is from
the brief golden patch long past
his prime at the end of the ’60s
and beginning of the ’70s when
he briefly rediscovered a passion
for finding good songs and
putting his all into them—singles
like “Suspicious Minds,” “In the
Ghetto,” “An American Trilogy,”
“Burning Love,” and “I Just Can’t
GQStyle
Help Believing,” each of them
tottering precariously on the edge
of ridiculousness as he bullied
his way through them, but each
nonetheless glorious. But these
are just a scattering of great pop
records, not in themselves the
stuff that makes a legend.
42 OF 45
And as for his life itself, these
days it is usually framed as a mythic
tragedy, as a cautionary tale about
what can happen when too much
 If your primary
image of Elvis
is of a bloated
figure in a
sequined karate
suit, it’s time
to revise your
thinking.

IF ELVIS HADN’T DONE IT FIRST, WE WOULDN’T

WANT TO WEAR A LOT OF THE CLOTHES THAT
ARE SO POPULAR NOW—THE PRINT SHIRTS,
THE SHORT-SLEEVE DRESS SHIRTS, HAWAIIAN
PRINTS. ELVIS BASICALLY CREATED ’50s STYLE,
GQStyle

WHICH HAD BEEN BLAND UNTIL HE INFUSED

IT WITH A LITTLE COUNTRY, A LITTLE WESTERN.
OF COURSE, HE HAD THAT FAMOUS GREASER
HAIR THAT’S BACK IN STYLE, AND HE DID THE
BANDANNA THING. HE DRESSED FOR THE TIMES,
43 OF 45

AND THEN THE WHOLE WORLD FOLLOWED HIM.”

— J I M M O O R E , G Q C R E AT I V E D I R E C T O R
Elvis’s clothes
weren’t tight—
God knows the
man needed room
to move—but
they were always
sharply tailored.

GQStyle
44 OF 45

comes to someone without the
fortitude to support it—as a tale
about how paranoia and excess
and sloth can so overtake a
man, even one with every kind of
fame and riches, that they destroy
everything magical about him,
bit by bit, until one night, with
nothing left to be squandered,
he simply passes away in the
bathroom with a book in his hand
at the age of 42.
And yet it doesn’t really matter,
none of it. Or rather, it all matters,
but not to Elvis the icon. Not to
the Elvis in the photographs. He
is free of all that because more
and more he is just Elvis, an image
floating adrift of the life that
spawned it, just as James Dean
and Marilyn Monroe similarly
thrive in the icon afterworld while
what they did in their lives, even
the best of it, is mostly forgotten.
And more and more, for all
these ghosts, it is their photos
most of all that come to represent
them. It’s tempting to rue this,
SEE ADDITIONAL CREDITS
One staple of
young Elvis’s
wardrobe that
never goes out
of style: spit-
polished loafers.
I suppose—to bemoan how
superficiality endures while
substance fades, and to mourn
all that is lost as three dimensions
shrink into two.
Yet...yet it is in his photos
that Elvis still looks amazing.
Elvis in black and white. Elvis in
color. It is in his photos that he
is still nothing but Elvis: cocky
and charming and carefree, and
beautiful in a way few men are.
Captured like this, he is at his most
perfect—trapped in time, and so
set free of all that would happen
in the days and the months and
GQStyle
the years after the shutter clicked.
And here and now, that’s the
Elvis we seem to want most of all.
The old cliché is that
photographs fade. But they
don’t, not anymore. We would
never allow them to. Instead,
it is the life that fades, and it is
45 OF 45
the photos that remain. And—
look!—there he is, within them,
forever fresh and magnificent
and there for us always.
ADDITIONAL CREDITS

Cover Page 36. GAB Archive/

Archivio GBB/Contrasto/ Redferns/Getty Images.
Redux. Page 38. Earl Leaf/
Michael Ochs Archives/
Yves Saint Laurent Getty Images.
Page 2. Marc Riboud/ Page 39. Michael Ochs
Magnum Photos Archives/Getty Images.
Page 3. Richard Melloul/ Page 40. Gilloon/Camera
Sygma/Corbis. Press/Redux.
Page 5. Pierre Boulat/ Page 41. Clockwise from
Cosmos/Redux. top left: Yannis Vlamos/
Page 7. Martine Franck/ GoRunway; Fernanda
Magnum Photos. Calfat/Getty Images; Yannis
Page 8. Courtesy of Vlamos/GoRunway;
Fondation Pierre Bergé– courtesy of Balmain;
Yves Saint Laurent. GoRunway.
Page 10. Bruno Barbey/ Page 43. Bob Campbell/
Magnum Photos. San Francisco Chronicle/
Corbis.
Basquiat Page 44. AP Photo.
Page 12. Richard Corman/ Page 45. Bob Campbell/
CPi Syndication. San Francisco Chronicle/
Page 13. Edo Bertoglio. Corbis.
Page 15. © Donna
Mussenden Van Der Zee/
photograph by James Van
Der Zee.
Page 16. Ben Buchanan.
Page 17. © 2015 The
Warhol Foundation for
Visual Arts, Inc./Artists
Rights Society (ARS), New
York.
Page 19. wowe.
Page 20. Courtesy of
Comme des Garçons (2).
Page 21. Victor Bockris/
Corbis.
Page 22. Gianfranco
Gorgoni/Contact
Press Images.
Page 23. Patrick McMullan.
Page 24. Photo by Edo
Bertoglio © New York Beat
Films LLC.

Dennis Hopper
Page 25. Courtesy of
Brooks Noel/Condé Nast
Archive.
Page 26. Image and artwork
© The Andy Warhol
Foundation for
the Visual Arts, Inc./
Licensed by ARS.
Page 28. Bettmann/Corbis.
Page 29. Caterine Milinaire/
GQStyle
Sygma/Corbis.
Page 30. Caterine Milinaire/
Sygma/Corbis.
Page 31. Michael Ochs
Archives/Getty Images.
Page 32. Douglas Kirkland/
Corbis.
Page 33. Caterine Milinaire/
Sygma/Corbis.

Elvis Presley
Page 35. Archivio GBB/
46 OF 46

Contrasto/Redux.