My Sartorial Library: Who the Fu#&k is Alan Flusser?

It’s 1983. I’m mostly clad in Corbin and Berle and maybe one Southwick suit and a smattering of half-price Polo stuff that I’d go over to Columbia, S.C. and pinch when Brittons would have a sale. Oh, and I had Hertling suits from when Julie Hertling made jackets and pants. I was low on dosh but just like today, real, real high on appetite and taste level. The proverbial beer budget—champagne taste thang. But here we are in '83 and I’ve got a real job and the fools are paying me nineteen thousand—six hundred dollars per year plus car and expense account. Pinch me.

WAH…seven years older and one of the most stalwart Trad guys ever, was in ’83 and is today, one of my best buddies in the world. He’d just exited a first marriage and so his apartment was our staging area for all kinds of guy antics and debauchery and … I think today they call it a hook-up. Shut up. That's WAH today, still about as Trad as they come.

So I walk in one day and there’s this paperback book on WAH’s coffee table and the cover is packed with tasty images of all kinda sartorial goodies. “Who the Fu#&k is Alan Flusser?” I asked. Keep in mind; this was pre, the 1987 Wall Street/Michael Douglas Flusser launching pad. “He’s some designer/clothier guy who’s written a book” was the WAH response. Little did I know that my gander at the book and subsequent borrowing of it without explicit permission (I’ve yet to return it twenty-nine years later) would launch what would become a sartorial library that’s probably as robust as many and more so than most.

Also, obviously, I had at that moment, no idea that I’d end up making a little more dough through the years and piss scads of it away bespeaking some of the tastiest conceptions that the…to-this-day-second-to-none color, tone, texture master Sensei Flusser directed me to commission.

Even crazier, if someone had told me in 1983 that I’d actually be the owner of the very pair of Flusser’s alligator tassel loafers depicted on the cover of the book, I’d a checked you for a fever.

If someone had told me that I’d have a daughter one day who would, during one of her evening prayers, ask God to bless “President Obama and Alanflusser”, I’d have surely laughed you out of the room. LFG by the way, refers to Alan with a run-on one word moniker…Alanflusser.

So it’s only fitting that I kick off my sartorial library posts with my first ever book on such things. The Master Sensei Flusser’s first book is modest compared to what he would turn out later but it’s precious to me for many reasons.

Onward. Wearing my Bobby from Boston Advent Calendar Keepers Tweed…named such, courtesy of Flo.

ADG II