Without Twisting Any Arms, Wiseguys Influence Fashion (Published 2002) (2024)

The hoary adage claiming clothes make the man was taken out of mothballs last week as the news media worked up an elegiac frenzy over the death of John J. Gotti, the self-styled Dapper Don. True, the obituaries following Mr. Gotti's death at 61 from head and neck cancer fulfilled their responsibility to inform readers that Mr. Gotti had a long rap sheet of brutal crimes. But the gruesome, and salient, details tended to be buried in the 10th paragraph. It was in the leads that readers encountered the juicier, if less obviously relevant, fact that Mr. Gotti was a snappy dresser. He was a man who favored hand-painted silk ties with matching pocket squares and who had a weakness for handmade shoes and $2,000 (or was it $3,000, or $4,000?) Brioni suits.

As it happens, no one at Brioni's Manhattan flagship remembers ever serving Mr. Gotti. And while amnesia was common to those who crossed the mafioso's path, the record should show that, as Brioni's spokeswoman, Alejandra Cicognani, put it, ''They never received him in the store.''

Brioni, Ms. Cicognani pointed out, has become a kind of shorthand for men's wear's upper reaches. So the reference, while flattering, is probably, as Ms. Cicognani said, ''more like a cliché than the truth.'' Mr. Gotti might just as easily have worn suits from Ermenegildo Zegna or Caraceni or the Neapolitan tailor Kiton. It hardly matters. Mr. Gotti was a dandy, and despite the exaggerated claims of the tabloids, there is nothing unusual about that in the annals of gangsterdom. Gangsters are always in fashion. Often enough, as both fashion history and the oeuvre of Martin Scorsese amply demonstrate, they also exert a powerful influence on it -- and not just in terms of the stuff that falls off trucks.

The phenomenon is not even uniquely American, a fact made clear by the careers of the Kray twins, Reggie and Ronald, two brutal co*ckney mobsters whose extortion and murder sprees rarely got as much ink in their native England as did the nattiness of their bespoke Savile Row clothes. ''Glamour is fear,'' as Ronald Kray's character aptly points out in ''The Krays,'' Peter Medak's 1990 film about the brothers. The Japanese Yakuza have long been objects of sartorial fascination, notorious for their flashy tailored suits and the tattooed body suits they wear underneath. So distinctive is the gaudy style favored by members of the Russian mafia that high-end boutiques in Paris and Berlin stock selections pitched exclusively to their trade.

It has always been this way. Hatters in the 1930's could barely keep stock in broad-brimmed Borsalinos, a trend whose origin was credited to Al Capone. During the same era, George Raft started a run on tight-waisted suits inspired by those favored by members of the Chicago underworld.

The double-breasted chalk-stripe suits the costume designer Theadora Van Runkle chose for ''Bonnie and Clyde'' became one of the biggest influences on both men's and women's wear in the 1960's. Their inspiration, Ms. Van Runkle once noted, began in photo archives from the life of the legendary, and legendarily natty, cop killer Pretty Boy Floyd. Somewhat later in that decade, the movie ''Borsalino'' provided the basis for a Bill Blass men's wear collection that took off on the gangster suits Alain Delon and Jean-Paul Belmondo wore on the screen. Lest anyone miss the references, Mr. Blass sent his models onto the runway carrying violin cases, St. Valentine's Day massacre-style.

One might also consider the Las Vegas mobsters whose signature pegged trousers and high-armhole suits formed the underpinning of what became the Rat Pack style, a trend in the 1960's and in another 30 years a trend again; and the Harlem racketeer Nicky Barnes, whose exaggerated collars, flash suits and statement glasses laid the groundwork for ''Superfly.''

To cite any one example of gangster style is automatically to neglect five others. ''It's perennial, although recently you see the gangster style demonstrated in an upsurge of Savile Row suits that are clearly inspired by 'Reservoir Dogs,' '' said Andrew Bolton, the associate curator of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

''There is a chicness about gangsters,'' Mr. Bolton said. ''A hard-edged tailoring that telegraphs masculinity and machismo in a highly romanticized way.''

This would have been a hard point to defend at the wake for Mr. Gotti, held over two days at the Papavero Funeral Home in Queens. To judge by the quantity of law enforcement officials surveilling the service, one might safely assume that a certain number of the mourners were men in Mr. Gotti's line. While the women favored tasteful black pinstriped suits by Armani, masculine attire ran to what seemed to be the same generic boxy suit, worn with a black shirt and the sort of patterned tie that resembles a carnival prize.

''A lot of how the people think wiseguys look is a caricature,'' said Juliet Polcsa, the costume designer for ''The Sopranos.'' From the outset of the show, Ms. Polcsa said, it was important to find out what was real, a task made simple by the availability of perp walk footage and police videotapes.

''To my surprise,'' she said, ''they weren't all well dressed in sharkskin suits.'' They wore tracksuits and trousers from Sansabelt. John Gotti was an exception. ''But you have to remember that, when the press saw Gotti, he was going to court, so of course he's going to look great,'' she said.

It is certainly true that while Mr. Gotti in his days of ambitious soldiery favored polyester leisure suits with short sleeves kept cuffed, his elevation to don was accompanied by a meticulous transformation into the tabloid don. The Gambino soldier who once put down an associate for dressing like a cafone (peon) became a C.E.O. who wore fawn-color reefer coats with covered buttons and an immaculate bouffant haircut, which he had cut and blown dry daily as he had his manicure.

''These guys craft an image,'' said Fred Martens, former director of the Pennsylvania Organized Crime Commission. ''You have to remember that symbols are especially important to a man who is doing filthy, repulsive stuff on a daily basis but can fool the community with a clean-as-the-driven-snow facade.''