You heard that right: Jimmy Buffett, who passed away this week from Merkel cell carcinoma at the age of 76, was a fashion icon. As Guy Trebay at the New York Times writes, Buffett’s laid-back island style left a lasting and indelible mark on fashion for an entire generation, and shows no sign of abating any time soon.
As Trebay writes, “the truth is the undisputed king of easy-listening yacht rock probably exerted as much influence on style as any designer that ever sent a model down a runway in a jacket with three sleeves.”
Mr. Buffett, a singer, songwriter, entrepreneur and best-selling author, took a form of laid-back dressing instantly recognizable to anyone who ever hung around a boatyard and made it mainstream both at home and abroad. Not for Mr. Buffett the hippie-adjacent suedes and leathers of his musical contemporaries, nor even the standard-issue double-denim get-ups preferred by pop folk idols of his age, people like James Taylor or Jackson Browne.
A lifelong waterman, Mr. Buffett spent his early days propping up bars in Key West. Like many before him, he was quick to adopt the locals’ casual garb. Nobody wears uniforms on Key West, unless you think of a uniform as Bermuda shorts in Easter egg colors; low-slung, faded khakis; flip-flops; and short-sleeved shirts with raucous patterns and squared-off tails.
The raggedy straw hats or duck-billed oysterman caps of the sort Papa Hemingway once wore on Florida’s bonefishing flats were all Buffett staples, part of an image cannily cultivated by an entertainer who, while evangelizing for leisure, built a personal fortune on themed restaurants, casinos, hotels and cruises. Though the company is privately held, by most accounts his branding savvy made him a billionaire.
For decades, Tommy Bahama shirts (the brand founded in 1993, more than two decades after Buffett showed them the way), have become the go-to casual night-out wear of choice for men over 30. The Marine Layer brand (founded about a decade ago) feels like they used Buffett as their model for their entire line of laid-back clothing. And even Amazon has an entire segment of their massive clothing shop dedicated to purveyors of Buffett’s “It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere” philosophy.
According to Trebay, “There are faded shorts in pinwale corduroy with six-inch inseams a lot like those produced by Jim Jenks when he founded his wildly influential surfwear brand Ocean Pacific (Buffet wore them onstage) in 1972. That, of course, was around the time Mr. Buffett was recording his second album, “A White Sport Coat and a Pink Crustacean.’’ Posed on a fishing boat for the cover, Mr. Buffett wore bell-bottom denims and a broad-brimmed Stetson. By the time raunchy tunes like “Grapefruit-Juicy Fruit’’ and “Why Don’t We Get Drunk’’ became barfly anthems, Mr. Buffett had already shed the hat (and, eventually, the hair beneath it), trading his slick denims for outfits so aggressively understated it seemed as if the big wardrobe choice of his day was whether to go commando.”
“He didn’t identify with fashion statements per se,’’ said Kevin McLaughlin, a co-founder of the prepwear mini-empire J. McLaughlin and driving force behind the re-envisioned heritage label Quaker Marine Supply. “But he set a standard and had an influence in that if you’re cool and you’re comfortable in your own skin, it’s almost impossible to be underdressed.” Call it nonchalance, sprezzatura or swagger — that offhand assurance is a quality too little appreciated by contemporary fashion, where the benchmark of critical success is often looking overdressed, overthought, overwrought.”
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