Robin Williams used to do a great bit about fictional wonder drug Fukitol ("the closest thing to a coma you'll ever be"), and 2011 saw the arrival of storybook juggernaut Go the F–k to Sleep, but it would seem today that the profane release of pent-up frustration is becoming a winning business model as much as an attitude. Take former book editor Sarah Knight's The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a F*ck, the no-but-seriously-folks parody of decluttering guru Marie Kondo's international hit, which became a runaway bestseller in January soon after it was published.
Our bucket lists are getting shorter but our F-it lists sure keep growing. We praise the no-nonesense attitude of Viola Davis on How to Get Away With Murder, buy F-you stamp kits and embroider subversive cross-stitch. There is a cultural shift from political correctness to people expressing that they're fed up with bull, says fashion designer Mark McNairy, "but change is not gonna happen overnight." McNairy himself is diving into the uncensored fray with F**k Ivy: **And Everything Else (Harper Design). It's a how-to men's-wear scrapbook takedown that detonates F-bombs all over the cult of retro-preppy that Take Ivy, the 1965 book documenting Ivy League men's wear, celebrates, all while dispensing shouty but fundamentally encouraging common sense. An oxymoron of a style guide that only iconoclast McNairy (or McNasty, as he's nicknamed) could have written, F**k Ivy strikes a tone somewhere between Howard Beale and Howard Roark.
"My idea was just a book of all the things that, growing up, made me what I am," McNairy says of his original draft. "As far back as I can remember, it started with The Andy Griffith Show, my favourite TV show, and the camo question that always comes up [in interviews about my love and use of the print] – it and the clothing, I'm sure, started with G.I. Joe." When the founder of American men's clothing and shoe company New Amsterdam presented the initial mock-up, an early editor told him to try again. "And I was like, f–k you!" (Of course.) This, McNairy explains in a soft North Carolina lilt over the phone from Los Angeles, where he relocated in August after 30 years in New York.
Some of McNairy's understandable frustration comes from the lack of basic fashion familiarity he encounters every day from male shoppers, and even buyers and people who work in fashion. When he praises the classic oxford-cloth buttondown shirt, for instance, he often has to clarify that the "button-down" refers to the collar, not the front placket. "It drives me crazy!" he says.
"It's changing, but before, men could tell you everything about their golf clubs – what kind of metal it was made out of, blah blah blah – but their wives picked out their shoes. They couldn't care less about how things are made." His book is like Strunk and White's terse The Elements of Style for clothes, because you must first know the protocols and rules before breaking them.
McNairy also chose atypical photographs to demonstrate his points. For a lesson on how to wear a poplin suit, it is surely the first time American ambassador to Vietnam Henry Lodge has appeared as an exemplar in a men's style manual (and likely the last). Cary Grant, staple of many a men's-wear guide, is in this context featured more as a "don't" lesson about tie bars.
It sounds corrosive but, like Knight's recent hit, it's real talk with an absence of malice except at the fetish of heritage forms, be they western, military or Ivy League nu-preppy try-hards. Most American men wear them slavishly, he says – too tastefully but all too literally.
Enter the sacred (cow) and the profane. "Ralph Lauren is one of my heroes," McNairy explains, "but I love Ralph because of the individual pieces of clothing, the detail put into it. The whole image thing about…Well, did you see the Oprah interview with his family at their ranch in Colorado? They're all dressed in cowboy outfits. And it's just embarrassing to me. That's what I'm rebelling against. Ralph Lauren has absolutely no sense of humour whatsoever."
Another attention-grabbing parody that isn't, F**k Ivy is a reaction and corrective to the way men now take the cult of the gentleman or dandy, too far – with a big exception for the admonition against Happy Socks ("They make you look like a [jerk]," he writes). "I just don't like fun socks. I like sober socks," McNairy confirms. To suggest otherwise would be uncouth, yet he does: The guide's parting shot is to disregard everything he's said.
Nathalie Atkinson