Apparel | Tuesday, March 25, 2008

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SUPIMA IN THE NEWS: The Fairchild Encyclopedia of Menswear

By Greg Wang

NEW YORK — As Mary Lisa Gavenas discovered when she was working on The Fairchild Encyclopedia of Menswear, trying to write the definitive reference book on all matters of menswear meant tackling a lot of textile topics too.

“No way you can talk men’s fashion without mentioning denim. Or worsted. Or what canvas does to suit construction. Or how to tell a pinstripe from a chalkstripe from a pencil stripe. Or how Gore-Tex works and what came before it,” says Gavenas, whose just-published hardback has over 2,200 entries on 418 oversized, well-illustrated pages—hundreds of them explaining fibers, fabrics, patterns, and textile history.

“It was crucial to make these entries thorough enough for an buyer or retailer to use,” says the author, who includes thousands of cross-references, “but it’s also written for the guy who’s just a fashion addict, so the language is very approachable.”

To make things even easier, she’s also included an eight-page color insert illustrating all the traditional patterns and weaves: “So you don’t even have to know the name of something to use this book.”

She adds: “There’s really no place else to look some of this stuff up. You could go crazy trying to research this on the Web—you’d go through thousands of hits on a search engine before you’d find the particular definition of ‘cloth’ or ‘yarn’ as it’s used in the menswear.”

And naturally there’s an entire entry devoted to Supima—as well as dozens of linked entries like ‘pima cotton,’ ‘Egyptian cotton,’ ‘long staple cotton,’ and ‘sea island cotton.’

“When I was researching this I found Supima included in a couple of guides to traditional menswear—people at the high end of the market definitely love being associated with the name—but there’s a lot of misinformation out there. For example, Esquire’s Encyclopedia of 20th Century Men’s Fashions, which was published in 1973 and has been plagarized mercilessly ever since, misidentifies Supima as a fabric and most menswear ‘experts’ have been copying that mistake ever since.”

Fairchild—itself a division of Condé Nast—is the educational publishing arm of the company that also produces Women’s Wear Daily, W Magazine, DNR, Footwear News, and a slew of other consumer and trade titles. Its books are literally required reading in virtually every college curriculum featuring fashion, retailing, or interior design.

“This book, though, was written with the crossover market in mind,” says Gavenas, who started out as an old-fashioned general assignment reporter on daily newspapers before moving to New York to cover fashion and then get a master’s degree in Costume History at NYU.

Her book also includes “how-to” diagrams showing necktie knots, bow ties, and ascots, plus several variations on folding a pocket square. Biographies of dandies—from Beau Brummell and the Duke of Windsor to Frank Sinatra and Miles Davis—are packd with the kinds of details not available anywhere else. She adds: “There’s also trivia galore on topics like the invention of the ‘earmuff’ . . . I wanted this book to have an authentic claim to being encyclopedic.”

And, as its author sums up: “I guess you might say that you couldn’t write the definitive book about menswear without mentioning Supima.”

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