Monday, November 23rd, 2009...2:41 pm

Larry David, Style Icon?

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Curb Your Enthusiasm‘s Seinfeld Reunion finale may have attracted 98 percent of the viewers in the uncoveted 45 and over demographic. I was watching, though I couldn’t exactly tell you what happened or even whether the episode was any good. I was too busy checking out Larry David’s clothes.

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That’s right: Larry David is my style icon. LD may seem an unlikely fashion inspiration, but I think he dresses in a way any middle-aged person, male or female, would do well to emulate: casual yet not scruffy, comfortable but never sloppy, easy-fitting yet not baggy, formal but not uptight, stylish but no slave to fashion. He almost always puts together an interesting blend of neutral layers, with a round necked tee shirt under a high-vee sweater with a loose hem, under an unstructured sport coat, over chinos that are not always chino=colored, worn with leather or suede sneakers. He’s got nice simple round glasses and hair that’s just the right length.  (Note to men: Women don’t care about baldness, at least not nearly as much as men fear they do.)

More to the point, LD’s style has an ageless quality: He doesn’t dress like a kid, he doesn’t dress like an old man, he simply dresses like some timeless version of himself. Over the seasons of Curb, his style has morphed a bit. He used to wear more vintage-looking shirts and more overshirts with collars, which I’m glad he left behind.

The problem is that Larry David Style doesn’t really look good on me.  I’m too curvy, too, well, female, while Larry has that lanky, supple-looking (could he possible do yoga?) figure.

But it’s easier to find older guys whose style you want to imitate than it is to find great-looking women style icons, at least in contemporary life.  Period films sometimes prove inspirational in terms of fashion.  One recent movie that launched me into a brief black and white period was Coco Before Chanel.

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And Jane Campion’s Bright Star was gorgeous, as were Abbie Cornish’s clothes, which made me, for a day or two, want to dress only in dusty blues and pinks.

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I wish there was a grownup woman in the movies or on television who looked not like a Super-Cougar nor a Super-Mom nor a dowdy granny nor a crazy person.  A woman who looked like the female equivalent of Larry David.  Until then, I’ll have to keep dressing Larry-style.

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