What Fall 2020’s New Man Has In Common With the Jellybean of the 1920s

Casablanca Fall 2020 Menswear

Photo: Alessandro Viero / Gorunway.com

On the runways, walking the streets, and in the shops, sharp-dressed men are enjoying a menswear renaissance that mirrors, in more ways than one, the dandy period of about 100 years ago. When F. Scott Fitzgerald dreamed up the character Jay Gatsby, he created not only a symbol of a certain version of the American Dream but also a portrait of the fashionable man of the day. Known as jellybeans or sheiks, these peacocking men were the counterparts to the liberated flapper or New Woman.

Regardless of gender, the youths who put the roar in the 1920s rejected stiff Edwardian conventions, especially as they related to fashion, sex, and gender. (It’s interesting to note that menswear’s current moment is similarly happening alongside fourth-wave feminism.)

Through the filter of time, the Jazz Age looks like an unending party. Au contraire. The decade, like The Great Gatsby itself, was ultimately nihilistic. In the aftermath of the First World War, the future seemed uncertain. Lacking faith in existing systems that had wrought such destruction, the new generation decided to live like there was no tomorrow. “The jellybean and the flapper may not be unknown to society, but they are the products of a dilettante period,” noted an observer in a local Texas paper in 1923. “They lived in ancient Greece and Rome.”

Faith destroyed, materialism took its place, as Fitzgerald unforgettably captured in his novel’s famous shirt scene:

“[Gatsby] opened for us two hulking patent cabinets which held his massed suits and dressing-gowns and ties, and his shirts, piled like bricks in stacks a dozen high. ‘I’ve got a man in England who buys me clothes. He sends over a selection of things at the beginning of each season, spring and fall.’ He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them, one by one before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel which lost their folds as they fell and covered the table in many-colored disarray. While we admired he brought more and the soft rich heap mounted higher—shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange with monograms of Indian blue.”

Substitute sneakers for shirts and you have a modern hypebeast moment.

This same Gatsby once paired a white flannel suit with a silver shirt and gold tie. The man was fly. The wardrobe of his contemporary jellybeans might have been less extensive, but it was also statement-making. A raccoon duster, plus fours, and Oxford bags were as essential to his look as a dropped-waist dress and cloche hat were to a flapper’s.

The youth styles of the day were immortalized, and sometimes caricatured, in the art of illustrators like J.C. Leyendecker (of Arrow Collar fame), Ralph Barton (who illustrated Anita Loos’s book Gentlemen Prefer Blondes), and John Held Jr. So influential was the work of the latter that it was said that people modeled themselves after his drawings. Today’s range of influence is much broader and more inclusive, but there’s a red thread that connects Gatsby in his pink suits to A$AP Rocky in a babushka or Billy Porter in a red-carpet gown: It is the idea of self-invention through action and dress.

Here, 11 looks for latter-day Gatsbys from the fall 2020 menswear collections.