11 Feb 2026

Good look / Sad book

Felipe De La Hoz loves good clothes; Maria Bustillos on reading the original draft of Virginia Giuffre’s memoir

Photographs courtesy DiDi Turley

Today: Felipe De La Hoz, journalism lecturer at NYU and member of the New York Daily News Editorial Board; and writer and editor Maria Bustillos.

Issue No. 500

Fine and Dandy
Felipe De La Hoz

BOOK REVIEW: The (Real) Memoir of Virginia Giuffre
Maria Bustillos

Fine and Dandy

by Felipe De La Hoz

I had fun being interviewed last year by Natty Adams for a book about contemporary dandyism (his third in a series with photographer Rose Callahan); it was an opportunity to let loose and nerd out a bit about one of my special interests, which doesn’t get much airtime in these days of living on the knife edge of history.

But at one point Natty asked me a perfectly reasonable question that caught me a little off guard: was it strange for someone in a leftist political orbit, being into menswear at a time when classic tailoring had gotten kind of sucked up into the Retvrn movement and, consequently, the country’s fascist slide? I hadn’t really given it much thought, because I don’t necessarily consider the Richard Spencers of the world to have a genuine interest in the craft and the history of menswear—at least not in the same way I do, despite having made their bones on looking the part of “respectable” Nazis in their three-piece suits.

What I mean to say is that I can’t really imagine as joyless and repulsive a person as Spencer, or Stephen Miller—men who, despite their malevolence and power, seem kind of addled, one-dimensional, almost pathetic—really caring about, say, fabrics and drapes and canvassing and the rest of the techniques, the aesthetic history and the social meanings of menswear. If they wear tailored suits with pocket squares and silk ties, it does not seem to be out of an appreciation for the labor, the creativity, and attention to detail that have gone into making such things; they don’t aspire to the kind of elegance that’s rooted in knowledge and taste. Instead they want to convey that they are just like the Men Who Used to Run Things, before all this modernity came and knocked them off their rightful pedestal above other people. It is, in effect, a uniform, if a less controversial one than some of the other sharply-tailored uniforms they might choose to wear.