Illustrator and Dandy. It doesnt get much better. He combined a near obsession with rolling 20′s and 1930 art with a modernist perspective to create some very provocative pieces that were consistently featured in the New Yorker. On the fashion side, he maintained the aesthetic of a true bespoke dandy, all wingtips, bowler hats, club collars and double breasted suits. He even sported a cane from time to time. Looking like a gentleman might be the first step to acting like one. The man passed but the legend will live past his September 5th resting at age 70. Here are some excerpts from a New York Times article on the influential Mr. Merkin.
After graduating from Syracuse University with a bachelor’s degree in fine art in 1960, he earned master’s degrees in art from Michigan State University in 1961 and the Rhode Island School of Design in 1963. For the next 42 years he taught painting and drawing at R.I.S.D, commuting every week after he relocated to New York in 1967.
“My sartorial aspirations lie somewhere between the Duke of Windsor and the Duke of Ellington,” Mr. Merkin told The New York Times in 1967. He favored custom-made double-breasted suits of his own design, bowler hats and homburgs, and boutonnières. He would occasionally stroll the boulevards of Manhattan sporting a cane. In his closet hung inspirational photographic portraits of his idols, the diplomat Anthony J. Drexel Biddle and the film star Adolphe Menjou.
The men’s wear designer Alan Flusser, another friend, said in a telephone interview on Thursday: “He was one of the few men who knew how to wear clothes, in a bespoke Bohemian manner.” “You have to be way beyond fashion to do this.”
Mr. Merkin wrote the column “Merkin on Style” for GQ from 1988 to 1991, holding forth on a subject he knew more about than practically anybody else. A key to his philosophy was the dandyish notion of fashion as aggression.
“Dressing, like painting, should have a residual stability, plus punctuation and surprise,” he told the fashion publication The Daily News Record in 1986. “Somewhere, like in Krazy Kat, you’ve got to throw the brick.”
Slideshow of Richard Merkin’s work via the New Yorker.
