Menswear is texture management

Womenswear editorials get color, movement, and drama. Menswear gets one navy jacket and the photographer's ability to make wool interesting. I consider this a fair fight, and this column is about how I fight it.

PLACEHOLDER COPY: swap for your own fashion writing. Structure: a thesis, a pull quote, one worked example from a shoot, and a closing opinion you are only 80 percent sure of.

Raking light or nothing

Fabric is topography. Wool has hills, satin has rivers, seersucker has an entire weather system. Flat frontal light irons all of it into nothing, which is why nearly every texture frame in the featured series is lit from a hard 80 degrees off axis, skimming the surface the way late sun skims a field.

A double-breasted jacket is the most architectural thing a person can wear.

The worked example

The lapel detail in Le Smoking, frame 07A, was one bare bulb, one flag, and the stylist's hands still in frame from re-pinning a seam. We kept the accident. The satin reads as liquid precisely because the wool beside it reads as stone: texture is only legible next to a different texture.

The 80 percent opinion

Tailoring photographs better slightly wrong: collar a touch lifted, tie a degree off center, one button honest. Perfection reads as catalog. The frame you remember has a flaw placed exactly where you cannot stop looking at it, and menswear, more than anything else I shoot, rewards that placement.

Disagree by email. Bring references.