First it was Lubriderm, what my father rubbed briskly between his palms and extended in glistening offering. “How about a bit of the Lube?“ he’d say when I walked into his bathroom. I was, like, 8 years old, or something, so I had no choice but to put my face in his shiny hands. Then, for a long time, it was Nivea. “How would you like a little…Nivea?“ he’d ask, with his brown hands singing. Now it was baby oil. Now he was 77, and I was 38, and we were sharing a room in a hotel near the ocean. He was sitting in bed, and I was sitting on the floor. He poured the oil into his hands and whisked them together, with a sigh of friction, and applied the oil to his face. Then he said, “Here—rub a little baby oil into your kisser. If you want to stay young, you have to keep well lubricated.“

“Baby oil? What happened to Nivea?“

“Too greasy. Baby oil soaks right in. It’s the best thing for a man’s face.“

“Isn’t baby oil just as greasy?“

My father raised a thick eyebrow. “Listen to me,“ he said. “Learn my secrets.“

He held out the bottle. I held out my palm. “Good, good,“ he said. “Rub it right in—right in…“

There were always secrets. You could not walk into my father’s bathroom and not know there were secrets. Secrets of grooming, secrets of hygiene, secrets of preparation, secrets of the body itself—secrets and knowledge. First of all, he had a bathroom all to himself—his bathroom, Dad’s bathroom. And he made it his, by virtue of what he put in it—his lotions, his sprays, his unguents, his astringents, his cleansers, his emollients, his creams, his gels, his deodorants, his perfume (yes, he used perfume, my father did, as his scent—Jean Naté eau de cologne—for he was, and is, as he will be the first to tell you, a pioneer, as well as a fine-smelling man), his soaps, his shampoos and his collection of black fine-tooth Ace combs, which for years I thought were custom-made, since that was his, Lou Junod’s, nickname in the Army: Ace. He called these things, this mysterious array of applications, his “toiletries“ and took them with him wherever he went, in a clanking case of soft beige leather made by the Koret handbag company of New York, and wherever he went he used them to colonize that bathroom, to make that bathroom his own, whether it was in a hotel or someone’s house—because “I need a place to put my toiletries.“ He has always been zealous in his hygiene, joyous in his ablutions, and if you want to know what I learned from him, what he taught me, we might as well start there, with what he never had to say: that fashion begins with the body, and has as much to do with your nakedness as it does with your clothes; that style is the public face you put together in private, in secret, behind a door all your own.

I have a sense of style, I guess, but it is not like my father’s—it is not earned, and consequently it is not unwavering, nor inerrant, nor overbearing, nor constructed of equal parts maxim and stricture; it is not certain. It does not start in the morning, when I wake up, and end only at night, when I go to sleep. It is not my creation, nor does it create me; it is ancillary rather than central. I don’t absolutely f’ing live it, is what I’m trying to say. I don’t put it on every time I anoint myself with toilet water or stretch a sock to my knee or squeeze into a pair of black bikini underwear. Which is what my father did. Of course, when I was growing up, he tried as best he could to teach me what he knew, to indoctrinate me—hell, he couldn’t resist, for no man can be as sure as my father is without being also relentlessly and reflexively prescriptive. He tried to pass on to me knowledge that had the whiff of secrets, secrets at once intimate and arcane, such as the time he taught me how to clean my navel with witch hazel. I was 18 and about to go off to college, and so one day he summoned me into his bathroom. “Close the door,“ he said. “I have to ask you something.“

"What, Dad?“

“Do you…clean your navel?“

“Uh, no,“

“Well, you should. You’re a man now, and you sweat, and sweat can collect in your navel and produce an odor that is very…offensive.“ Then: “This is witch hazel. It eliminates odors. This is a Q-Tip. To clean your navel, just dip the Q-Tip into the witch hazel and then swab the Q-Tip around your navel. For about thirty seconds. You don’t have to do it every day; just once a week or so.“ He demonstrated the technique on himself, then handed me my own Q-Tip.

“But Dad, who is going to smell my navel?“

“You’re going off to college, son. You’re going to meet women. You never want to risk turning them off with an offensive odor.“

I never did it—or, rather, I did it that one time and never again. I am a son who has squandered his inheritance, you see; I am incomplete in my knowledge and practice of matters hygienic and sartorial. And yet…I want to know, and that is why one weekend late last summer I wound up staying with my father in a hotel room that smelled of salt water and mildew, with his bag of toiletries spilling out on the bed and a puddle of baby oil shimmering in my palm: for the blessing of his instruction, for the privilege of his secrets. He had always told me that a man is at the peak of his powers from his late thirties to his early fifties, when he has forced the world to hear his footsteps—that a man comes into the peak of his powers when he has power and the world at last bends to him. He never told me, however, that that power can be measured by the number of secrets a man knows and keeps, and that when it became my time to make the world heed my step, I would want to know his secrets, for the paradoxical purpose of safekeeping and promulgation. My father’s fashion tips: I’d listened to them all my life, and now that I was finding myself living by them, I wanted to tell them to the world, if only to understand where in the hell he got them; if only to understand how someone like my father can come to know, without a moment of hesitation or a speck of doubt, that the turtleneck is the most flattering thing a man can wear.

1. The turtleneck is the most flattering thing a man can wear.

This is axiomatic, inflexible and enduring. This is an article of faith and, as we shall see, the underpinning of a whole system of belief. Mention the word turtleneck to any of my college roommates and they will say “the most flattering thing a man can wear.“ Mouth the phrase “the most flattering thing a man can wear“ and they will say “the turtleneck.“ This is because my father was born to proselytize, and when he and my mother visited my college and took me and my friends out to dinner, he sought to convert to his cause not only me—as he has as long as I’ve been alive—but them as well. Those who wore turtlenecks that evening were commended; those who did not were instructed and cajoled. My father was declamatory in the cause of turtlenecks, and as often as possible he wore them himself. Indeed, this is my wife Janet’s first glimpse of Lou Junod: We have sat next to each other, Janet and I, for five hours, as our bus bucked a snowstorm and made its way from a college town in upstate New York to a mall parking lot on Long Island. We have kissed, for the very first time, the night before. We have held hands covertly the entire trip, although she has not yet smelled my neglected navel. Our seats are in the back of the bus, and so we have to wait a long time before we can get out. When we finally reach the front, there is a man standing at the door. He is impatient. He is not standing in the polite semicircle that the other parents have formed outside the bus; indeed, he is trying to stick his face inside the bus, and so we have to wait a long time before we can get out. He is, however, oblivious to whatever confusion he causes, and his chin is held at an imperious tilt. Although snow falls heavily behind him, he has a very dark tan, and his face shines with steadfast lubrication. He is, by his own description, “not a handsome man, but a very attractive one.“ He has a strong face: a large nose with a slight hook; thick eyebrows, nearly black; and eyes of pale, fiery green. He is about five-ten and a half, or in his words, “six foot in shoes.“ He is wearing a leather windbreaker, unzipped, and a pair of beige pants, which he calls “camel,“ and a ribbed turtleneck, tight to his body and pale yellow. Over his heart dangles a set of gold dog tags—his name is on them—and on his left pinkie is a gold ring of diamond and black onyx. He does not wear a wedding band. “Where is he?“ he is saying, theatrically, with a habit of elaborate enunciation that lingers lovingly upon every consonant. “Where is…my son?“ Janet looks at him and then at me and says, “That’s not…?“ I look at him and say, “Hi, Dad.“

Now, the turtleneck in this scene may seem incidental—just another detail, in an accumulation of detail—rather than an organizing principle. Don’t be fooled. Anytime my father wears a turtleneck, he is advancing a cause, and the cause is himself. That is what he means when he says that an article of clothing is “flattering.“ That is where his maxim extolling the turtleneck acquires its Euclidean certainty. The turtleneck is the most flattering thing a man can wear because it strips a man down to himself—because it forces a man to project himself. The turtleneck does not decorate, like at tie, or augment, like a sport coat, or in any way distract from what my father calls a man’s “presentation“; rather, it fis a man in sharp relief and puts his face on a pedestal—first literally, then figuratively. It is about isolation, the turtleneck is; it is about essences and first causes; it is about the body and the face, and that’s all it’s about; and when worn by Lou Junod, it is about Lou Junod. The turtleneck is the most flattering thing a man can wear, then, because it establishes the very standard for flattery in fashion, which is that nothing you wear should ever hide what you want to reveal, or reveal what you want to hide. This is the certainty from which all the other certainties proceed; this is why my father, never a religious man—indeed, a true and irrepressible pagan, literal in his worship of the sun—believes in turtlenecks more than he believes in God.

2. There is nothing like a fresh burn.

I do not know exactly what my father looks like, for I do not know what my father looks like without a suntan. I have never seen him pale or even sallow. He does not often use the word suntan, however because he has been going out in the sun for so long that he has as many words for suntan as Eskimos have for snow. There is, for instance, “color,“ which he usually modifies with a diminutive and uses almost exclusively to entice and encourage his three children—my brother, my sister and me—to “go outside, stick your face in the sun and get a little color.“ There is also “glow,“ which seems to mean the same thing as “color,“ but which requires less of a commitment—as in, “Just a half hour! Just a half hour in the sun and you’ll get a little glow, and you’ll look and feel terrific.“ But neither a little glow nor a little color can substitute for the nearly mystical properties of “a burn.“ Indeed, a burn is such a powerful thing that my father never asks his children to get one. A burn is such a powerful thing that in order to get one for himself my father concocted, in his bathroom, a tanning lotion of his own invention, composed of baby oil, iodine and peroxide (a few years ago, he tried to improve upon it by adding a few drops of Jean Naté, “for the scent,“ and it exploded). A burn is such a powerful thing that my father went to great lengths to make sure the sun shined on him, all year round, and turned the world into his personal solarium. In November and December, when he went out on the road for weeks at a time to make a living selling handbags, he always ended his trip in Miami and stayed for a few extra days at the Fontainebleau or the Jockey Club, so that when he finally came home he would come home—and this is another of his Eskimo words—“black.“ In January and February, he would dress in ski pants and a winter coat, cover himself with a blanket and sit for hours on the white marble steps that led to the front door of our house on Long Island—steps that were built with their reflective qualities in mind—with a foil reflector in his gloved hands and his oiled face ablaze with winter light. (Me, freezing: “How’s the sun, Dad?“ He, with tanning goggles over his eyes: “Like fire.“) In March or April, there was Florida again, or California, and in the summer there was our house in Westhampton Beach, where my father indulged his paganism to its fullest extent; where the ocean was “nectar of the gods“; where the black bikinis he usually wore under his trousers he now wore to the beach; where the reflector now on occasion surrounded his entire body, like some incandescent coffin; where the sound track was my father singing “Summer Wind“ and tinkling the ice in his cocktails; where he wore straw fedoras and V-necked angora sweaters; where his sense of style seemed to stretch all the way to the sunset and his burn was forever fresh….