As everyone knows, male fashion lawyers tend to be hunks. I was a bit late getting the memo, but on the insistence by my German doctor, I finally started exercising, and being German myself, I of course overdid it, to the point that my shirt maker (Turnbull & Asser) had to adjust my pattern and my tailor (Henry Poole) is on notice that it will need do the same. Because both usually expect rounding middles by the time customers reach my point in life, that made me feel quite good. But what I next sought to do in the name of fashion was of no concern to either of them.
It would be hard not to notice that the trend is for less body hair on men. When I was growing up, what was said about something that toughened you as a man (such as strong drink) was, “That will put a little hair on your chest.” Nature dutifully made me quite fashionable in that regard, but since that time, things have regrettably slid the other way. Beefy young men in fashion advertising display pectorals and abdominals as furless as a those of a baby. One recent print ad showed a pack of lovely women measuring every inch of a young man wearing only his undershorts and showing not a blade of hair below his perfectly formed cranium.
Would that real life were as equally correctable in Photoshop. Instead, off went this hirsute attorney in search of a more practical solution, which is how I ended up at Olga’s laser emporium. A slave to tradition, I decided to keep the hair on my chest, but I agreed to sacrifice all between the sternum and what Olga told me was my “bikini line.” She first shaved my abdomen, thereby defoliating that previously forested tract that no one had seen since I put on my bar mitzvah suit. Then she set her laser to work, and after a twelve-minute ordeal in which I felt like the target at a flame-thrower practice range, I stood up and had a look.
To my surprise, what had lay hidden under that vanquished mat of virility was, after daily workouts, a surprisingly pleasing set of washboard abs—not quite a six-pack, but something like a four-pack on its way toward picking up the two missing cans. There you go, I thought: a fashionable belly at last. The problem is that there are not that many venues in which a fashion lawyer gets to show how fashionably toned he has become. Going shirtless in the firm’s boardroom seemed not quite in keeping with our mission. I suppose I could arrive at a fashion show with my shirt as open as Keith Richards’, but that style just does not speak to me. I do not even swim topless anymore but wear a rash guard (swim shirt) with an SPF of 50. So I have done what women have done for millennia: I have suffered for beauty—beauty that must, in a guy’s case, remain both skin deep and out of view.
At least my doctor is pleased. As I lay on the examination table, she kneaded and pounded my abdomen as though hoping to strike oil and said, “Very tight. There are two possible explanations. Either you are finally exercising as I told you to do—or you have serious liver damage.”
In fashion, nothing worthwhile comes easy.
Credit: Alan Behr