By Bent Van Looy.
I could be wrong, but I doubt many PS readers could pull off a pair of tobacco knickerbockers. God knows, at some perilous point in my personal style journey I tried (and failed, of course). Come to think of it, I only know one guy who can: my friend Tintin.
From his early travels to the USSR and America, the tirelessly optimistic reporter for Le Petit Vingtième donned a generously cut pair of turd catchers (as they are called in Flemish). Somehow, he managed to make them look like a sensible garment, worn with a white shirt and a light blue crewneck sweater.
Add a pair of white knee-high socks and simple brown oxfords (I imagine them to be a pair of suede Aldens), and you’ve got yourself a unique and recognisable uniform.
But our hero is also known to switch up his rigid dress code. I love him in The Blue Lotus, for example, where he stuffs a short-sleeved yellow shirt into the plus-fours (above), which, in the next panel, he wears with a striped red tie – without a jacket.
The latter is the type of look his creator, Georges Remi, better known as Hergé (his initials GR said in reverse), could rock like no other.
Remi (above) grew up in a well-to-do Brussels bourgeois family in the early 20th century. Like many boys in his milieu, he passed through a clear progression of dress: long gowns as a baby, shorts and shirts as a child, knickerbockers at school, and bespoke tailoring thereafter.
His family’s proximity to high society – brushing shoulders with aristocrats and dignitaries – left a lasting mark on how Hergé dressed throughout his life.
His clothes aren’t loud or showy – in fact, quite the opposite. I love old photographs of the man himself at work in his studio, wearing a simple white ironed dress shirt and a clipped tie, sleeves rolled up for the task at hand.
The choice of the tie, the clip, the belted worn-in chinos, and a discreet Swiss watch show a man who absolutely knew his clothes. And that love and knowledge shone through on every page of the Tintin canon, where every character is dressed with love and care, except for Snowy, that is, who – like most dogs – operates in the nude.
It’s miraculous how Remi, in his characteristic ligne claire style manages to communicate the intricate codes of clothing with a single, flat layer of watercolour.
Check patterns, like Tintin’s cowboy shirt in Tintin in America, are just that, simple checks made with a ruler (above). Another artist would’ve tried to show his mastership by letting the pattern flow with the fabric of the shirt. Hergé, instead, gives us a hint. Our mind does the rest.
And, no matter how minor the role, everyone is carefully outfitted in clothes that befit their station in society – from baron to bootlegger, mobster to marine biologist.
Take crime kingpin Al Capone (below) in a double-breasted suit, trousers pressed and tapered, wearing a bejewelled tie on a pink shirt with a white contrast collar, accompanied by a crony in a sloppier blue suit and an ill-balanced, tiny bow tie.
There’s a world of difference in status there, explained through the cut and style of tailoring – no words required.
Indeed, Hergé’s love of tailoring is evident throughout the Tintin books. He drew a host of characters – gangsters, ambassadors, and occasionally even Tintin himself – in suits, especially brown ones.
The omnipresence of brown tailoring in the world of Tintin probably has a lot to do with the times, with many of the comics written in the 1940s and 50s.
There’s Tintin’s suit jacket in Temple of the Sun, in the same hue and cloth of the knickerbockers – cinched in the back to signal ruggedness and utility (above). The shirt collar and fish-mouth lapels on the jacket look very Parisian, and different from what contemporaries in London or New York would have worn.
Tintin mostly wore brown with a white shirt and a black tie (an unfailingly classic combination), whereas Hergé clearly had fun taking his side characters shopping, combining the brown suits with shirts, ties, roll necks and scarves in much stronger colours.
But Hergé also had a keen eye for casual clothes and workwear. Consider Captain Haddock, in his signature navy knit turtleneck sweater (below) – a look he only briefly ditches for overly loud tailoring in The Seven Crystal Balls (betraying that the Captain may be out of his depth, sartorially).
And even though Tintin clearly favours his uniform, he doesn’t mind throwing a few francs at high quality outerwear when the need arises. Before going to Tibet, to comb the Himalayas in search of his lost friend Chang, our hero must’ve had the presence of mind to go shopping for a sturdy mountaineering anorak at Nigel Cabourn or Stone Island (above).
Often rugged and definitely casual, Tintin is known to wear all kinds of parkas and ponchos on the right occasion. And when at home in Belgium, he goes for a stroll with Haddock in a cool Valstarino-style suede bomber.
And I can’t not mention the long khaki raincoat Tintin wears on the cover of King Ottokar’s Sceptre, which I like to imagine him buying from Cohérence (above).
It’s a well-worn, very simple A-line model, and flutters beautifully behind its wearer on his many adventures. This coat always made an impression on me as a kid and symbolises the point where well-cut tailored clothes meet adventure and dynamism.
After looking for Tintin’s raincoat for most of my life, I managed to score an Italian coat from the forties that resembles it in vintage shop ‘Ub’ in Florence. I couldn’t believe my luck.
Hergé’s own style softened over time. Though his later years were marked by personal struggles, his clothes grew more relaxed.
In photographs from his sixties, he embodies a kind of quiet luxury: scarves and foulards replace stiff collars, suede jackets and odd trousers take over from formal suits (above). It’s the wardrobe of a man at ease – curious, adaptable, and in step with his time.
So to, in his final adventure published in the mid-1970s, Tintin and the Picaros, our hero proves to be susceptible to trends and discards his trusty knickerbockers for a slightly flared pair of slacks (below) as he stomps through the San Theodoros jungle, never to be seen again.
