Fun is a big part of his work—you look at any of Mr. Slowboy’s illustrations, many of which are collected in his recent book Mr. Slowboy: Portraits of the Modern Gentleman,
and you can’t help but smile. His characters dress well, but they take you out of the moment and let you dream of walking around with a bag filled with baguettes, or riding a bicycle through a European city. In the book, Wang talks about how his character doesn’t want to “grow up.” By that he means becoming rational and practical—and less focused on dreams, having fun, and creating. That philosophy can be plucked from looking at any of his drawings—a reminder to enjoy things and stay curious. Mr. Slowboy always looks like he’s deep in thought, noticing everything around him that we can’t see; the other men Wang illustrates are almost always smiling. Some wear suits, others are getting fitted for them; some look to be causing some good old-fashioned trouble, like the illustration of a man in a brown suit who is being chased by a swarm of bees as he carries away jars of honey. There’s even one drawing of a guy in a checkered blazer and blue slacks standing in front of a vintage Porsche, he’s got his phone out and he says “Gotcha Pikachu” as he catches a Pokemon.
In an essay for the Mr. Slowboy book, the author W. David Marx points out that Wang might have many influences, but that “his art is best understood as an extension of Japan’s enduring and robust tradition of menswear illustration,” a field that Marx explains “began in the early 1960s with pioneers such as Kazuo Hozumi and Yasuhiko Kobayashi.” It can also be seen in the drawings that the French artist Jean-Claude Floch, better known as Floc'h, started producing in the 1970s. Those names might not be recognizable to Americans, but their influence is evident. Kazuo, for instance, is best-known for his smiling men with rosy cheeks dressed in their seersucker suits, while Yasuhiko veered a little closer towards psychedelic art.
The style illustration has stuck around in places like Japan, France and England, but fell out of vogue in the States for a few decades. There was a time when you could open up magazines for men and likely see as many illustrations as you did photographs. Whether it was a copy of Playboy you “read for the articles,” a forgotten mid century publication like Gentry or even a copy of GQ in the 1960s, you could find covers, comics, caricatures, even advertisements for everything from cologne to underwear all drawn by hand. It’s a vintage idea, and vintage never really goes out of style.
Other artists pay homage to their own preferred corners of history. Dick Carroll, for instance, has a style reminiscent of old copies of Mad and other mags from the tail-end of the Golden Age of Comics in the late 1950s and early ’60s: he draws old men strolling around the Upper West Side, but also guys in Wu-Tang shirts in Brooklyn. Andrew Mashanov’s illustrations, meanwhile, are a bit more on the whimsical side, definitely for fans of people that have a copy of Ivy Style on their shelf. Wes Robinson, based in the U.K., loves playing with color, and if you stare at his drawings long enough you start to notice the big influence David Hockney has on his work. The Tokyo-based osamu19760714 (who asked not to use their real name), meanwhile, fills his Instagram page with illustrations of favorite items of clothing, as well as shots of him actually wearing the stuff he sketches.
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It would be easy to look at the rise of the illustrator-as-style influencer and say it’s connected to the fact that people aren’t out and about, dressed up and ready for Scott Schuman or Joshua Woods to capture them on the street. Or maybe that virtually anybody can cosplay Bill Cunningham with the aid of their iPhone. And that’s certainly part of it: there are a million selfies and candid shots of people standing on city streets, but only a few people can really draw. Mr. Slowboy and his contemporaries also present a nice change of pace, a different way of looking at style.
But it's worth remembering that men’s style has always had some overlap with the cartoonish. Some streetwear brands understand the appeal: Just look at the Looney Tunes collection Kith did two years ago, or how much vintage Warner Brothers stuff goes for on Grailed. Ralph Lauren has his teddy bear, Rowing Blazers hooked up with Babar for a collection, and just last year you had the Simpsons modeling for Balenciaga along with the other residents of Springfield. Brands from L.L. Bean to Uniqlo to TSPTR have had deals to put Snoopy and other Peanuts characters on their clothes.
These illustrators, then, are taking things to another level: they’re not putting cartoons onto clothes. Instead, they’re using drawings of clothes to remind us that getting dressed can and should be something we do to enjoy life a little more. They’re reminding us that a little whimsy and color can brighten things up even in the darker times—or just when we’re trying to find some inspiration for what to wear.