I had forgotten about this piece on Miles Davis from a couple of years back and it was nice to find again after researching the Andover Shop a bit last month.
Sometime around 1954, jazz great Miles Davis walked into the Andover Shop, a small haberdashery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and single-handedly turned the world of style upside down. Just as his groundbreaking album Milestones (celebrating it’s 50th anniversary next year) changed music, that afternoon in Cambridge shifted men’s fashion.
Miles emerged from the store clad head to toe in traditional “Ivy League”-style clothing, and in so doing merged two separate worlds-those of the establishment and the black jazz artist-as if fusing two dissonant notes to create a bold new harmony. The result was a crashing chord of cool that obliterated the line between square and hip, sounding a fashion fortissimo that lasted several years before fading into the silence of pop-culture obscurity.
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