George Hamilton has been dressing well for as long as he can remember.
The 85-year-old screen actor, who is known for his sartorial style as well as his perpetual tan, traces his love of clothes to his mother.
In a conversation titled “An Evening of Substance and Style,” hosted by his custom tailor Paolo Martorano, Hamilton described his mother as a “Southern belle who was straight out of Scarlett O’Hara” who would “always dress me as if I were going to some kind of party.”
In her lifelong quest to become a movie star, Hamilton’s mother married countless times in hopes that one of these pairings would help her obtain her dream.
“My mother wanted more than life to be a movie star, and that’s all she thought about,” he said. “In the 1930s and ‘40s, movie stars made the world go ’round.” He said she would “just melt” when she watched actors like Cary Grant on the big screen.
“Years later, I saw Clark Gable on the street, and he was smoking a cigarette,” Hamilton recalled. “He threw it down, and I picked it up and put in my pocket. I still have that cigarette. I don’t know why, but I knew it meant a lot to my mother, and because it meant a lot to my mother, it somehow meant a lot to me.”
When he was still young, Hamilton’s mother brought him and his older brother, also an aspiring movie star, to Hollywood in hopes of getting their big break — but they never did. “They didn’t get to be movie stars,” he said. “They wanted it too much.”
But that was a lesson learned for Hamilton. “You have to look like you don’t need it,” he said.
On a casting call for MGM, which was seeking actors with star potential to sign contracts for $300 a week, Hamilton bought a blue, three-piece suit in a thrift shop that he accessorized with the perfect tie. He rented a Rolls Royce for $100 and asked a doorman to act as his chauffeur.
Hamilton went into the room, shook hands with the casting agents and left. “This is not for me,” he recalls telling them. “I want to be in finance. And — I promise this is a true story — I was only one out of the 10 guys to get a contract. I turned it down three times and I got $1,000 instead of $300.”
Once he was discovered, Hamilton recalls meeting some of his screen idols such as Fred Astaire and Cary Grant and asking them for advice. Astaire told him to find a good tailor and Grant told him to “get a good haircut. They were so incredibly aware of the surface,” he recalled.
Hamilton took the advice to heart, started studying the different clothing styles and spent a lot of time in the wardrobe department watching the tailors create pieces. After that, he developed his own style.
“You have to know the rules first before you break them,” Hamilton said. “There’s a whole world of sartorial dressing that preceded me, and I got to learn about that by looking at the classics. I don’t think you can go against them if you don’t know what they are.”
Hamilton believes a man’s suit must reflect his personality and while there aren’t hard and fast rules, there are some style guidelines that should be followed. The shoulder should be strong “but not domineering,” the waist slightly suppressed, and the shirt slim and not boxy.
But, he cautioned, it’s not wise to “constantly look like you’re on the cover of a magazine. That’s not a good idea.”
These days, Hamilton credits Martorano with helping him continue to be a style icon. Long before they met around four years ago, the New York-based tailor was already a longtime admirer of Hamilton’s wardrobe. The first pieces he made for the actor were a double-breasted navy blazer with cream trousers.
And while the tailor didn’t need a lot of guidance, he marveled that Hamilton could “tell me how he wants the lapel to be padded, how he wants the tailor to hold the tension, the needle, to get it to roll the way he wants. That was the experience of a lifetime. Dressing a man who has been an icon your entire life is a very humbling experience.”
Article published in Women's Wear Daily, October 15, 2024. By Jean E. Palmieri.