Anthony Bourdain: Summer Style Guru

Anthony Bourdain: Summer Style Guru

Ninety degrees in Hanoi. The air is soup. It smells of charcoal and fish sauce and something floral you cannot name, something coming off the wet street or maybe off the bowl in front of you, you cannot tell and it does not matter. Anthony Bourdain is folded onto a plastic stool three inches off the ground, his long legs at angles that should not be anatomically possible, a cold Hanoi beer in his hand, bun cha steaming in a bowl the color of old brass.

His shirt is rumpled. Sleeves rolled. He looks, against all evidence, exactly right.

That was always the thing about him. He looked right. In a Bangkok market at noon, sweating through a cotton shirt. On a Sicilian terrace in August, the Mediterranean doing its thing in the background. On a beach in Greece, squinting. In a Port of Spain rum shop at midnight. He looked like he belonged wherever he was, and the clothes were a large part of why.

Not because they were expensive. Not because they were fashionable. Because they were chosen by a man who understood, at some deep and possibly instinctive level, that how you dress when you travel tells every person you encounter exactly what kind of traveler you are. And Bourdain, above all things, did not want to be the wrong kind. He just wanted to be himself.

The Uniform

Here is what he actually wore. Not in the fashion-spread sense. In the "he wore this in Osaka and then in Morocco and then in Croatia and it still looked good" sense.

A soft button-down shirt. Untucked. Sleeves rolled to just below the elbow. Linen or cotton, depending on the humidity. Beige, white, chambray blue, olive, faded navy. No prints. No tropical patterns. Definitely no logos. The colors of sand and sea and old buildings, which is to say the colors of everywhere worth going.

Below that: faded denim or stone-colored chinos, both worn to the specific degree of softness that only repeated washing produces, both looking like they had already been somewhere and were prepared to go somewhere else without making a fuss about it.

That is it. That is the wardrobe. Two or three shirts, a couple pairs of trousers, the whole thing fitting into a carry-on with room left over. Menswear writer Edwin Zee, dissecting the look in a 2021 essay for Put This On titled "Anthony Bourdain, Unexpected Style Icon," put his finger on the essential quality: "His waxed trucker jacket follows him to Montana, while his beige linen shirt returns on his trip to Brazil. It feels as if all of Bourdain's clothes are well-loved and well-worn." Same pieces. Different continents. The clothes themselves accumulating context. Getting better with every journey.

He was not trying to look a certain way. He was trying to be unencumbered. There is a difference, and most people get it backwards.

The Shoes

Let's talk about the shoes, because Bourdain was oddly passionate about shoes in a way he was not passionate about most things involving his appearance.

Clarks Desert Boots. Sand suede. That was it. One shoe, worn on every trip, in every climate, to every occasion. He bought them in rotation, three or four pairs at a time. When one died, he pulled the next from the queue.

To Men's Journal, he explained this with the enthusiasm most people reserve for vehicles or restaurants: "These are the most comfortable shoes on Earth. And they're dirt cheap if you buy them at the right place. You can kick them off in a second when you're going through airport security, which is a big benefit in my line of work. But they're great for anything. I buy about three or four pairs at a time. When one pair dies, I just rotate it out."

To Esquire, the same sermon in slightly different words: comfortable shoes are important, he said. I like Clarks Desert Boots because they go off and on very quickly, they're super comfortable, you can beat the hell out of them, and they're cheap.

The man had priorities. The shoe was one of them. It is, in retrospect, an impeccable choice. A crepe sole that floats over cobblestones. A silhouette that works with denim and chinos and suits and swim shorts if you are feeling brave. Nothing to lace. Nothing to overthink. Just pull them on and go.

The Sunglasses & the Watch

Two accessories. That was the rule, whether he stated it that way or not.

The sunglasses were Persol. Italian, handmade in Turin, their name coming from per il sole, which simply means for the sun. The 649 model was designed in 1957 for Turin tram drivers who needed protection from glare on narrow streets. The folding 714 was the one Steve McQueen wore in The Thomas Crown Affair in 1968, and McQueen's own pair sold for more than $60,000 at a 2006 auction. Bourdain wore both models, typically in tortoiseshell acetate, the warm amber tones sitting exactly right against silver hair in the later seasons of Parts Unknown.

No logo visible from a distance. No sport-performance branding. A beautifully made piece of Italian engineering that had been essentially the same object for decades and had no interest in your opinion about that.

The watch was quiet and serious. Per Time and Tide Watches, his most-worn piece was a Rolex Oyster Perpetual Date with a blue dial and an engine-turned bezel. He was also seen in a custom blacked-out Rolex Milgauss and a Panerai Radiomir 1940. Against a rumpled linen shirt and a pair of battered desert boots, these landed as tools rather than trophies. A working watch worn without ceremony. The way serious watches are supposed to be worn.

No rings. Minimal jewelry throughout. In summer, with sleeves rolled, the tattoos on his arms were the only decoration, and those were not decorative in any conventional sense. They were a record. Japanese tebori work acquired on his travels, a skull, a knife, Greek script reading I am certain of nothing. "I largely get them done to please myself," he told The Manual. Another dent won't matter. He was talking about the tattoos, but he could have been talking about the whole philosophy.

The Philosophy: Pack Light, Dress to Disappear

Bourdain's clothes were the physical expression of a worldview, and the worldview was stated clearly enough in Kitchen Confidential in 2000 that there is no point pretending it was subtle.

"Do we really want to travel in hermetically sealed popemobiles through the rural provinces of France, Mexico and the Far East, eating only in Hard Rock Cafes and McDonald's? Or do we want to eat without fear, tearing into the local stew, the humble taqueria's mystery meat, the sincerely offered gift of a lightly grilled fish head?"

He wanted to eat the fish head. That required not arriving at the table dressed like someone who had flown in from a resort. The rumpled linen shirt was not an aesthetic choice. It was a posture. A way of saying, in fabric, that you were here as a guest rather than a spectator.

His packing rules followed the same logic. To Main Line Today in 2011: "I pack for security, and it's all carry-on. Shoes that slip on and off quickly, jackets that I can beat into submission, shirts that don't require pressing." To the New York Times: "Dress for security. I don't carry liquids or gels, I don't wear a belt or any jewelry, I get my stuff out and in the tray very quickly and I'm through."

The Tumi suitcase, referenced in Men's Journal, was picked for its durability and repair warranty. Not for what it signaled. For what it could take. Near-bulletproof, he said. Which is what you want from luggage if you plan to use it the way he used it.

Everything, in other words, was chosen to remove friction. Between him and the airport, between him and the street, between him and the meal. The less his clothes required of him, the more attention he could pay to where he actually was.

The Hot-Climate Episodes, Where the Wardrobe Did Its Work

Vietnam. He went back again and again. Each time, the plastic stool. Each time, the correct linen shirt. The September 2016 Hanoi episode, in which he and Barack Obama shared bun cha and Hanoi beer at Bún chả Hương Liên for the equivalent of six dollars, produced one of the most reproduced images of either man in a casual setting. Bourdain in a dark casual shirt, both of them entirely at ease, because that is what happens when you dress to be present rather than to be photographed.

His definition of happiness in Vietnam never changed across the years: "All of the things I need for happiness? Little plastic stool. Check. Tiny little plastic table. Check. Something delicious in a bowl?" The shirt was appropriate for the stool. The stool was the whole point.

Sicily. For Parts Unknown season two, filmed in summer heat that was doing what Sicilian August does, his field notes crackled with the pleasure of eating in the right way in the right heat. "Sicilian food is exactly everything I love: the cuttlefish-stained pasta, street meat, inky wines, oily fishes." And in a later, quieter moment: "This is what I wanted Sicily to be, something to soothe my shattered soul. It doesn't take much: a bowl of good pasta."

He was wearing something light and neutral. He always was. Because you cannot taste a bowl of pasta the way it deserves to be tasted when you are too warm and underprepared for the climate.

Greece. Naxos, Parts Unknown season eight. On camera, in the light of late summer, he laid out the ideal Bourdain beach vacation in one paragraph that should be printed and given to anyone currently planning a Mykonos trip: "I'm on a Greek island here. It's a beautiful day. I'm planning on passing out on the beach shortly. You know, maybe some watercolors, do a little cooking, more napping, eating, napping. Contemplate mysteries of the universe or nap, either one. That's a vacation to me, staying put and doing nothing."

Staying put. Doing nothing. In linen. Correct.

Bangkok. No Reservations season five, the wet season. Sweating through the humidity of a Thai afternoon, chasing the five flavors through floating markets and street stalls, dressed for movement and heat and the comfortable certainty that the shirt would need washing again tonight.

Trinidad. Parts Unknown season nine. He arrived with the pre-emptive anti-tourist disclaimer that was also a wardrobe manifesto: "You don't go to Trinidad for the beaches. It ain't no tropical paradise." He went for the doubles and the pelau and the midnight music, dressed to sit wherever the next meal happened to be served.

The Summer Wardrobe

The Bourdain summer wardrobe is three linen or cotton-linen shirts in neutral colors, two pairs of light trousers, one pair of suede desert boots or leather sandals that require no decision-making, good sunglasses in acetate, and a simple watch. Everything fits in a carry-on. Nothing requires an iron. Nothing has a logo.

Leave the new clothes at home. The outfit that works best on a plastic stool in the tropics is the one that looks like it has been on a plastic stool in the tropics before. New clothes are for people who are performing a vacation. Worn-in clothes are for people having one.

At the airport: shoes off, belt off, no liquids, nothing in the pockets, through the scanner before the person behind you has found their boarding pass. Get to the other side and get on with it.

Find the place with no English menu. Sit where the locals sit. Order what the person next to you is eating. Be present enough to notice that the food tastes different when you are not performing your vacation at it.

This is not complicated. It is, in fact, the simplest possible approach to summer travel. He proved it worked, for twenty years, in approximately a hundred countries, on a budget that ran from plastic-stool noodles to three-Michelin-star dinners, in the same handful of linen shirts.

The shirt is wrinkled. The boots are worn in. The beer is cold. Everything is correct.

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