Like his singing voice, Tony Bennett’s personal style was smooth, straightforward and confident.
He resisted the temptation to change his approach to music as rock overtook the pop charts, and he largely stayed away from many sartorial trends that came and went during his seven decades in show business, wisely sticking to tuxedos and neatly tailored suits, many of them from Italian fashion brand Brioni. For more casual moments, he wore slacks and a blazer, sometimes with a nice dark turtleneck instead of a button-up shirt and tie.
By sticking to the style that allowed him to feel most himself in terms of both music and fashion, Mr. Bennett paradoxically managed to avoid the trap of being too strongly associated with a particular era.
In recent decades, when menswear magazines celebrated the ring-a-ding-ding style of the 1950s and early 1960s in outdated fashion spreads, they usually focused on Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and other veteran members of the Rat Pack.
And while the other singers of Mr. Bennett became subjects of retro-chic fascination, he still played theaters, nightclubs and award shows with a new crop of stars including Stevie Wonder, kd lang, Elvis Costello, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Bono, Sting, Celine Dion, John Legend, Amy Winehouse and Lady Gaga.
“The only thing that lasts is quality – suits, music, people,” said Mr Bennett in an interview in 2010. “It’s all the same. My suits are very expensive, but they never go out of style and I can keep them for 20 years.”
