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" Last Tuesday, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds released Push the Sky Away, Cave&amp;#039;s twentieth album in 34 years, if you include albums with his side project Grinderman and his legendary early-&amp;#039;80s goth band The Birthday Party. And that&amp;#039;s not counting his robust catalog of soundtrack work for theater and film, a box set&amp;#039;s worth of one-off tracks (including a number of duets with some of pop&amp;#039;s sultrier female stars), and the handful of novels that he&amp;#039;s written. Cave&amp;#039;s immense oeuvre is a monument to the idea of finding your thing and doing it to death (even if your personal thing isn&amp;#039;t particularly commercially accessible), but even his formidable reputation for prolificacy is overshadowed by his status as a fashion icon. He&amp;#039;s long been considered one of the best dressed men in rock &amp;#039;n&amp;#039; roll, and while his songs more frequently than not center around sordid, desperate characters, he&amp;#039;s rarely been spotted looking anything less than perfectly put-together, even when his own lifestyle veered towards the intensely dissolute. His trademark blend of high-end tailoring and gutter-level sleaze has inspired countless scuzzy rockers to put on a suit and comb their hair. Here are some of the most important lessons that Cave has taught us about getting dressed:      Develop a look, then stick with it until it becomes your signature. From all available evidence, Nick Cave hasn&amp;#039;t left the house in anything less than a suit \u2014 or at least a button-down and a nice pair of pants \u2014 in several decades. When people think of Nick Cave, they picture a man in a dark, well-tailored suit, tieless, with the top buttons of his shirt undone and his hair slicked back, because this is how Nick Cave dresses all of the time, even when he&amp;#039;s not on stage. Like his music, his style is completely unaffected by fads and trends, so you&amp;#039;ll never see a photo of Cave during a hip-hop phase, trying out a preppy look, or anything of the sort. He&amp;#039;s also a good example of the fact that, even with a structured signature style, you can still have plenty of room to mess around. Case in point: Now that he&amp;#039;s in his mid-50s and his hair&amp;#039;s starting to thin, he&amp;#039;s begun dressing as if Neil Diamond had a little brother who happened to be a mid-level mafioso.      Simple is better... A white shirt with a dark suit is about as elemental as men&amp;#039;s fashion gets, and about half the time you see Cave, that&amp;#039;s what he&amp;#039;s wearing. He doesn&amp;#039;t mess with the formula either. You&amp;#039;ll never see him wearing a deconstructed take on the suit, or a suit matched with (ugh) a graphic tee. It&amp;#039;s just a nicely made suit, paired up with a nicely made shirt \u2014 and it looks good every time he wears it.      \u2026But don&amp;#039;t be afraid to wear a statement piece. Look at that big-ass ring on his right hand. It&amp;#039;s definitely ostentatious, and probably tacky, redolent of gangsters, corrupt businessmen, and swingers. The classic dark suit is his look&amp;#039;s foundation, but the addition of this little nugget of vulgarity (and a little goes a very long way) makes the whole thing crackle.      Sweat the small stuff. Look at how the sleeves of his shirt are rolled up a few inches above his elbow, an entire roll past where most men would naturally stop. There&amp;#039;s no way this was an accident. At some point Cave must have figured out that that extra roll did something to elevate his sleeves-rolled-up look beyond where it would have been had he stopped at the elbow (which it does), and the next time he rolled up his sleeves (and probably every time after), that&amp;#039;s what he did. He&amp;#039;s particular. You should be too.      Make your look you \u2014 only more so. Cave&amp;#039;s built a career on his ability to evoke an aura of intensely tawdry sexuality, and with his side project Grinderman, he ditches his normally romantic interpretation of it for an approach that&amp;#039;s got all the sentimentality of an overexposed Polaroid of someone&amp;#039;s junk. (Sample lyric: &amp;quot;Well my baby calls me the Loch Ness Monster / Two great big humps and then I&amp;#039;m gone.&amp;quot;) So it makes sense that he&amp;#039;d grow a mustache that looks less &amp;quot;internationally respected transgressive erotic poet,&amp;quot; and more &amp;quot;creepy second cousin whose web browser history you hope you never see.&amp;quot;      There&amp;#039;s not really a particular lesson here except for maybe, &amp;quot;If you ever find yourself in the position of being a rock star, then you should definitely grow the biggest rat&amp;#039;s nest hairdo possible and then be super rude to earnest television hosts.&amp;quot; We just wanted to post that magnificent hair. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/style/mens-fashion/a19822/nick-cave-style-lessons-022113/?src=rss>