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Last of the Mohicans & Cooper’s Fashion Tips

Today is the 190th anniversary of the publication of one of America’s first great adventure novels — “The Last of the Mohicans,” by James Fennimore Cooper. When I was a young man, Cooper also gave me an excuse to dress in “a careless, slovenly manner.”

The book has produced a number of film versions in both English and German. The most recent, and probably the most famous is the 1992 version starring Daniel

Day-Lewis as Hawkeye, aka Natty Bumpo, as shown here in a poster for the movie.

I’m equally fond of another Cooper book featuring Bumpo: “The Deerslayer.” It was published 15 years after “The Last of the Mohicans,” but was actually a prequel. The events described in “The Deerslayer” occurred almost 20 years earlier.

I also freely admit that my approach to men’s fashion comes straight from one of Cooper’s characters in “The Deerslayer”: Hurry Harry. According to the book, Harry’s height “exceeded six-feet four” and he was “unusually well-proportioned.” Since I am 6-feet-4, and when I was young and athletic I could claim to be at least relatively well-proportioned, he seemed like a good role model.

Although his buddy, Natty Bumpo, was a bit of a frontier dandy in “The Deerslayer,” Harry was the opposite. “Hurry Harry, either from constitutional recklessness or from a secret consciousness how little his appearance required artificial aids, wore everything in a careless, slovenly manner,” Cooper wrote, “as if he felt a noble scorn for the trifling accessories of dress and ornaments.”

“A noble scorn” for dressing well. Hurry Harry has always been my role model when it comes to fashion. That’s my excuse for the way I dress and I’m sticking to it.

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bob silbernagel

bob silbernagel

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