Source: Park & Bond
Date: June 6, 2012
The star of ‘Magic Mike’ and ‘White Collar’ is passing on his love of blue blazers and the perfectly knotted tie.
We think of Park & Bond as the Intersection of Men & Style. To celebrate Father’s Day, we’re exploring a more perilous crossroads, that of fatherhood & style. The New York dads featured here—many of whom are pictured with their offspring—manage to navigate it with elegance, individuality, and ease. From stylish leading man (and father of three!) Matt Bomer, to the brilliant photographer Ben Watts, to the legendary journalist Gay Talese, these gents prove that being a dad doesn’t have to mean wearing dad jeans.
To add to the Father’s Day-themed fun, we asked five of our favorite neckwear designers to reinvent the tired old Father’s Day tie for a new generation of stylish dads, and we are donating the proceeds to the Boys Club of New York. You can learn more about the ties—and pick one up for yourself or the father in your life—right here. Or, you can see them in action on several of the dapper dads featured here—Mr. Bomer included.
With the omnipresent ads for White Collar, his USA show about a rakish but well-dressed con man who crosses over to the other side to help the feds, it’s arguable that Matt Bomer has done as much as any man in recent memory to raise the stock of the four-in-hand tie knot. It’s definitely proven influential to his son. “Our oldest has a fascination with ties,” Bomer says. “We’ll be going to a family dinner and he’ll come downstairs in a pair of shorts, a T-shirt, and a blue blazer with a tie. We let him rock that.” He and husband Simon Halls, a Hollywood publicist who counts Tom Ford among his clientele, are the parents to three: a seven-year-old and four-year-old twins. (What’s that like? “Busy,” he says. “With three boys, you’re constantly running around.”)
Bomer and his father bonded over sports—as a teenager, he played baseball, football, soccer, and tennis; swam, dove, and ran track—and sports have forged a bond between Bomer and his own son, too. (He calls the first Forty Niners game he took his oldest to, “One of the highlights of my life.”) He’s come to emulate his father in more ways than he might have expected. “One of the amazing things that happens when you’re a parent is you find yourself sounding exactly like your parents did. Not only sounding like them, but saying the things that you hated hearing when you were a kid,” he laughs. They diverge a bit on matters of personal style: the elder Bomer “really buys into the mythos of being a Texan” and “has moments with the ten-gallon hat,” while the younger cites Alain Delon and Marcello Mastroianni as influences.
As White Collar moves into its fourth season, Bomer is preparing for the release of his next film, Steven Soderbergh’s Magic Mike, in which he plays an exotic dancer. Not exactly part of the traditional Texas mythos, and maybe not destined to influence his kids’ dinner attire either. But more than likely to do for ab workouts what Bomer’s already done for the necktie.