Elvis may have been more about bling and booze in his later years, but early on—according to Bernard Lansky, self-proclaimed clothier to the King—his style was always “clean as Ajax.” A hard thing to pull off as a muddy Mississippi white boy who popularized a defiantly black way of dressing—pegged pants, hi-boy collars, immaculate hair, and the plaid jacket that Lansky tailored for Elvis’s star-turning appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. The King set the sartorial tone for Jerry Lee Lewis and a host of other Memphis rock ’n’ roll legends, all of whom made Lansky’s men’s shop the place to go if you were an up-and-coming musician. And though he may have gone Vegas in later years, Elvis ultimately returned to his roots. “I picked the white linen suit, blue shirt, and white tie he was buried in,” says Lansky, one of the honorary pallbearers at Presley’s funeral. “It was sharp.” • A knit tie will never go out of style. The Beatles wore them when they got off the plane at JFK (black ones, with square-cut bottoms), and you can still buy any number of versions today.

Left: Nick Nolte's Thomas Jefferson costume, c. 1780s. Right: Greta Scacchi's gown, c.1780s. The man's suit is cut wrong for the 1780s; the long waistcoat's v-cut at the bottom is from the 1760s and earlier. For the 1780s, the waistcoat should have been shorter and the jacket more loose-fitting. Greta's dress, for France in the 1780s, would probably have been made out of linen, or like material, and the bodice would have been higher or entirely covered by a white wrap.