Cambridge Analytica aside, I’m not a fan of Mark Zuckerberg‘s suit, shirt and tie. The tie especially. Inspired by those deliberately low-rent shirt-and-tie combos worn by Rodney Dangerfield in the ’80s? It’s all part of a general theory I’ve been developing about Millennials being the worst-dressed generation in the history of Western Civilization. Those hand-me-down Goodwill shirts and baseball caps, those dreary T-shirts and grotesque shorts they wear in the warm months, those ghastly white-soled sneakers.

I’m thinking of an old Howard Hawks story about Lauren Bacall. Hawks was interested in her for a film in the mid ’40s (probably To Have or Have Not) but told her she had to lower her voice, that she’d be more interesting if she sounded sultry and smoky. So Bacall went away and came back and her voice was just what Hawks wanted. Then he told her to stop smiling all the time and to maybe insult a man every now and then. She later told him that she ran into Clark Gable at a party and said to him in that cool, low-down way of hers, “Where’d you get that tie?” Gable said, “Oh, some Beverly Hills haberdash…why do you wanna know?” And Bacall said, “So I can tell my friends not to go there.”