Like his singing voice, Tony Bennett’s personal style was supple, straightforward and sure of itself.
He resisted the temptation to change his approach to music when rock overtook the pop charts, and he largely stayed away from many sartorial trends that came and went during his seven decades in show business, wisely sticking with tuxedos and smartly tailored suits, many of them from the Italian fashion brand Brioni. For more casual moments, he went with slacks and a blazer, sometimes with a handsome dark turtleneck in place of a button-down shirt and tie.
Paradoxically enough, by sticking with the style that allowed him to feel most himself when it came to both music and fashion, Mr. Bennett managed to avoid the trap of becoming associated too strongly with any one era.
In recent decades, when men’s fashion magazines celebrated the ring-a-ding-ding style of the 1950s and early 1960s in backward-looking fashion spreads, they tended to focus on Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and other dyed-in-the-wool members of the Rat Pack.
And as the other singers of Mr. Bennett’s generation became subjects of retro-chic fascination, he was still playing theaters, nightclubs and awards shows with a new batch of stars including Stevie Wonder, k.d. lang, Elvis Costello, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Bono, Sting, Celine Dion, John Legend, Amy Winehouse and Lady Gaga.
“The only thing that lasts is quality — suits, music, people,” Mr. Bennett said in a 2010 interview. “It’s all the same. My suits are very expensive but they never go out of fashion, and I can keep them for up to two decades.”
