There’s something about Miami, the badly-dressed epicenter of the Northern Hemisphere, that seems to affect even the most sensible of men. Take Glenn O’Brien, the weathered and usually well-put together “Style Guy” of GQ fame.

In town this week for the round of shindigs, O’Brien apparently left his dress sense in his other pants.»

Photographed by our fearless lensman, Patrick McMullan.

Yes, we know what you’re thinking: What the hell is he doing here? Certainly no-one in their right mind would call larger-than-life art world provocateur Julian Schnabel well dressed, but you’ve got to admit he’s got a lot of style—inimitable and even unenviable as it might be. When he first started wearing pajamas in public we were more than a bit skeptical; but when he threw some cashmere on top we started to see the light.

He not only owns this look (like anyone else wanted it), but he’s really making the mad genius thing work.

Photographed by our fearless lensman, Patrick McMullan.

The restaurants bearing the Mr. Chow moniker are known as much for their haute-chinois cuisine and glittering clientele as their sophisticated, understated elegance. Small wonder then that the real Mr. Chow embodies the latter perfectly.

We’ve never had the pleasure of dining at the original London location, opened in 1968, but the super-stylish New York outpost on E. 57th St. is one of our favorite restaurants in the world. The man behind it all, Michael Chow, is also an actor of note and an art collector extraordinaire whose portrait has been painted by David Hockney and Jean-Michel Basquiat, among others.

More on Mr. Chow»

Photographed by our fearless lensman, Patrick McMullan.

Looking through the past week’s party pix we were struck by this classic triptych of extremely influential characters. At an opening of an exhibition of photographs by Mikhail Baryshnikov the other night, the coolest dude to ever don a pair of ballet tights was flanked by fellow icons Julian Schnabel and Lou Reed.

We’d watch that show»

Photographed by our fearless lensman, Patrick McMullan.

When it first came out in 1973, Lou Reed’s tragic rock opera Berlindisappointed fans who’d been expecting an upbeat follow-up to his glam opus Transformer. Left to gather dust, it took twenty years for critical opinion to come around and finally dub it a masterwork.

Larger-than-life artist/auteur Julian Schnabel had, of course, always been a believer»

Shorts. The final frontier.

Men.style is chiming in today on the growing threat shorts pose to today’s workforce. Previous salvos have come from Gawker, and (our favorite) David Colman of the NYT.

Of course, what men.style only hints at is that, for Gawker and Condé Nast (and we suspect the fashion desk at the Times), office clothing takes on a somewhat different meaning. After all, how can they expect old Coles to write trend pieces about cutoffs when he’s can’t wear them himself? That kind of trendiness is what they pay him for. The same goes for anyone else who happens to be in the trend business—leading to the dreaded Schnabel effect—while the poor folks in the rest of the office are stuck in white button-ups for the rest of their lives.

As the old saying goes, there are three kinds of tie on Wall Street: solid color ties, diagonally striped ties, and ties that set your career back five years.

We shudder to think what they’d make of a shorts-suit.