After eight fantastic years, tonight the curtain finally closes on Mad Men – with the last episode of the award-winning series set to air on US televisions this evening.
To honour the occasion, and what surely must be considered one of the greatest triumphs in recent American television, Esquire spoke to 10 experts about why Don Draper and co changed the very way in which we lived…
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1| Style
“Mad Men was a game changer. Don Draper instantly became the visual shorthand for cool. He was a universally acceptable ‘man crush’ before that was even a meme. When I got married in 2009, Don’s was the look I was channeling. Crucially, it is easy for the man on the street to adopt. Roger Sterling is actually the snappier dresser but his pocket square origami is too tricksy. And because Don is such an alpha male, the average man could claim him as a style hero without embarrassment. After the show aired, men started dressing up when they went out by wearing pocket squares and tie slides and parting their hair at the sides. Suit lapels, shirt collars and ties became skinnier. The entire silhouette of men’s tailoring changed. Mad Men was the catalyst.”
DAN ROOKWOOD US Editor, MR PORTER.COM
2| Hair
“When Mad Men aired in 2007 it reinforced that shift towards classic styling. Prior to this there was messy bed head – short back and sides and texturised, messy on top – vintage haircuts were the antithesis to this. They were groomed and neat. Men’s trends last quite a while but this whole trend has lasted a very long time. The Don Draper haircut on a man is so classic, which might also explain that longevity. It makes the face look really handsome, square jawed and masculine. Also, it’s not a difficult look to pull off. It suits most men. We’ve also seen a massive rise in people buying combs. That’s the key to the Don Draper look as well. The trend changed from using your hands to using a comb.”
ALEX GLOVER Master Barber, Murdock London,
3| Design
Every generation looks at its recent past in a different way and I think Mad Men has done for the Sixties what the previous generation did for the Victorians. Something that looks out of date suddenly looks pretty cool. In the 1960s Victorian style went from being a joke to being something taken seriously; the way the Rolling Stones started wearing 19th century army uniforms. They took the look but they didn’t go for the morality of the Victorians. In the same way, our generation has taken the look of the Sixties but doesn’t go in for the sexism or smoking at work. There is now a major market in mid-century antiques, the early works of Charles Eame and Robin and Lucienne Day. Mad Men has helped take that work from the enthusiast world into a wider one. We don’t how much Mad Men has played in [re establishing] the coolness of the period but it’s there in the colours you see in Topshop; if you go into major stores you will see stuff from that period, which is extraordinary. Mad Men has probably had a lot to do with condensing a lot of things in that direction.”
DEYAN SUDJIC Director of the Design Museum London
4| Drinks
“You’ve seen a real rise in the popularity of dark drinks: in American and British whiskys and in cocktails like the Old Fashioned that Don drinks in the show. The popularity of the long, fruity cocktails of the late 1990s to 2000s has fallen away and been replaced with those shorter drinks with a little bit more punch to them. Apart from the show, there’s also the fact that in a time of austerity you can’t necessarily go out and afford to have six drinks so with these shorter, harder drinks you can have three and still get the same buzz. Behind the bar, we’re a lot more aware of presentation. It’s got to aesthetically look good as well as taste good. Mad Men has certainly made everyone sharpen themselves up.”
MYLES DAVIES Group Bar Manager in Hix, hixrestaurants.co.uk
5| Dining
“There was an overlap between Mad Men and the broader dining experience that has evolved. Mad Men takes a new style of going out to extremes; that sense of going somewhere and having more than just a reverential attitude to food. And rather than that French style of dining, it’s moved into a more American casual style. You look at Mad Men’s locations. They have that old school glamour; they’re not bling but they are glamorous in their own way. Restaurants that opened 10 years ago tended to feel of the moment but restaurants opening now tend to feel like they have been here for a much longer time. People like that feeling of longevity and that’s a very Mad Men trend.”
WILL BECKETT, co owner of Hawksmoor British steakhouse, thehawksmoor.com
6| Work
“Mad Men is contemporary office politics done in the style of 1960s. What you see in people who get to the top is that they are good at being Machiavellian and are psychopathic. There are people in the Sterling Cooper & Partners office who are not like that; who did have a conscience and weren’t just purely governed by self-interest. But Don Draper will always prevail in that he doesn’t have empathy. The best office role model is Peggy Olson. She succeeds in part – a rare phenomenon – by being good at her job. We’re all told that’s how to get on but the reality is you have to be good at office politics too, which Draper is.”
OLIVER JAMES psychologist, Oliver James: Office Politics (Vermilion) is out now
7| The Ad Industry
“How real is it? Some bits are spot on; others wildly absurd. Yes people drank more back then, but the idea of someone walking into your office at 11am and pouring a whisky would have been seen as outrageous. What remains true? Remembering, it’s not what you say but how you say it. Its timeless style has captured our imagination. It’s dated but doesn’t date. Never was the suit so appealing. My only real criticism is why is the creative output of the agency so bad? This was the moment when NY dominated the creative industries, but not with work like Don’s.”
SIR JOHN HEGARTY Founding partner of Bartle, Bogle Hegarty advertising agency
8| Television
“I don’t think Mad Men has changed television really. Glorious TV serials, period and contemporary, were being made before it and more will be after. But its quality and its ambition (telling the story of the latter part of the 21st century through the prism of one era) have rarely been matched. The major change it made to TV is that it gave AMC the confidence to compete with HBO and hence commission Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead, among others. There’s very little ‘action’ in Mad Men. We see all emotional sides of Don, Pete, Roger and co in a way we don’t often with men on TV (done well, at least).”
WILL DEAN Editor Independent Magazine and former Mad Men blogger
9| Women
“Don’s relationships with women at work do feel contemporary, in the sense that they are largely respectful. He found, mentored and promoted Peggy. He was the only partner who vetoed Joan sleeping with a client in order to secure the big deal. Don’s personal relationship with Megan hasn’t played out as expected. She rejected the decent job he gave her to pursue her own dreams. He is being left behind – ironically, the young wife is ageing him. In many ways she represents what he thinks he wants, but can’t accept. For all his progressiveness with his female colleagues (though actually, only two of them, so let’s not get carried away), he still struggles with the meeting of modernity and tradition.”
REBECCA NICHOLSON Columnist on The Guardian newspaper
10| Being a man
Don Draper is, in many ways, what our culture deems the ideal man. He’s stylish, powerful and sexually successful. He works in a creative job in which he’s constantly told he’s a genius and in which he refuses to be shackled by a contract. He’s a totally free agent who is, apparently, in charge of his own destiny. But scratch the surface and the Draper character is quickly revealed to be an empty façade. Firstly, he’s always been Dick Whitman faking it as Don. And secondly, because, I think, he has intentionally been written with very little interior life.
He’s blank. And ultimately that’s why Mad Men has resonated so profoundly with the men who watch it: it reveals all the intensely desirable things that they can never live up to, to be an impossible, empty, meaningless fiction.”
DR JAMIE HAKIM Lecturer in Media Studies, School of Film, Television and Media Studies at University of East Anglia, UK