The man on a mission to bring 1970s sexiness back in style

Telegraph

18-04-2025

Yves Saint Laurent, hair coiffed and as reed-thin as his Gitane cigarette, lighting up the dance-floor at Paris's Le Sept nightclub as his yin and yang female familiars Betty Catroux and Loulou de la Falaise flick their hair alongside, as potent as his Opium fragrance. The dandyish figure of Jacques de Bascher, sometime lover of both Saint Laurent and Karl Lagerfeld, immaculate in a white three-piece suit, weaving his devastating magic around the hearts of the continental beau monde across the Côte d'Azur. Halston in leathers, slipping through the throngs at Studio 54, trailed by Mick, Bianca and a cloud of scandal. Alain Delon, all lethal cheekbones and feline agility in Purple Noon, or the leonine deadliness of Helmut Berger looking just about the most bewitching example of masculinity you ever did see, on screen and off.
Welcome to the world of male seduction as distilled so eloquently by Ben Cobb, a long-time editor and now designer. These references are prime examples of what he evocatively terms the 'Homme Fatale', taking these ingredients and shaking, stirring and pouring them into a collection that he's designed with the Scandinavian house Tiger of Sweden. Consider it a chilled martini in menswear form. 'The 1970s was such a fascinating moment for men expressing themselves sartorially, and it's something I've always been interested in,' says Cobb, who has worked as editor-in-chief of cult titles such as Another Man and Love magazine and most recently helmed ES Magazine.
It helps that Mr Cobb happens to look as if he's stepped straight from the smoky drinking dens of Maxim's circa 1976 or the atmospheric film noir stills of Helmut Newton; at 51, he's all dark curls of hair, cheekbones that could shear a shard of ice into your cinzano at Club 55 and some thoroughly excellent suits – strong of shoulder, narrow of hip, with flared trousers and Cuban heels. It's an aesthetic that he's translated into his capsule range for the Swedish brand, a joint venture that's been going since 2022.
' The 1970s aesthetic is fantastic for men because it's sexy but also masculine; there's a lot of structure there in terms of tailoring, but it was an era that allowed movement too – mainly for all that dancing,' says Cobb, who I've happened to see shimmy his snake hips across dance floors from Paris to Berlin.
That sentiment's echoed in the sanguine fluidity of the trousers, the exacting precision of the suiting and those seductive, silken shirts, designed to be undone to the navel as the sultry night wears on. 'Nineteen-seventies tailoring actually harks back to other decadent eras, such as the 1920s and 30s, that time between the wars when there was this fatalistic sense of hedonism,' says Cobb, who as a youngster growing up in London was inspired by the films of Helmut Berger and Alain Delon, and by the exceptional vintage suiting from the 1970s that offered a dressy alternative to the 90s grunge of the time.
'It was a time when men really embraced peacockery,' says Cobb, 'but unlike the 1960s, there was a feeling of refinement and louche, elegant sophistication.' Of course, certain sartorial scholars can cite the moments when men's style was more exuberant and expressive, from the era of Beau Brummell to the dauphins of the Court of Versailles, with Macaronis and Maharajas along the way. But for Cobb, who was born in 1974, the decade defined his formative years thanks to early second-hand store and flea market hauls as he explored his look in his teens; 'you could pick up a great jacket for next to nothing that was built to last and had a defined shape that was off that time,' he says.
So it's very much not the rather drab and dreary side of 1970s Britain that some of us might recall; blackouts, Fray Bentos and Arthur Scargill in his donkey jacket. 'I've always preferred fantasy to realism,' says Cobb with a wry, moustached (of course) smile. Hold the Vesta boil-in-the-bag meals, thank you very much. It's something more ephemeral and richly evocative, and also a welcome antidote to current dress-down trends.
Who is his ultimate Homme Fatale? 'If I had to pin it on one person, it would definitely be Helmut Berger,' says Cobb, whose Instagram account is a veritable homage to the late bisexual Austrian actor prone to dark and dangerous characters, and whose private life was as turmoiled, fatalistic and troubled as his on-screen incarnations. 'The Homme Fatale's a man of drama and disaster, as well as incredible taste. There's a danger to him, alongside that elegant sophistication.'
A silk neck scarf alongside a denim shirt undone down to here, with a side of renegade roguishness? 'Something like that,' says Cobb. 'It's about living deliciously.'