Why choose?

The Sartorialist asks: Who had more style?

Cary Grant?

He didn’t cheat like Fred Astaire who created all kinds of innovations in his legendary collaboration with his Savile Row tailors Anderson & Sheppard or Kilgour, French & Stanbury to facilitate his incomparable movements on the dance floor.

Some of Astaire’s innovations were ridiculously pretentious like the time he tied a scarf instead of a belt around his pants, a substitution that was supposed to make his clothes less constricting. Cary Grant just wore clothes that fit.

Fred Astaire was a one-dimensional talent, a dandy dancer, a leggy technician with a lot of skill, and even more discipline. His girlishly lithe figure made it easier for him to defy gravity than a man of Grant’s more manly size.

or Fred Astaire?

There is more a sense of studied nonchalance about Astaire. Grant looked elegant in white tie and tails, but Astaire looked elegant and comfortable. He wore them like they were pajamas and a tux as though it were a part of his everyday routine, rather than borrowed from some Prussian general. It wasn’t supposed to look perfect, it was supposed to look thrown together in a perfectly natural way. Of course, it wasn’t anything of the sort. It’s what Castiglione in The Book of the Courtier defined as “sprezzatura”, a studied casualness that hides itself in purposeful eccentricity.

'It makes us happy just to look at him'

How Archie Leach became Cary Grant. He'd been in 20 movies before he became a star, Benjamin Schwarz, writes.

In middle age, Grant would write that in his youth he had lacked "daring and abandon," as well as "confidence and the courage to enjoy life." But now he abruptly came into his own. With his contract soon to expire at Paramount, he resolved to choose his own roles and shape his own career. In one of the gutsiest gambits in Hollywood history, he broke from the studio system, becoming the first freelance star in the modern era. He soon made Topper, a flat, "sophisticated" trifle, but one that made oodles of money and displayed Grant's heretofore unrevealed feel for light comedy. That same year, though, he also made The Awful Truth -- and seemingly from nowhere the Cary Grant persona gloriously appeared, fully formed. All at once there was the detached, distracted wit; the knowing charm; the arch self-mockery; the bemused awareness of his audience, with whom he was sharing a joke (a quality that made him simultaneously cool and warm); the perfectly timed stylized comedic movements—the cocked head, the double takes. And, not least, the good-natured ease combined with a genius for pitiless teasing (see the hilarious, similarly agonizing interrogations, in The Awful Truth and three years later in His Girl Friday, to which Grant's character subjects his former wife and her suitor -- the latter played on both occasions by that brilliant stooge Ralph Bellamy -- regarding their anticipated provincial home life).

See also Cary Grant's suit, about the remarkable outfit that Grant wore in North by Northwest.