The aisles at most men’s trade shows are not usually filled with laughter. But that changed last weekend when Alec Baldwin made a surprise appearance at the Chicago Collective to visit the Douglas Hayward booth at the show.
The brand created by the late Savile Row tailor is being introduced to the American market by Arnold Brant Silverstone and his partners. Baldwin is a longtime fan of the line and volunteered to help promote the launch.
Sitting in the Douglas Hayward booth on the second day of the show, Baldwin stopped Louisiana retailer Ted Silver as he strolled by in a sport coat with pink stripes sipping a soda from a pink can.
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“Does your soda always match your jacket?” Baldwin asked. Silver just nodded and said he was in menswear so of course it did.
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The actor, who was pictured in the center of a promotional piece from the brand wearing a Douglas Hayward tuxedo alongside Steve McQueen, Roger Moore, Clint Eastwood and others, said he was sure the brand would swap him out for whatever celebrity they worked with next. “It’ll be Christian Bale soon,” he said.
Who knows if Bale is a clotheshorse, but Baldwin certainly is. He’s been a fan of the brand since he was in Belfast shooting a movie several years ago.
“It was a little cooler than I thought up there in the spring,” he recalled. “They’ve got one men’s shop and they had this wonderful jacket — it was Douglas Hayward. It was beautiful but it wasn’t my size.” He asked the shop owner if he could get one that would fit but was told the company was most likely out of business.
Baldwin didn’t give up and continued to search for the Douglas Hayward brand owners for months before he finally found the licensee.
“And I said, ‘Fellas, I love it,’” he said, which led to a years-long conversation about “doing something to relaunch a very beautiful high-end suit.”
Baldwin was well acquainted with beautiful high-end suits from his days on “30 Rock.” “I was in a suit and tie every day for seven years,” he said. “Tom Broecker was our wardrobe designer as well as for SNL for years. Thanks to him, I probably have 200 suits, 300 shirts from Zegna, Brooks Brothers and others.
“I wore a suit and tie at work and at the end of the day, in my wardrobe, I would meet friends at a Manhattan restaurant dressed pretty well. I got hooked. When the show ended, I started dressing like I was coming to your house to clean your pool and I wanted to get dressed again and wear the uniform of the Chinese Communist Party.”
It’s good that Baldwin can still find humor in his life considering the tragic accidental October 2021 on-set shooting death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins and wounding of director Joel Souza during the filming of his film “Rust.” Baldwin was brought to trial but a judge dismissed the involuntary manslaughter case against him last month.
Without mentioning the case specifically, Baldwin said: “I just had an enormous burden lifted off of my situation, which is great.” It also cleared the way for Baldwin, his wife and seven children to start working on a reality show on TLC.
“I’m just really looking to do something and wash all of this off,” he said. “It’s been a tough time for us but I’m going to go back to work slowly.”
It’s a bonus that this job allows him to stay home because it’s being filmed at his house in East Hampton, N.Y. “That’s great because for me, work was always traveling, always going to Europe and all over the United States. I’ve been everywhere in this country. And now that I have seven kids — I’m 66 years old and have a 1 1/2-year-old baby so my wife and I are always striving to stay home.”
In October though, he’s going to hit the road again, filming a movie in Italy. But this time, he’s going to bring the whole clan with him — at least for a couple of weeks.
Although it will require taking the older children out of school, he’s OK with that. “We need an adventure,” he said.
For Baldwin, family is the most important thing to him, he said. It’s also the reason he won’t reprise his role as Donald Trump on “Saturday Night Live.”
“That killed my weekends,” he said. “In 2016, we had three kids, now we have seven, so I don’t see myself doing that crazy crap until midnight on Saturday nights.”