THE EXECUTIVE LOOK: How To Get It, How To Keep It

The proprietor of The Custom Shop Shirtmakers--""44 stores coast-to-coast""--explains, flashily, how to be discreetly well assembled. ""Wear two plains, but only one fancy"" (usually, a plain suit and a patterned shirt or tie). ""Wear a base color""--your suit--""with an accent color."" Wear a dark suit with a light shirt and tie, or vice versa. And--top priority for Levitt--fit your shirt collar ""to four dimensions, instead of the usual two""; i.e., collar back-height and front-height, not just collar size and style. The book is fitted out with photos of celebrities projecting the wrong image (Henry Ford II as a ""racketeer"") and wearing variously fitted collars (""only Sadat""--pictured with Begin and Carter--""has a good shirtmaker""). It's also filled out with personalia--Levitt's first bumbling days in business, how he combines custom-fitting and -cutting with assembly-line production to undercut the usual custom prices (the Shops' hallmark--and an interesting entrepreneurship angle), the proclivities of his famous customers and friends. There are pointers, too, on assembling a business-shirt wardrobe, selecting a suit, etc. The self-promotion and snob appeal are so blatant as to be almost ingratiating--and the man who does as Levitt tells him, will indeed look innocuously or impeccably well turned-out (depending on how much money he has to spend on clothes). If chutzpah and hype can put anything over (almost anything at all), this shouldn't want for takers.