Golden Globes 2014: Cooper, McConaughey among best-dressed men

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Bradley Cooper, our vote for best-dressed man of the night, wore a black Tom Ford peak-lapel tuxedo, white evening shirt, black bow tie, pocket square and evening shoes. (Jason Merritt / Getty Images)

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A standout -- for his swagger as well as his suit -- Matthew McConaughey took to the stage to accept his award in a forest green one-button, peak-lapel three-piece tuxedo by Dolce & Gabbana. (Jason Merritt / Getty Images)

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Mark Ruffalo was a sartorial standout in a John Varvatos Collection three-piece, two-button, peak-lapel tuxedo in brown and gray, white dress shirt, bow tie and Richards dress shoes. (Jason Merritt / Getty Images)

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Christoph Waltz, two-time Golden Globes winner, wore a black, two-button kid mohair tuxedo with a white silk smoking shirt, a black silk faille bow tie and lace-up evening shoes, all by Prada. His mustache gets our vote for tonsorial flourish of the evening. (John Shearer / Invision/AP)

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“Wolf of Wall Street’s” Leonardo DiCaprio was prowling the red carpet in an Armani tuxedo -- with signs of a mouth beard growing in. (Jordan Strauss / Invision/AP)

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One of the evening’s tone-on-tone-on-tone-deaf fashion fails, comedian Jim Carrey wore a John Varvatos Collection black tuxedo, black dress shirt, bow tie and dress shoes. (Kevin Winter / Getty Images)

By Adam Tschorn

Jan. 13, 2014 3:04 PM PT

The eternal challenge -- at least for guys who play by the rules of the red carpet -- is how to be sartorial standouts in a sea of tuxedos. The opening salvo in the awards show derby, Sunday night’s Golden Globes, found a few fellows standing head and shoulders above the rest. Among those who managed to show the penguin suit who’s boss:

Bradley Cooper

We can’t really put our finger on what made Cooper the cream of the tuxedo-clad crop. Maybe it was because the last time we saw him he was on the big screen in “American Hustle” in full so-bad-it’s-good ‘70s regalia. Or perhaps it’s because it wasn’t any one thing but every little thing he got right, from the fit of the jacket to the amount of shirtsleeve showing at the cuff. Of course the black, peak-lapel Tom Ford tuxedo (Cooper actually wore head-to-toe TF) didn’t hurt matters any. Classic. Timeless. Perfection.

Matthew McConaughey

It takes some serious swagger to pull off a Dolce & Gabbana three-piece, one-button, peak-lapel tuxedo -- in forest green velvet no less. But McConaughey showed he had that in spades Sunday night. When he took to the stage to accept his award for actor in a drama, McConaughey came across as smooth and unruffled as the texture of his tux.

Mark Ruffalo

Ruffalo, one of the award ceremony’s presenters, was a perfect example of how a guy can stand out from the crowd without sticking out like a sore thumb, choosing a John Varvatos collection three-piece, two-button, peak-lapel tuxedo in brown and gray with a broken-weave texture so subtle you almost don’t notice it at first. (Compare that with Jim Carrey’s tone-on-tone-on-tone Varvatos ensemble that made it look like the comedian was wearing a tuxedo folded out of a single sheet of black origami paper.)

Facial hair follies

As a facial-hair aficionado, I’m always intrigued by what the menfolk on the awards-show circuit choose to do when it comes to putting their best face forward (my colleague Melissa Magsaysay has already mused on the manifestation of the “man bun”). And while it’s hard to tell what’s a result of being groomed for an upcoming role (literally) or simply in-between jobs laissez-faire, there was some noteworthy facial fuzz in evidence including Leonardo Dicaprio (sporting a mouth beard), Michael Douglas (part pirate beard, part bristle-cone pine) and Chris Pine, whose beard was a paragon of pogonic perfection.

But there was something about Christoph Waltz’s mustache that made all other beards and mustaches in the room pale in comparison. The two-time Golden Globe winner, who presented the man-bunned Jared Leto with his Golden Globe for supporting actor, was kitted out in a Prada kid mohair tuxedo accessorized with a strip of lip spinach that stretched to the corners of his mouth where they turned down ever so slightly.

We don’t know (and frankly don’t care) if it’s for a new role, to cover a cold sore or merely grooming whimsy that gave rise to the ‘stache but it adds a dash of panache -- not to mention a certain vaudevillian flair -- to the Austrian actor.

It’s the kind of mustache that could arm-wrestle the beard belonging to Dos Equis’ “most interesting man in the world” and win handily.

And it gets my vote for tonsorial flourish of the night.

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