Celebrated menswear designer and author Joseph Abboud says his interest in clothes and fashion was initially inspired by the movies, which continue to influence him today.

Born in Boston in 1950, Abboud comes from a Catholic Lebanese family; his mother was a seamstress and his grandfather at one point owned Australia's largest men's tailored-clothing company. Abboud graduated from the University of Massachusetts-Boston in 1972 and studied at the Sorbonne in Paris. He joined Ralph Lauren in 1981, eventually becoming associate director of menswear design, and launched his own label five years later.

In 1988, with GFT (Gruppo Finanziario Tessile) USA, Abboud launched J A Apparel. After having sold his trademarks and name to J A Apparel, he left that company in 2005. He later launched a new line called Jaz, created a line for Lord & Taylor department store and became chief creative officer of HMX, owner of the Hart Schaffner Marx and Hickey Freeman brands. Abboud, whose 2004 book Threads: My Life Behind the Seams in the High-Stakes World of Fashion details his involvement in the world of American fashion, remains a key figure of that scene.

As TCM Guest Programmer, Abboud chooses four black-and-white movies from the 1940s, that fabulous period when leading film stars were bigger than life and impeccably groomed and dressed. Of all the iconic leading men of that time, Abboud tells TCM host Robert Osborne, he has the most affection for Errol Flynn, the star of They Died with Their Boots On (1941). He remembers Flynn as "a noble, gallant and very handsome actor. As a kid I wanted to be him!"

Abboud finds Alfred Hitchcock's moody suspense film Rebecca (1940) fascinating partly because "You don't often think of Laurence Olivier as the leading man, but he is so dashing in this movie." Abboud considers Cary Grant, star of Hitchcock's romantic thriller Notorious (1946) "the epitome of men's style - his masculinity, his confidence, the way he wears clothes." In the wartime romance Casablanca (1942), which Abboud considers "the perfect movie," Humphrey Bogart may play a "flawed hero," but his image (including that famous white dinner jacket) is "still infused with elegance and style."

By Roger Fristoe