Just how many suits does JJ Lee wear? Creative consultant for a design firm, trained architect, style columnist for The Vancouver Sun, host of the "Fashion Monday" segment on CBC Radio One's On the Coast, apprentice tailor and personal fashion designer, photography hobbyist, and now, an award winning first-time author.

Published last fall, his memoir, The Measure of a Man, has since been nominated for the Governor General's Literary Award for Non-Fiction, remained on Amazon.ca's Top 10 list for biography and memoir in 2011, and was selected last week as one of five finalists (out of an initial 115!) for the Charles Taylor Prize for Non-Fiction.

The Measure of a Man is mostly about how style and fashion infiltrate every facet of our lives. Every inch of his book is adorned with his creative stamp - from the book jacket, which is an image of a suit jacket edged by the author's personal measuring tape, to the author's own pen and ink sketches printed throughout the book to illustrate a particular style of suit or a historical figure's fashion choices, to the tiny coat-hanger icons that separate text within chapters.

The cover art also clues us into the heart of the book. In a final chapter, Lee gets into a philosophical discussion of the function of suit breast pockets. What men keep in their inner breast pockets, says Lee, "mirrors what we cherish in our hearts." The exterior pocket, while still near to the heart, is "more like a man's front porch...We put there things we do not mind for our neighbours to see." In the suit pocket on the cover is a childhood picture of John Hing Foon Lee, Lee's father, a central figure in the book. The portrait Lee bravely displays for all his neighbours to see is a painful relationship with a father who was proud, selfish, reckless, emotionally distant with his children, and, in his darkest moments, physically violent towards his wife. Though his father was also a generous, sentimental, and ambitious man, he failed to see what his family truly needed from him: his presence. And so we learn of Lee's desire to apprentice with old Bill and Jack Wong at Modernize Tailors in Vancouver's Chinatown to be fueled not only by his love for the craft but also by his search, even in his mid-thirties, for a father-figure.

The Measure of a Man is no style-by-numbers how-to guide for the sartorially-minded man. Episodes from men's fashion history are amusingly presented and exhaustively researched, taking us from Greek and Roman sculpture, to medieval knights in shining suits of armour, right through to James Bond and Armani. Lee seamlessly weaves together elements of painful personal experience, fashion history, and his modern-day quest to learn the art of tailoring and find a place for himself in the world. More than a style guide for men, or even a social history of the suit, The Measure of a Man is an intimate and thoughtful rumination on what it means to be a son, a father, and a man.

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Genie is a managing editor for Schema Magazine and self-appointed seeker-out of Schema-worthy events in Vancouver. She is a certified bookworm with a special fondness for Shakespeare and CanLit. You can follow her on Twitter @geniemak.