Excerpted from theatlantic.com:
If one were to recast The Rockford Files, as Universal Pictures is intending to do, would the Frat Pack actor Vince Vaughn seem the wisest choice to play Jim Rockford, the character James Garner inhabited with such sly intelligence and bruised suavity? Universal apparently thinks so.
One can say many things about the talents of Vaughn, and were Universal embarking on a bit of polyester parody—remaking, say, Tony Rome, among the least of the neo-noirs—Vaughn’s gift for sending up low pop would be just so. But to aim low in this case is to miss the deceptive grace that Garner brought to the original, and prompts a bigger question: Whatever happened to male charm—not just our appreciation of it, or our idea of it, but the thing itself?
I can't understand the sentences bolded above:
How can a sentence start with were like that? Besides that, it's overall structure and meaning is unclear to me, like "a bit of polyester parody Vaughn's gift for...", what's that?
Polyester is a kind of synthetic plastic, what is polyester parody?