Tea at the Savoy

The Perfect Gentleman: The Pursuit of Timeless Elegance and Style in London (James Sherwood)

From the publisher:

'In an age of globalization with fashion trends that change by the day, the quality and workmanship of the great British luxury brands endure and flourish like never before. Valued for their craftsmanship, superlative quality, exclusivity, and the status they confer on their owners, these “heritage houses” have been synonymous with the finest production for hundreds of years.

This lavish publication celebrates the gentleman’s search for the perfect sartorial detail or the ideal accessory. It features six historical chapters, from the Regency period to the present, each of which presents classic British marques, including shoemakers, jewelers, shirt and tie makers, cloth makers, perfumers, hatters, and vintners. The final chapter showcases the new generation of designer-artisans who are redefining notions of quality and handwork in the era of globalization and digital technologies. A reference section presents the London gentleman’s social world, from the shopping arcade (Burlington) to hotels (The Savoy) and the member’s clubs and antiquarians in between.'

Invasion of the Euro Sloane

I admit it. I feel for the English. Their country has been deconstructed and destroyed. Their nation, re-defined. English culture has been fatally infected by Americanisation. The political system is infested with Judeo-Scottish bolsheviks. The upper classes are being replaced by European and Middle Eastern wealth. The English working class is being ethnically cleansed by imported Africans, Asians, and assorted third world scum. And now news from my old stomping grounds in London suggest the Sloane Ranger has been displaced by the Euro Sloane. WTF?! Where will it end? The time for a Nationalist liberation movement is now. This is an excerpt from the London Evening Standard:

The Chelsea Sloane is severely under threat. The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea was once the almost exclusive habitat of the urban British upper classes, but now the Alice-band, pashmina and pump brigade is facing extinction, and its place is being taken by a far more cosmopolitan crowd.

The Euro-Sloane has invaded SW3 - sweeping up from Cheyne Walk and on to Knightsbridge, modernising the restaurant menus, sanitising the bathrooms and occupying the flats where the Spencers and Lord Sebastian Flytes used to live.

Brideshead accents, meanwhile, have been elbowed out along the Fulham Road, confusing the new Italian, French and German incumbents who came to Chelsea hoping to practise their English.

Aleksander Borev, a Bulgarian doctor, has lived in SW3 for the past four years. "Kensington and Chelsea is about money," he says, "and money these days is fluid, so the people who are here are the people who are everywhere. Europeans, mostly."

But Peter York, author of The Sloane Ranger's Handbook [sic], and a keen anthropologist of the posh, compares the displacement of the upper classes to that of an indigenous people, forced off their land by loggers.

"The whole area is just utterly, utterly changed," he says. "The predominance of the City - the need to be more professional - has ruined Chelsea life. It has become much younger and smarter, and faster-paced."

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/lifestyle/article-24027221-invasion-of-the-euro-sloane.do

14

Sloane Rangers: Peter Jones

As you know, when I was much younger I shopped at Peter Jones in Sloane Square. In fact one of my first serious girlfriends would take us there most weekends. I could have sworn Laura Ashley goods were on her shopping list, but I am told Peter Jones did not sell LA. Oh well, my memory must be shot. Later on I became a regular for shirts, ties, and suits. The 134-year old department store has now been refurbished. The Daily Telegraph recently covered the introduction of the 'new' Peter Jones:

Peter Jones straddles Britain's swankiest fault line, where Belgravia meets Chelsea. Diana, Princess of Wales shopped here, as does - claim the regulars I spoke to recently - Prince Harry and his newish sister-in-law. According to Tony Wheeler, the department store's managing director, 40 per cent of its clientele lives within walking distance. Which - given this neighbourhood's affluence - explains why it is the strongest financial performer of all John Lewis stores. As well as being local, Peter Jones customers are loyal: from their first pair of prep-school shoes onwards, they shop here for life.

Last night, many of those customers were invited to a party thrown to celebrate the end of a 10-year, £100 million refurbishment. David Cameron donated one of his Prime Ministerial fountain pens for a charity auction, and a choir - from a local, Peter Jones-shod prep school - was due to provide the music. The final flourish of this spruce-up took place in the menswear department, which now boasts trendy Danish furniture in the changing rooms and a strong, Sloane-friendly collection of Ralph Lauren, Gant, Hackett, Tommy Hilfiger, Thomas Pink and Mayfair Richard James suits. To mark the occasion, the store has produced a special collection dedicated to its core customers, those fountain-paddling Sloane Rangers. It includes a red-white-and-blue trimmed Barbour, a paisley lined wax Cro'Jack jacket, Eton shirts, a Chelsea boot by Grenson and even - rather suspiciously - a "heritage Sloane Ranger eye-mask".

When Peter York and Ann Barr wrote their Sloane Ranger handbook, these items and their contemporary equivalents comprised a highly evolved localised dress code that quickly set apart the U from the non-U. For men, the key Sloane Ranger kit included a tweed jacket, "worn in all situations, particularly with jeans"; the covert coat, "a vital garment because only Sloanes wear it"; and a green, oiled Barbour that "smells of dogs". By wearing these garments, Sloanes could recognise their own kind, and never fall into conversation with ideologically suspect Hampstead intellectuals.

© Copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited 2010

Savile Row

J.Simons: Traditional American Clothes

If you can picture Covent Garden, London in the mid-1980s, you can easily imagine a group of young floppy-haired Barboured Sloanes, perhaps the worse for wear for drink, entering the J.Simons shop for a first look round.

The preppy window display along Russell Street was enticing enough, but the interior of the store was filled from bow to stern with a magnificent collection of tweed jackets, loafers, OCBDs, grey flannels, and multi-coloured jumpers. The two or three crop-haired, vaguely foreign-looking employee-chaps milling about inside the store were approachable and helpful. If the Jazz-pose and Negrophilia for which the shop was famous were on display, we certainly did not notice.

Much of the merchandise looked second-hand, and I'm sure some of it was. One impression that remains with me even today is that many of the clothing items, especially the jackets and trousers, seem to have been designed for men short of stature and small of limb.

Over the years J.Simons became our source for Sebago loafers, Sperry Topsiders, and the odd jumper. And that's about it. The rest of our kit we acquired elsewhere, from Blazer, Thomas Pink, Hackett, Boden, Gieves & Hawkes, Barbour, Façonnable, Polo, or second-hand musty shite picked up at Camden and Kensington Markets. Sam Walker in Covent Garden offered for a time a large selection of authentic clothing items, including retro leather jackets, blazers, and cravats in glass cases in the cellar.

The J.Simons boutique, one soon realised, was in a particularly odd position, but one that made a bit of sense. Representing Ivy Style in the UK, it was an English interpretation of American collegiate style which in turn itself was derived directly from English sartorial traditions. All roads lead back to England. There's no getting past it. And rightly so.