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.
"I want to return to Arcadia...Heiligenstadt, my home, whose forests and lakes are compared to that ancient Greek paradise...the place where my youth will forever run through green fields...the homeland of the Germanic pirate-knight Harlock clan. At the end of a journey, all my kinsmen think of their homeland. We hear the voice of Arcadia's pirate-knight spirit calling..."
After leaving Oxford without taking a degree, David Ogilvy (1911-1999) worked as (in his own words) "a cook, a salesman, a diplomatist and a farmer" before going into the advertising business at age 38.
Ogilvy represents the true advertising tradition, not the Hollywood version portrayed in the current American televisual programme Mad Men, a silly fictionalised account written by the very Noo Yawk hipsters whose fathers and grandfathers displaced the Madison Avenue elite in the first place.
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. 
"We can ask and ask but we can't have again what once seemed ours for ever--the way things looked, that church alone in the fields, a bed on a belfry floor, a remembered voice, the touch of a hand, a loved face. They've gone and you can only wait for the pain to pass." 
"Quand on est seul, on est en libre d’imaginer tout ce qu’on veut, on rêve à sa guise, on se sent bien, sans doute parce que la pensée n’est pas polluée par celle des autres, car la pollution commence là."
The Guards, being older than most, are more idiosyncratic than most. An American major, serving temporarily with the Blues and Royals in Detmold in West Germany, was amazed at the number of times the officers appeared to change their uniforms throughout the day. "Officers sometimes spend hours discussing what they are going to wear next day," a Grenadier confirmed in Berlin. 
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