08 October 2010
07 October 2010
06 October 2010
Sensation (Arthur Rimbaud)
Picoté par les blés, fouler l'herbe menue:
Rêveur, j'en sentirai la fraîcheur à mes pieds.
Je laisserai le vent baigner ma tête nue.
Je ne parlerai pas, je ne penserai rien,
Mais l'amour infini me montera dans l'âme;
Et j'irai loin, bien loin, comme un bohémien,
Par la Nature, heureux--comme avec une femme.
Well-Heeled: LA versus NYC
A rivalry imagined rather than experienced. Both cities occupy top billing in the 'pop' culture and both are known for attracting social-climbers, provincials, rubes, frauds, and aspiring sharks.
But there is an important difference that immediately distinguishes itself to those interested in details of style.
The latest issue of The Rake (Issue 11 Volume 5) contains a brief article on my favourite bespoke shoe maker, Cleverley, in which is repeated the old saying:
How do you tell the difference between a man from NYC and a fellow from LA?
The New Yorker has laces in his shoes.
How amusing. Although it is true I am not from LA and have actually lived in both this area and NYC for an equal number of years, I am close enough to LA today to feel an obligation to respond to this jibe.
Is there some truth in it? Yes, I think so. Certainly in my business and social dealings here in Southern California I notice that most of the other chaps wear loafers and other slip-on shoes.
And when I analyse my own collection, the numbers indicate that currently 67% of my shoes are of the slip-on variety. This number is set to increase, as I gradually replace my older oxfords and brogues with newly-acquired bespoke and MTO slip-on shoes.
Do you prefer loafers and slip-ons? If so, say it loud and proud!
After all, the New Yorker, living in the dangerous crime-infested environment for which his city is famous, has a very good reason to stick to laces.
The laces deter urban street thugs from stealing his shoes.
05 October 2010
04 October 2010
03 October 2010
Monsignor Gilbey
I soon learnt that although Alfred had been educated at Beaumont he was not a Jesuit, nor was he the worldly snob wrongly imagined by chippy people who did not know him. In fact, underneath the exquisite exterior and the continental courtesy (his mother was Spanish) could be found a surprisingly humble priest far removed from the pompous grandee of popular mythology. Like many another young fogey, I was captivated by his charm, friendliness, hunting humour and old-fashioned good manners. He was exceptionally kind and generous, and he had a great gift for imparting confidence to insecure young men. In his contribution to this book, Nicholas Lorriman perceptively comments upon Gilbey's 'attentiveness to the individual, so that many people felt they had a special place in his affections'.
...
The principal pleasure of the book is its celebration of Alfred Gilbey's eccentricity. While some of the acolytes twitter on about the Monsignor's foibles in a slightly off-putting manner (shades of the Oxford barber slavering over Lord Sebastian in Brideshead Revisited), Professor Watkin treats them with just the right degree of sympathetic detachment. There are richly comic descriptions of Alfred obsessively rearranging the biscuit basket at the Traveller's; ceremoniously creating 'a rich mosaic' in packing his suitcase; and elaborately ritualising his toilet to the extent that he indulged in a 'second levée', which took up most of the monsignorial morning. His retiring at night was, we learn, considerably prolonged by the process in which he washed the eight half-crowns that, in pre-decimal days, he always carried with him. He would apparently go through his small change 'selecting images of Kings George V and VI in preference to those of Elizabeth II whose face on the coinage he described at this time, with affection not disdain, as that of "a pert girl"'.'
Excerpt from The Spectator review of Alfred Gilbey: A Memoir by Some Friends (2001)
02 October 2010
01 October 2010
Franco: Trad Style
26 September 2010
Northlander
For the observant outsider, it is a spectacle. That social discourse has been cheapened and confused is most evident in the content on the interwebs, which becomes more meaningless by the hour. In the constant squabbles, the neverending brand marketing, self-promotion, and one-upmanship, modern people resemble nothing less than prison inmates screaming at the concrete walls and hurling handfuls of piss and shit at one another through the bars, cackling and groaning down the cold, half-lit hallways. Anyone can see they are not happy. They are just waiting to be put out of their misery.
Like ripples from a pond-dropped stone, the repurcussions from events of the last year have subsided as the months proceed. It takes time. It is an ongoing process. The key is to press on and stay involved. As you may have heard, my calendar has been marked by a series of obligations professional and social. Yachting activities have occupied an increasing portion of my time this season, not least because sailing takes the mind off other things.
Be assured, I know who I am and where I have been, and therefore, if the moment presents itself, I will love you and respect you and accept you for who you are. It is only those who lack a sense of identity and heritage, who are bereft of self-knowledge, who are the most unforgiving of the other and seek its eradication everywhere.
Abroad beckons. In preparation for the days ahead I have cropped my hair according to the traditional Prussian configuration--#1.5 on the back and sides and #3 on top--and encouraged a beard which even now at this early stage is showing flecks of blonde and red. My face is tanned from yachting days and my blue Nordic eyes, like deep clean sapphires. As always, I am ready for blood.
Arcadia Of My Youth
"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..."Phantom F. Harlock II, Arcadia Of My Youth (1982)
25 September 2010
24 September 2010
23 September 2010
Ogilvy Style
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.At the time, he said, he knew "nothing about marketing and had never written any copy." And yet he later managed to build the company he founded, Ogilvy & Mather, into one of the world's most successful advertising firms.
He was a master copywriter and his campaigns for Hathaway Shirts ("The man in the Hathaway shirt") and Schweppes ("Schweppervescence") are classics. His books on advertising are still studied today.
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.In the photograph (above), lifted from the cover of his autobiography Blood, Brains, & Beer, Ogilvy is pictured wearing a Brooks Brothers khaki suit with a 3/2 roll and a repp tie. He holds a pair of tortoiseshell spectacles. In other photographs from the period he is depicted wearing a tweed jacket and smoking a pipe.
Pay attention to his haircut: his hair does not creep forward in sideburn form, nor does it cover his ears. Study the photographs and note the way he parts his hair on the right, widely recognised as a mark of creative genius.
22 September 2010
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.
21 September 2010
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