A romantic restaurant six years ago. Thin and nervous, recovering from the worst illness of my life. On one side of us, a fireplace roars and crackles, making up for the bunch of lawbros talking structured finance to our other side. And then suddenly, I hear it, faux-naively touching my heartstrings like its own accordion keys, slow wistful notes common to 1960s and early 1970s French films, the kind that I would stumble on in late-night zapping through cable… So common as to be almost anonymous and thus exotic. The sort of channel-surfing that felt like waking dreams and alcohol-fuelled glimpses of other realities, where other mores applied.
I knew this would stay with me in my ears and in my head, so was glad the staff were able to tell me what I was hearing, the theme to Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris lightly reworked by Gotan Project.
Last Tango in Paris, infamous now not for its eroticism but for the exploitation of its star Maria Schneider at the hands, and other body parts and a stick of butter, of director Bernardo Bertolucci and costar Marlon Brando.
Is it ever acceptable to separate what charms us from the otherwise problematic? I’ve been thinking about that again reading that Banana Republic is now marketing vintage items from its very different 1980s incarnation, back before its longtime owners, Gap, decided to rein it in. Back when its name, Banana Republic, had any relevance to its image and its merchandise.
Launched in Mill Valley, California in the late 1970s,Banana Republic once called itself a “travel and safari clothing company,” using a wonderfully constructed catalog narrative of exploration and exoticism to sell Brady fishing bags, so-called expatriate jackets and trousers, and arrays of travel books. It was closer to Seinfeld’s J. Peterman than J. Peterman itself, which started around the same time. Like Peterman, that old Banana Republic circulated thousands of catalogs with hand-drawn illustrations, rather than photographs, of its merchandise, accompanied by the seductive imagery of persuasive, whimsical prose recounting the founders’ exploits in Burma, Australia and elsewhere. The early Banana Republic shops featured life-size plastic megafauna like giraffes and staff whose jackets called them “guides”, with the shop logo of double bananas flanking a decidedly developing-nation-style star: the national seal, as it were, of Banana Republic.
To judge by small ads in old New Yorkers, many odd little ventures tried to sell clothes with atmosphere and wordy descriptions. But none did it more successfully than Banana Republic, which even launched (and quickly folded) its own high-powered travel magazine with serious contributions from international journalists famous not for fluff but insightful writing and photography.
In recent years, a devoted Instagram account, Abandoned Republic, has tracked down merchandise, memorabilia and personal memories from that era. And now, at least momentarily, so does Banana Republic corporate, in search of a more interesting brand identity than its last 30 years of “Gap, but a bit more upscale.”
Banana Republic corporate reconnecting with its past means current passing through a name, an attitude and a choice of merchandise that are necessarily differently freighted in today’s context. For the last three decades the name Banana Republic has been divorced from any signifier, a handful of syllables that might as well be an ideogram for “somewhat nicer khakis.” But what was a banana republic? In 1979, it must have sounded like a quirky choice of name, connoting quaint, backward, exotic autocracy – an elsewhere demarcated from the reader’s presumed safe, rule-of-law-governed, developed Northern Hemisphere, Western homeland. But this consciously chosen corporate name ignores the horrific, nearly incomprehensible political and ecological domination American corporations exerted on and in various South American countries to create and exploit enormous fruit plantations. O. Henry coining the term was one effect of such circumstances. This was by no means a forgivably distant phenomenon: barely two decades before Banana Republic’s own founding, one American fruit company lobbied the U.S. government into overturning a democratically elected government in Guatemala in favor of an unstable, bloodthirsty tyrant who safeguarded the company’s gigantic profits.
A similar lack of awareness stains those cute catalogs, which uncritically quote (for example) Henry Stanley, inarguably one of history’s greatest monsters, for the commercialization of safari fashions influenced by colonial nostalgia. Which was quite fashionable in the 1980s: Out of Africa, White Mischief, even claptrap like King Solomon’s Mines all came out in Banana Republic’s heyday, popular at least as much for their elegant, dashing depictions of ruling-classes as for their narratives. It’s rather surprising that the early Banana Republic didn’t sell the deeply freighted pith helmet, although it did sell – and the new BR vintage shop has briskly resold –many, many surplus Israeli Defense Force shoulder bags.
Safari fashions, particularly against the narrative and cultural context of early Banana Republic media and marketing, risk not just whitewashing but bleaching and sanitizing centuries of exploitation in all its forms. That conjunction of imagery localizes readers in the shoes of the privileged and the heavily armed, gives those forerunners all the benefits of a reputation laundered and lightened of venality, predation, bloodthirstiness without connection to any agency, risking turning the wearers into walking unironic homages to them. Context refracts resonance.
And with the resale shop an homage to that homage, what are we to make of this? It seeks a rebrand, to stand for something more interesting, now that it’s been reminded that retail, like the daydreamed safari landscape of BR’s old marketing, too is red in tooth and claw.
Like my consternation thinking about Last Tango in Paris, perhaps we can reproportion concern. The Banana Republic resale shop, although much heralded in fashion media, can only be a limited phenomenon (dedicated to the exploitation of the #basic consumer, rather than the Global South), limited by the relative rarity of existing 1980s BR clothing and by the marketing needs of maintaining exclusivity. And marketed identity lasts until the next thing. We, consumers, must exit comforting and entertaining dreamworlds and be aware, of what we are wearing, of its significance, whether we are shopping at Banana Republic or elsewhere, whether the song playing in the background will haunt us romantically or psychically.
There’s a fantastic new podcast Kill James Bond! providing a critical eye on the tired old cliché and media it inspired, from the Ennio Morricone-scored, Neil Connery-starring Operation Kid Brother to apparent #wifeguy Michel Hazanavicius’ revisionist French takes on the Bond also-ran OSS 117. Something clicked hearing the hosts discuss the joy the hero of the latter, Jean Dujardin’s entitled, thoughtless Hubert Bonisseur de la Bath, takes in simple moments and simple experiences. Joys typically filled with double entendres, like having his biscuit buttered or getting oiled up, as well as those that provided novel thrills for a 1950s character, such as taking an airplane… or, for a dandy, getting a chance to wear his new alpaca tuxedo.
Anyone reading this has probably secretly had similar moments, moments that you can’t share with a partner, of finding the perfect occasion, the perfect excuse for being able to display a fanciful indulgence. And, along with other fanciful details of old 1950s and 1960s spy movies like rear-projected driving scenes and blue-filtered day-for-nights, the makers of OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies brought back the old tradition of having the hero’s suits made by a reputable tailor. Sean Connery and Patrick McGoohan had Savile Row tailor Anthony Sinclair, Cary Grant had a slew of Internet bores attempting to decipher a maker’s label in North by Northwest, and Dujardin’s spy had Jo Kergoat, renowned Paris tailor and protégé of none other than André Bardot, a founding member of the Groupe des Cinq of French custom tailors, the circle of prestigious 1950s tailors who shaped what French tailoring is today.
What is today? As tailored by Kergoat (who made 47 suits for the movie), Dujardin is a perfect French parody of Sean Connery, immaculately dressed in elegant detail – far better, for instance, than Daniel Craig ever has been as James Bond. Dujardin has reprised the role twice, once in 2009’s OSS 117: Lost in Rio, and now in OSS 117: Red Alert in Black Africa, which is slated to come out around the same time as the oft-delayed Bond film No Time to Die. In the meantime, during the long uncertainty of the pandemic, Jo Kergoat, who has previously raved that “everything’s going to hell and soon there won’t be a single real tailor in Paris," has helped fulfill his own prophecy and hung up his shears, at 91.
Hazanavicius and Dujardin have worked on other projects together, including the prominently Oscar-ed The Artist. Another period piece, it also featured the unusual attention to detail of French bespoke crafted clothing for Dujardin, this time from the custom tailor and shirtmaker at Lanvin, the oldest continuously existing French fashion house. Such a step was coherent with Dujardin’s role, a silent film star confronted with the new age of Hollywood talkies, in an age where studio systems practically required stars to maintain the same care in their off-camera appearance as in their highly orchestrated films. Not only was Lanvin one of Paris’ oldest couture houses, but with its men’s custom business founded in 1926 (in magnificent Art Deco premises decorated by Armand-Albert Rateau), it was one of the old guard of established French tailors, mostly forgotten names like Cristiani, Larsen, Knize and Creed (yes, the overhyped perfumers of today were once custom tailors to none other than the Shah of Iran, among others). An old guard against whom Bardot’s Groupe des Cinq had rebelled around the time that the action in the first OSS 117 movie takes place, because those five tailors (Socrate, Waltener, Camps, Bardot and di Nota) had wanted to show more progressive designs, back when prestigious custom tailors could set fashion because they dressed men of fashion, rather than being the isolated, crumbling redoubts they are today. And Lanvin itself lost its own such redoubt, after just under a century as one of the best, tailor and shirtmaker in the world, in the last year after the actual people responsible for such craft fled to the relative safety of Francesco Smalto… a tailoring house founded, ironically, by one of the alumni of the Groupe des Cinq.
It cannot be too coincidental that those two absurdly well-dressed, well-tailored roles make Dujardin confront periods of uncertain transition: his silent matinee idol facing the advent of films with sound and a whole new style of acting, and OSS 117, he who acts out all of the things 007 elides, like the need to carefully remove his custom suit jacket, shoes and cufflinks before jumping into bed with the femme fatale du jour, faced with the disintegration of colonial empires, of the illusion of France as a great power. In a way, Hubert Bonisseur de la Bath is Eurocentrism himself, forced to encounter other cultures as they shrug off imperialism (in the case of his first film, through the Suez crisis that destroyed British and French pretenses of power), as all of the absolutes that composed his worldview break down. So indeed the tailors and shirtmakers that made him. One can no longer take the joys of an alpaca tuxedo for granted, no matter how elegant one momentarily looked in it.
As I get older, it’s amusing to recognize that so many of the pithy quips and sayings I have derive from a small set of catchy past readings, however shallow my culture. Case in point: I thought of beginning this piece with “I’m a profane man,” a self-hating declaration inspired by my high school assignments in Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground (“I am a sick man... I am a spiteful man.”). One of the many ways in which I am profane occurs when I find something, some article of clothing or tool that suits me so perfectly and improves my quality of my life that I’m tempted to use Jude Law’s slightly unnerving ejaculation as Dickie Greenleaf in The Talented Mr Ripley, “I could f**k this I love it so much.”
Dickie was getting passionate about his refrigerator, a new purchase that allowed him to have cold beer in southern Italy. While I’m lucky enough to live in an age and place where refrigeration is taken for granted, I find myself echoing that sentiment in my head when, say, I find a pair of jeans with the right cut, denim and fit, or, more recently, the ideal pair of slippers – durable, beautiful, tactile, reasonable, perfectly fitting and insanely comfortable.
I’m not one of those people who insists everyone take off his or her shoes at the house. I take mine off, though, since it’s generally more comfortable to walk around without shoes on, and in summer far cooler to do so. As a teenager, I used to wear Chinese slippers, which had the advantage of being dirt cheap and available in precise sizes. Of course, they wore out quickly, and because I kept shoving my foot in, the backs got trodden down. After all, I’m not fanatical enough to use a shoe horn to put slippers on. I found a delightful pair of pointy suede babouches at the Entreprises Artisanales in Marrakech, the government-sponsored crafts market outside the souk, which were both handsome and reasonably well made. After those wore out I tried to replace them remotely by ordering a similar-looking pair from a merchant online, but they came apart almost immediately. As those gave up the ghost I tried suede slippers from one of my Paris haberdashers, which were light but rather old-mannish, and expensive for what they were. I finally dug through my #steez stash and found glorious relief in velvet furlane, otherwise known as gondolier’s slippers.
The story goes that furlane originally were made by convicts on one of the islands of the Venetian lagoons using what otherwise would have been refuse: discarded bicycle tires were made into the soles, while the uppers were made out of offcuts of the velvets and brocades Venice had become famous for producing. The front ends in a little curved point up the instep like a Persian slipper, and the upper is bordered in grosgrain, while the edge of the sole is trimmed with a handsome roped braid. I do query at what point these became the footwear for gondoliers, since they’ve been plying their trade in the lagoon for centuries, while the bicycle’s been with us for less than two. Historicity aside, they fit wonderfully and come in precise sizes, while the cloth forgivingly grips any width of foot. While they’re also made with backs, I prefer mine backless, resembling a far sleeker version of the custom cloth slippers that John Lobb of St James will make up custom for around a thousand pounds, which come with the ineluctable odor of burning money. Even though not custom, my backless furlane still fit well (none of the heel-slapping that comes with slippers that are too long in back, and cost a few percent of Lobb’s delusional price, meaning they’re relatively affordable, even if I am now scouting replacements to set aside.
I’ve been surprised to find almost no sources for them online. At best, one or two sites ask potential customers to email to see what’s available. Even Etsy, the world’s handicrafts gar(b)age sale, turned up empty. How can it sell handmade Spider-Man panties (don’t ask) and not have furlane? I’ve thus started asking my Svengalis to consider selling them. Watch this space… til I profane it again.
ALTERNATIVE STYLE ICON: JIMMY WANG YU IN THE MAN FROM HONG KONG
by Réginald-Jérôme de Mans
There are things we always want to reclaim from our past, even from its most confused, bittersweet moments. In my case, the thoughtful moments driving home late at night down Santa Monica Boulevard decades ago from an essay-writing extension class at UCLA. With the top down on my coincidentally Australian-built convertible (a deathtrap, a future girlfriend would call it, and refuse to get in), those summer evenings seemed flower-scented, ripe with potential that would go wasted, still and quiet and beautiful in a city that was not mine.
I was taking this after-work class after feeling like I was losing my marbles, wanting to find a way to collect myself after college. College had beaten any confidence in my ability to write for personal expression out of me. I would not rediscover that in that class, in fact not for decades until blogs like No Man Walks Alone reached out to me and I could process and piece back together parts of myself, those disjointed, uncalm, uncollected pieces of myself. At the time, I was young and unmoored, and the station at the lower end of the dial I’d listen to on those drives back reflected that feeling of unreality and detachment. It played everything, ironically or not, everything from the Laverne and Shirley theme to what would have at the time been cutting-edge electronica. And one-hit wonder Jigsaw’s strange “Sky High”, whose refrain “You’ve blown it all sky high” was sung altogether too casually for someone to be expressing the upheaval of their entire life.
I was pleased to rediscover the song playing as the main theme to 1975’s The Man From Hong Kong, whose star Jimmy Wang Yu is today’s Alternative Style Icon. The song’s strangely flip attitude towards destruction works perfectly in this bizarre, bizarrely interesting movie, which ends on the climax of Wang Yu blowing former James Bond George Lazenby and an entire floor of Lazenby’s apartment building to kingdom come. After setting Lazenby (yes, Lazenby himself, in a practical effect that actually did leave him with burns) on fire by kicking him into his open-plan 1970s fireplace…
Lazenby had blown his own career sky high by walking away from a multi-picture Bond film deal to instead star in 1971’s Universal Soldier, a confounding mashup of Easy Rider and The Dogs of War whose chief point of interest is that feminist writer Germaine Greer plays a minor role. Lazenby claims that his friend Bruce Lee was set to star with him in The Man From Hong Kong until Bruce met his mysterious end at the hands of either a Dim Mak death touch or a medication allergy. Jimmy Wang Yu stepped into the role and Lee’s vacant shoes and acquits himself well in all respects except the unfair and unwinnable one of being in the shadow of a deceased legend, deceased so very much larger than life.
The Man From Hong Kong showed how exploitation films could be strangely liberating, indeed subversive. It was a so-called Ozploitation film by dint of its Australian production, going so far as to have its first scene a fight atop sacred landmark Ayers Rock, where a future Mad Max actor actually beats legendary martial artist and fight choreographer Sammo Hung. It also exploited many other period trends: the Kung Fu, international thriller, and loose cannon cop fads, with Wang Yu a polished Hong Kong police inspector able to charm very white Australian beauties out of their hang-gliding pants and bikinis. Nearly a half century later, moviemaking still is rightfully criticized for emasculating Asian men, yet in this 1970s exploitation film an Asian man got to carry out the old seduction tropes of the regressive, lily-white British spy movie, even if (as Alice Caldwell-Kelly has observed) the characters do engage in racist banter about it.
This is very much a Jimmy Wang Yu showcase. It’s certainly not Lazenby’s fits that stand out in this movie. As my friend Matt Spaiser of The Suits of James Bond has pointed out, Lazenby has to dress the part of a playboy bigwig villain, and wears old playboy clichés like gold-buttoned blazers with draggy 1970s long collars and fat ties, all in combination with the long sideburns and Zapata ‘stache that make him look like a more butch Peter Wyngarde. Wang Yu, instead, makes a deep blue his theme color, first in a rollneck with light salt-and-pepper tweed jacket in his suave arrival scenes in Australia, then as the color of the jumpsuit he wears in a viciously violent car chase and final fight where, as agent of the most chaotic good, he smashes through the windows of Laz’s penthouse apartment. That jumpsuit could have been iconic, were it not eclipsed by the yellow jumpsuit that would turn up in Bruce’s boss fights in Game of Death, released infamously long after Lee had died. In the shadow of the legend, shadows of legend. In contrast, Wang Yu’s dark green corduroy suit that he wears for his first confrontation with Lazenby is iconic and uneclipsed. Despite its 1970s exaggerations of style and details, its material, color and dash are very much contemporary, corduroy being one of the casual materials in which suit designers are trying to lure us out, even if might wear a bit warm for hot girl summer or whatever the current name of this current uncertain, tentative summer is. Perhaps hang gliding should make a comeback, although not in Sydney airspace.
Uncertain and tentative, you do what you can to collect yourself, invest at the time in what you can of yourself, and decades later maybe, maybe, you get somewhere, even if you can never stop looking back.
As Troy McClure said about playing the human in a musical adaptation of Planet of the Apes, reviewing this book is “the role I was born to play!”
Simply entitled Richard James: Savile Row, this book commemorates the 25th anniversary in Savile Row of the fashion house and tailors of the same name. A read is somewhat disappointing, full of short essays by what amounts to a rather incestuous school of longtime Richard James fans in British media and entertainment, among them British GQ’s Dylan Jones and Richard’s most notorious client, Elton John.
Elton’s known as a voracious devotee – to not say addict – of his favorite outfitters over the decades, buying out entire shopfloors at times. His twenty-year devotion to Richard James is a key to understanding Richard James’ enormous if unrecognized positive influence on contemporary men’s clothing and British tailoring. Forty years ago Elton dressed head-to-toe in psychedelic Tommy Nutter, switching in the 1980s to over-the-top Gianni Versace glitz. Since the end of the 1990s, he’s evangelized Richard James.
Tommy Nutter, the last tailor-designer in Savile Row, dominated British men’s tailoring in the 1970s. Custom tailoring took a back seat to the cult of the ready-to-wear designer, mostly the Continentals: Pierre Cardin, then Armani and Versace. Nutter had a few isolated 1980s hits, like dressing the Joker in 1989’s Batman, before dying in 1992.
What had become of the British? 1980s attitudes towards luxury and clothing meant regression, selling an image of Britain as Raj, pith helmets, and gin among palm trees, not progress. Ralph Lauren did a much better job selling that ethos in his more expensive lines than any of the British could. Some tried; those of us of a certain age (me) remember seeing cashmere sweaters made in China sold in Bloomingdales under the label of Savile Row tailor Gieves & Hawkes, or blocky ready-to-wear suits at Barneys sold with the name of Savile Row tailor Kilgour, French & Stanbury, although made in Canada by Samuelson. An ersatz Britishness for export markets, an ersatz image and look created by ready-to-wear licensees with little input from the British tailors desperately trying to sell their names abroad.
Into this breach came Richard James. Like Nutter, James is categorically not a trained tailor. What he is, though, is an inspired designer who, since opening on Savile Row, has offered true custom tailoring as well as ready-to-wear in visionary designs. I remember the first Richard James items I noticed, beautiful belts and wallets of gorgeous quality hand stitched in England with contrasting linings in deeply saturated color. I still have one of those belts, in all its magnificence. What did they have to do with British custom tailoring? Nothing – and everything. For the first time a Savile Row name appeared to be doing something relevant, interesting and elegant – and doing it to the fullest extent and the last detail. Savile Row survives by its export markets and by the reputation its tailors have forged for beautiful items of a certain Britishness. No more uninspired licensed items that has as much to do with British elegance as a Sterling car (derided by Consumer Reports for “Industrial Revolution-era” English technology, remember those?). What Richard James has done is modernize British elegance from the creepy colonial-obsessed ethos that today only blinkered Brexiteer bluestockings and Internet edgelords cling to. Even the past James references uses other, more inspired touchstones of British greatness, including his bespoke offer (initially serviced by the Savile Row tailors Anthony J. Hewitt and James Levett before being brought in-house), but also ready-to-wear shirts in stripes that recalled the best of Swinging London; handmade ties whose lush, delicate patterns rivalled the best of midcentury Sulka or today’s Charvet; magnificently, decadently warm alpaca pile ‘teddy bear” coats originally created for 1920s motorists; astonishingly soft leather or suede jackets in the café racer style 1960s London Mods would have died for; and even the made-to-order cashmere socks with custom monograms Corgi used to make for defunct shops of yesteryear like the custom shirtmaker Beale & Inman. It was a vision of Britishness far, far from Lauren’s fantasies, a Britishness that admitted the turmoil of Ted Heath’s premiership, that added much-needed glamor after John Major’s greyness. And James reminded us what was wonderful about the British suit by invoking all that was dashing in its cut. Ready-to-wear suits were made in beautiful cloths from British mills like the impeccable Taylor & Lodge, in unexpectedly evocative colors and patterns: sharp mohair sharkskin, gorgeously patterned real Scottish or Irish tweeds or a French navy that was lighter than the normal shade; even rainbow chalkstripes on a sober dark ground. The cut was always tapered at the waist, double-vented, slant pocketed in the “hacking” style, a look espoused by Patrick Macnee’s subversively too-British John Steed in the 1960s. Richard’s linings were often boldly colorful, to remind us what could be playful about the suit, everything that 1980s pretention (clinging to all the trimmings of colonial oppression) had repressed.
Richard James the book shines in cataloguing those designs in beautiful detail. James really has been the best colorist in the business, as Jones termed him. Even more importantly, this book also shows how James has aced the tricky game of tennis without a net of innovating within the classic: in addition to recreating ruffle-fronted tuxedo shirts like those of George Lazenby’s louche Bond in 1969’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, James also invented tuxedo shirts whose fronts (instead of pleats or stiff waffle-weave Marcella) were hand-beaded by Hand & Lock, beaders and embroiderers to Her Majesty the Queen; Corgi (knitters and hosiers to the Prince of Wales) knitted thick, thick cashmere sweaters with hand-inlaid abstract intarsia designs; elegant cufflinks (always double-sided) recalled childhood marbles in the forms of hand-blown translucent glass or semiprecious banded agate (a real “Aggie”) or amber set in sterling silver; and even a travel bag that recalled the bags given away by Pan Am or Concorde in the early days of jet travel was rendered in ballistic nylon with reflective silver piping and brilliantly contrasting linings.
I’ve never owned a Richard James bespoke suit. I know that his ready-to-wear suits were disappointingly half-canvassed or fused, despite their wonderful materials. But they helped remind me that Savile Row could still be relevant, and that those tailors, despite past reputation, could be approachable and contemporary – and that has been my experience with the other tailors of Savile Row, including the impeccable, evocatively named Steed, whom I loved for their name before ever using them.
Every item with the Richard James name carried and carries the same visionary, whimsical design philosophy, a Britishness less fanciful and more romantic than Paul Smith’s, and far less caricatural and cynical than those of Ralph Lauren or Hackett. Socks, always made to a high-standard by Pantherella, are accented in amusing contrast colors or mad patterns. I have a number that are doing fine almost 20 years later. My Richard James Concorde bag has been a beloved, perfect gym bag for years, while his larger, tougher Japanese denim bag (trimmed in the best British bridle hide) is my go-to travel holdall no matter where on Earth I go. My beaded Richard James tux shirt is a prized piece of design genius, as is a magnificently waterproof raincoat made for him by Mackintosh in a beige twill that cunningly iridesces turquoise or orange from certain angles. For years I’ve searched for the same shade of gorgeous Thomas Mason turquoise twill cotton that an old Richard James shirt is in, but most of his materials are specially made for his designs; even the fine-gauge cotton knits that John Smedley or Peter Geeson created for him seemed to be in special colors and to his own patterns.
That wealth, that treasury of a vision and genius, tumbles out of Richard James’ new book, pictures that really are worth thousands of words and that speak for themselves about the importance of this designer’s contribution, reminding us that Savile Row, indeed British menswear itself, still had things of wonder to offer us.
“It’s STYLE not fashion!” enough of us have trumpeted, reflexively, defensively, guiltily, at surprised interlocutors who have confused our interest in clothes no one else wears with fashion. Fashion, we have told ourselves, is fleeting, style – as manifested in the continued and compulsive frittering of our wages on items with details only our parasocial internet peer groups care about – is eternal.
And against the frenetic unpredictability of fashion’s changes, even the twenty or so years I’ve pursued my personal style give me a fair claim to a sort of eternity. But no style has a permanence that allows it to exist completely outside of fashion. The esthetics of cutting-edge fashion can still filter over into pedantic classic menswear, literally shaping gentle changes those of us who cling to that grammar are seeing, as trousers are getting wider and baggier. And, more pointedly, every strange clothing subculture has its own particular fashions, and thus is subject to fashion’s strange bedevilments within their own frames of reference, like some spooky exotic particles.
My twenty years of being a clothes bore means I have endured the style wars. Twenty years ago, the foolhardy and conservative hailed the return of traditional menswear (suits, ties, nice shoes) as if Arthur himself had returned from Avalon (rather than Bryan Ferry on yet another tour). They did not realize that the look of traditional menswear, too, was now simply one of the many fads fashion cycles through, a temporary resurgence. (As I literally have too much invested in it and, thanks to high school, have ample experience living on the margins, I’ll keep wearing what I want anyway.)
The heyday of that trend took classic dressing to flamboyant extremes: fussily detailed pocket squares, vividly colored and patterned suits, and the freak explosion of a mannered little feature of a classic, if previously rare, shoe: the double monkstrap. This, readers, is the story of how I succumbed and overcame.
The monkstrap is a relatively uncommon design for closing shoes – laces and slip-ons are classic, and seven-year-olds everywhere are grateful to the inventor of the Velcro that closes their sneakers, but there’s always been a shoe in most classic shoemakers’ catalogs that closes instead with a leather strap that buckles like a belt to close your shoe. Like a belt, it also can be less forgiving in fit than closures that allow stretch (like elastic-sided slip-ons), or laces’ element of give. But two straps?
The double monk has been a specialty of the shoe brand John Lobb, a brand that is actually two separate companies, whose odd relationship is a complicated detail no one but the fellow esoteric bores we talk to gets right. Suffice to say, this style, invented about a century ago by William Lobb, at his family’s custom shoemaking operation in Paris, had become something of a cult classic in the years prior to the classic menswear fad. As even a cult of fops is not made only of the insanely wealthy and self-indulgent, what allowed this fussy, intricate design to become a classic was the ready-to-wear version John Lobb Paris had begun selling in the years following its acquisition by Hermès. (Hermès bought Lobb Paris in the early 1970s, kept its French custom shoemaking operations going and launched an English-made Lobb ready-to-wear line based on some of the most famous Lobb custom shoe designs. All the while Lobb London, solely a custom shoemaker operating out of a single shop in London’s West End, has continued separately.)
The benefit of a second strap to fasten a shoe is debatable. Its main attraction seems to be its novelty, and as a style it was relatively unusual for decades, perhaps because it’s hard to make a shoe pattern with two straps that fits comfortably, unless the shoe is made to fit a single person – the excellence of custom. And no matter how well made a ready-to-wear shoe is (and Lobb ready-to-wear is quite nice), there are limits to how well it can be made to fit an individual wearer.
Once classic menswear was indeed in fashion, the double monk was adopted by dandies, posers and happening fools alike, some of whom would even walk around with their double monks unbuckled for obvious, obnoxious sprezzatura, a superficial nonchalance that was no longer studied but copied from an Internet essay library. Lobb Paris ran with it, coming up with new styles of double monk shoes and making the double strap its attempt at a signature brand design, even offering what may be the ugliest briefcase ever made.
Lobb London stayed above it all. As a purely bespoke shoemaker, it makes whatever design a customer asks for, one pair at a time, although it has a vast catalog of samples for the customer’s inspiration. A literal catalog, I discovered, when I first began ordering shoes from Anthony Delos, the gifted custom shoemaker who had worked at John Lobb Paris’ custom shop, where institutional, trans-Channel, custom shoemaking memory ran deep and customers could consult the very same gigantic, luxurious catalog of samples. Among those custom shoe sample designs was a simple jodhpur boot – a buckled ankle-height boot – with a double strap closure. Those two short straps replace a single jodhpur strap that traditionally winds sinuously around the upper part of the boot, so they actually don’t look any more flamboyant than the normal design for that piece of footwear. And at last I, too, succumbed to the allure of the double monk, out of romanticism for the idea of a bootmaker trained in the Lobb custom tradition making them for me, out of the finest, softest suede he could find, and the sentimentality of a last order from a maker I considered a friend.
The result has endured, survived along with me the decline of the classic menswear trend and the devolution of the double monk into not only hideous briefcases, but even into triple-strapped mutant shoes and penny loafers whose very saddles have become double monk straps. To say nothing of the past year and change where I have worn only sneakers, but I am optimistic that the styles of that period, too, will evolve and pass.
A friend (why not? To paraphrase Rjmbaud, Réginald-Jérôme de Mans est un autre) writes: “Live to be a hundred, I’ll never forget it. In a cheesy import superstore, there it stood in all ridiculousness among the rattan furniture and foreign candy: Omar Khayyam Champagne. Yes, Omar the Tentmaker, who wrote the Rubaiyat a millennium ago, who now found his name on sparkling wine instead of sparkling verse. Nor, pedants, did the wine come from the Champagne region of France… or indeed from Khayyam’s native Khorasan province, Persia. Instead, small type on the label indicated the wine was a product of Maharashtra. Maharashtra, India, 1500 miles away and two countries away from where Khayyam lived and died, Maharashtra, the place my mother hailed from, and yet no other famous personage from anywhere closer had come to mind. Tentmaker in life, winemaker in death. Of Indian champagne.”
India is a large enough place to host the right pockets of soil and climate to make decent wine, even though neither my friend nor I dared buy Omar’s bubbly. I’ve looked for it in recent years hoping to make up for decades of curiosity without finding it again. South Asia is better known for its scotch: dutiful scion of empire, India is the world’s largest whisky market and produces almost half of all the whisky in the world, tending usually to suave blends, while Pakistan itself hosts a reputable single malt distillery. However, a trip to my liquor store a few years ago turned up another surprise: a squat bottle whose crude-looking label announced itself to be Old Monk rum, India’s favorite export.
Sentimental favorite though it be, this is rather far from the sophisticated sippers of Haiti, Venezuela and Nicaragua found in nice duty-frees (alongside vintage wines that may have passed through the kitchen of the dearly deported Rudy Kurniawan. It tastes warm, sweet, and distinctly of vanilla. Who is the monk and why is he venerable? Accounts aren’t clear, although the brand suggests it was inspired by the distillate contentment of. Benedictine monks. The rum itself is not particularly old, having been introduced in the 1960s by a distillery founded by the father of one of the worst colonial murderers of the British Raj. Colonial history is usually a mixture of such superficial twee charm overlaying enraging bloodshed.
We can thank colonialism for many of our favorite cocktails, including the simple gin and tonic, intended to sling antimalarial quinine and scurvy-fighting limes to the tippler. Various more complex recipes rely on such literal fruits of the tropics as limes, sugarcane distillates like rum, and the mysterious potions of native herbs known as bitters, leavened with products of the colonial power, the myth of civilizing colonialism in microcosm. Such is the case of the Old Cuban, a complicated standby of such outposts of tradition as the Carlyle Hotel’s Bemelmans bar. Faith Middleton’s recipe evokes the South American travels of Ludwig Bemelmans himself to draw a connection to distinguished cultural lush and Cuban resident Ernest Hemingway, America’s would-be avatar who makes those hot-country connections safe, sanitized by a bit of Old World-champagne.
His noted love of cats aside, I tend to agree with Gore Vidal on Hemingway (“What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not seen the joke?”). Anyway, Papa didn’t ask to be dragooned into this particular drink recipe, so I’ve made it my own without the buffer of a familiar credentialed intermediator, using Old Monk, the mint that grows wild in warm climates, and considerably more tropical bitters to cut the sweetness. And rather than the Canard-Duchêne champagne that imparts Old World élan, I’d love to be able to use that lost misnomer Omar Khayyam. In his absence, the insecurities of my reflexive postcolonial Europhilia drive me to use pink champagne, ideally Billecart-Salmon Rosé, although Mumm Cuvée Napa Brut Rosé pink sparkling wine works just as well. I’ve dubbed my riff on the recipe the Old Desi, not for late old Cuban-American Desi Arnaz, but in honor of my friend’s invisible countrymen, the Indian desis behind the portrait of the European old monk on the bottle and Omar Khayyam’s Marathi grapes.
The Old Desi, a bastard cocktail by Réginald-Jérôme de Mans:
2 oz Old Monk Indian rum
2 oz fresh lime juice
½ oz simple syrup, which you can make dissolving one part confectioner’s sugar in one part hot water
Liberal and repeated slugs of Angostura bitters
Fresh mint sprigs
Splash Billecart-Salmon Rosé pink champagne
Add the simple syrup to a shaker (if making your own, you can dissolve it together now), followed by the lime juice and a generously leafy mint sprig. Muddle gently. Fill with ice. Add the rum, then repeatedly have at the concoction with the bitters. Shake vigorously. Strain into a martini glass until ¾ full. Top with the champagne. Garnish with a mint sprig. Sip thoughtfully and wonder at what made thee.
On a tip from the Instagram stories of my friend Paul Fournier, I picked up Nishiguchi Essentials 100, a bilingual compendium of the 100 articles of clothing and accessories that totemically compose the intrepid Shuhei Nishiguchi, the photogenic men’s fashion director of Japan’s directional department store, Beams. It is the sort of thing I love, a diverse collection of objects, each with their own particular stories and their own particular uniqueness. It reminded me of my old favorite Einstein’s Watch, which juxtaposed the most interesting items put up for sale in 2009 (from Einstein’s own Swiss watch to a Barbie version of the DC comics superhero Black Canary). It also put me in mind of Taryn Simon’s An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar, out of whose catalog of hymen restoration clinics, corpse farms and Braille editions of Playboy rose a strange, yet familiarly offbeat, Americana.
Nishiguchi-san has been a stalwart of the hashtag-menswear scene for years, a fixture at the Pitti Uomo trade fairs (which he attends in a professional, rather than parasocial, capacity), and a popular enough phenomenon that menswear blogger Simon Crompton marketed a previous book of his, Nishiguchi’s Closet, which purported to show readers how to use just ten articles of clothing to create a hundred different outfits.
As its title suggests, Nishiguchi Essentials 100 features ten times the pieces of clothing as that earlier book, for a very different philosophy of dress. Why, at least three different raincoats are Essentials. Rather than pretend to any minimal rigor, or to the particular multifarious use of basics, the very number of these Essentials seems to beggar the meaning of the word. At last, a clothing book that does not lie about practicality, but instead exults in an overwhelming plenty of carefully sourced vintage trenchcoats, one-off briefcases specially created for him by a firm that specializes in gun cases, patinated prototype suede blazers, 1950s French army pants and… buffalo skin cowboy boots.
As the above list suggests, Nishiguchi is a polyvalent dresser not captive to any particular menswear style. His choices of Essentials is not just diverse, it is variegated like the motley plumage of an exotic bird. While his choice of vintage Brooks Brothers button-down-collar shirts would delight a Trad, his taste for vintage Ralph Lauren (a certain 1990s trenchcoat, baggy 1990s Polo trousers, and old American-made Polo oxford-cloth shirts) would put them off. The ‘Lo-Heads who might be impressed by those would be nonplussed by Nishiguchi’s 1980s Metallica T-shirts, French berets, or Hermès silver bangle hand-beaten by Touareg tribesmen like a Paul Bowles character. And each Essential has its own story: a tale of how each item had a connection to a person from his life, or how it is special in every detail, in ways the casual reader or consumer could not have imagined.
For every item in Nishiguchi Essentials 100 is special, and not just by its significance to its owner: even the Levi’s 501s Nishiguchi includes are specifically those from the 1950s to the 1990s, when Levi’s ceased making them in the United States. His Aquascutum trenchcoat was not one of its usual English production, but a version made in Canada for the North American market with natural shoulders. His handkerchieves are no ordinary bits of limp chambray, but by the infamous Simonnot-Godard, and came not only from Florence’s hallowed haberdashery Tie Your Tie, but from Tie Your Tie back before it changed ownership and, by implication, became just a bit more… well-known? Accessible? Viable? The implication is that experiences unavailable in the current day made many Essentials more precious, more covetable.
Even in purported catalogs like the other books I list above, a certain ghostly narrative detaches itself from the pretty (or unsettling) pictures and makes its presence felt. Nishiguchi is more explicit, writing even before his table of contents that he has “carefully selected” 100 items from his wardrobe that he cherishes and that are “indispensable” to his style and way of life… indissociable, it seems, from his sense of identity. Each item and its story seem like infinitesimally thin sample slices of self, specimens for us to pore over as if through a scanning microscope, and over a hundred of them to piece together a sense of Nishiguchi-san.
The recent pandemic, NIshiguchi-san writes, triggered a meditation that led to this book, In a way, it has catalyzed a sort of behavior of which Nishiguchi Essentials 100 is only the most brilliant version: the exhibition of self through visual and temporal fillets, consumerist fillets, pieces of self that each have their own narrative in our new world of social encounters, that of the distanced virtual interaction of Instagram and its ilk where so many of us have taken to including bits and pieces of what we wish to exhibit of our stuff… our latest kops, our latest drinks, talismans and fetish objects that have latterly become proxies, in our safety-minded physical stasis, for personality and identity.
How often have I thought, in recent months, of this exercise, this attempt to assert identity to faraway acquaintances (while we go bonkers with strain in our own real abodes), as a bit of body horror straight our of a Cronenberg film, our virtual attempts to maintain some sense of identity as we feel our real lives fall apart, like Brundle-Fly carefully, obscenely, gathering and storing the human pieces of him that fall off… What we store, what we catalog, what we display sometimes no longer aligns with who we actually are, and we have less control over the latter. What a fun exercise it would be, being able to show and write about the hundred or so things that we think compose us, or how we wish to be seen. But the Nishiguchi’s Essentials are actual talismans of his life, lifestyle and daily dress. This display is indeed inherent of him, for he actually is a fashion director for a famously eclectic luxury store, and a fashion icon, unlike most of the rest of us whose Instagram displays, whether self-conscious and ironical or not, are manifestations of aspiration, even if the act of display, the construction of images of our drinks, accessories, kops, and so on, can in effort feel like we are indeed parting with a piece of ourselves. As we are not Nishiguchi-san, let us pause to think about what remains, inside us, as well.
