ART
Dear Breaks,
Many moons ago, I attended St Martin’s to study for the MA in Fashion Journalism. After reading English at university, the free-and-easy approach of art college – whereby you had to teach yourself – was frustrating. It was the early 90s and Marc Jacobs had just produced his grunge collection for Perry Ellis that got him the sack. St Martins on Charing Cross Road wasn’t glamorous. Louise Wilson was the MA course director – a lady I always remember like Winnie Mandela surrounded by her football team of thuggish bodyguards. The real glamour at St Martins was the former MA course director Bobby Hillson who taught the late Alexander McQueen.
While at St Martins, I had to sketch fashion illustrations for various projects such as Halston, Schiaparelli and Dior. I have an antique style of fashion illustration that lends itself only to designers pre-1980 excepting Lacroix, Galliano and McQueen. This confirmed that it was far too late for me to be a fashion designer. I truly believe fashion ceased to be creative and innovative at the end of the 70s with the exception of designers who understood fashion history such as Westwood, McQueen and Galliano.
When I look at the fashions today, I find the ludicrous and unnecessary embellishments an affront to chic. Ragged seams, asymmetric edges, mixes of brocades and chiffons with leather, ugly colour combinations, uncomfortable fabrications and hideous accessories – have shoes and handbags ever been as ugly as the 21st century? – all conspire to smother elegance to death. But perhaps my aesthetic has passed and this is what women want today. If so god bless but don’t expect me to like it. Sadly, I think the lion’s share of young British designers are the most culpable for making unspeakable and unwearable clothing that will be laughed at by posterity.
Despite sketching fashion nostalgically, I have never been an artist. So it is with great humility that I have the privilege to be painted and drawn by a true artist: Timothy Morgan-Owen and a great illustrator John Bowering. Over the years, these two talents have used me as a subject and my vanity alone makes me blush. There is so much more of their work on my Letters from Bloomsbury Square (www.james-sherwood.com) that I hope you enjoy half as much as I do.
Until next time,
James.
The Bowes Museum
Dear Breaks,
Back in Nice for the weekend and ‘bon plage’ but much to tell about the Bowes Museum in North Yorkshire where Henry Poole & Co has been asked to mount a retrospective exhibition between May and August 2013. Have you been to the Bowes? It is a Neo-Renaissance chateau built in a town called Castle Barnard by John Bowes – a scion of the late Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother’s family – and his actress/soubrette wife Josephine to house their collection of furniture, art, porcelain, lace and objects d’art. You would melt at the sight of the Par Terre planted on the approach to the chateau.
Anyways, the Bowes has a most marvellous costume gallery that has in its time exhibited Vivienne Westwood and Stephen Jones. It makes the Victoria & Albert museum look like the third world. On exhibit when we visited was a bodice and evening slippers belonging to the Empress Eugenie, marvellous Belle Epoque ball gowns and 1050s Lanvin evening dresses. The most exciting exhibit was a wedding dress made by Lucille – Lady Duff Gordon – in 1912: the year RMS Titanic went down.
Lucille fitted the wedding dress before she set sail on Titanic. She survived the sinking with her husband by getting off on the first life boat manned only by the couple and a handful of sailors. They were later prosecuted for deserting souls who were left to drown on board. They were acquitted and Lucille went on to finish the wedding dress she had begun before the voyage. So there it stands in the Bowes Museum: a historic piece of clothing that tells a fascinating story.
If the Gods smile, we will curate the Henry Poole & Co exhibit and I think we will base it around the anniversary of HM The Queen’s Coronation of 1953. We have Coronation robes and liveries dating back to the 1902 of King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra. Such fun. Until next time…
James x
Back in Business
Dear Breaks,
Long time no see. As you know, I’ve been managing health issues such as sinuses brought on by years of work in Savile Row archives and migraines brought on by many years working in the rag trade. Anyway, suffice to say all is well now and I am back in business. This week took me to my University city Newcastle upon Tyne. Keith ‘head of ceremonial tailoring’ Levett and I were scouting the Bowes Museum in North Yorkshire for a potential Henry Poole & Co retrospective exhibition in May 2013. The Bowes was founded by a rellie of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother and is modelled on a French chateau.
I think we will do the exhibition despite learning from the curator that we are supposed to come up with the concept, raise £20,000, ask Prince Charles to open it and dress the exhibition for a week before opening time. All I could say to Keith was how much fun we could hav e tearing up and down to Newcastle over the coming months and misbehaving in one of my favourite cities in the world. Apropos of that, last night I went out on the tiles in Newcastle and ended the evening doing the Time Warp in a karaoke bar called Easy Street with a gang of Geordies. I couldn’t have liked it more.
My pictures today are taken at Anderson & Sheppard’s bespoke shop at N0 32. As I type, I am in the office at No 17 Clifford Street. The builders sign off next week, the shop window is in and it is all getting terribly exciting. All our trouser samples have come in today so I’ll be trying on and modelling. Our shirts have arrived and look beautiful. It is such a thrill to see garments we’ve worked for months on finally coming to life. Are you coming to the opening party? It is in September and Bryan Ferry is co-hosting with The Rake. I’m in Corfu so sadly won’t be there but I am sure it will be a hoot.
Until next time,
James.
So Much Nicer in Nice
Dear Breaks,
Long time no speak. I don’t know about you but whenever I come to the end of a super creative period of intense work, my health collapses like a drunk on a Mardi Gras float. Ordinarily I write this off as three restorative days in bed with a bottle of Old Famous Grouse. But this time the headaches, sinus trouble and sleeplessness persisted so I went to see the Docs. It took about two weeks to diagnose that I’ve suffered from debilitating migraines on top of chronic sinus trouble for months if not years. Explains an awful lot as it happens. There was me thinking I was a drunken slut with anger management issues but turns out I was in excruciating pain that only pills, rest and a totally new diet can cure.
So, at the risk of sounding like Mrs Cohen at Coffee Talk, it’s been all about being under the doctors for most of the month. Red wine, cheese, chocolate and citrus fruit are all out as is bright light and noise. Mercifully Prosecco, Ricard and Champagne are perfectly acceptable and St Moritz menthol cigarettes seem to help not hinder. So the Artist who has been painting my portrait (the one we’re putting in the attic to suppurate while I stay forever young) suggested we take the Train Bleu from Paris to the Riviera and spend four days in Nice on the beach. So this we did.
I love a train journey, don’t you? Particularly when the Artist packed two chilled bottles of Prosecco wrapped in newspaper in his carry-on luggage ‘for the journey’. On arrival in Nice, we went for dinner and was embezzled into spending over 200 Euros on a lobster the size of a small infant. But this was the only glitch. For the remaining four days, we booked two sun loungers, fluffy towels, parasols and Kir Royale at the Ruhe Beach Club on the Boulevard des Anglais being served lovely things by lovely young men in white yachting caps, white shirts with epaulettes and white shorts. What’s not to like?
By day we lunched with Suzi Perry – my partner in crime for the BBC at Royal Ascot – and watched the Nice fire brigade play beach volleyball on the sea front. The evenings we spent in jazz clubs, al fresco restaurants, the casino and the fair where we rode a carousel for the first time on my part in over twenty years. I felt positively ten years younger when we finally boarded the train back to Paris. So reluctant was I to leave Nice that the Artist thought he would have to deploy his stun gun. Until next time…
James.
Dashing Tweeds Hanky Hat
Dear Breaks,
Have you met Guy Hills? Guy is the creative director of Dashing Tweeds and for my money the most creative man in London. He is a true old school aristo with tonnes of energy and enough fire in his belly to light up Manhattan. Guy is a true polymath. He’s the type of chap you can take to dinner in a Tokyo restaurant and when presented with an origami duck can call for a sheet of paper and make a working origami grasshopper. Guy is an ‘up’. I have never heard him say a bad word about anybody whereas with me it is rather more ‘if you don’t have anything nice to say about someone, come sit down next to me’.
Anyway, Guy has been doing his thing with light reflective British tweed for a few years now. Have the glossy men’s magazines (The Rake excepted) acknowledged this? Forget about that. I think there’s an element of jealousy there. This came to mind when I was in the camp Greco-Roman swimming pool/sauna/steam this morning when I was perusing a copy of a free London magazine called Shortlist. The latest issue had a 20 most influential men in British fashion feature. The panel included model turned man of the people David Gandy, TopMan director Gordon Richardson, fashion editor Adrian Clark and various other great and good.
Well, who won? David Gandy, Gordon Richardson, Adrian Clark and Patrick Grant all nominated by each other. Where was Mr Hills? Nowhere. I suspect he will have the last laugh. It is much chicer not to be where you ought than to be ubiquitous. Amongst Guy’s recent activities – collaborations with Converse, Dover Street Market and Tom Ford – Guy has made an accessory called the Hanky Hat. It is white cotton drill and a cross between a peaked cap and a knotted handkerchief. Low key as always, Guy decided to co-write a Hanky Hat song with Guy – Angels – Chambers and shoot a video on the streets of Primrose Hill to promote it. I’ve sent you the link. It is genius with the hook ‘I’m on the rise’. Yes he is.
Until next time,
James.
Sex
Dear Breaks,
We talk an awful lot about suits but very little about what lies beneath. The health benefits of bespoke tailoring are that they encourage a man to keep his figure exactly to scale as he had it when he first becomes a Savile Row customer. It is a major factor in the benefits of ordering bespoke suits. I think I’ve written to you before about the Anderson & Sheppard cut. The shoulders are soft and the waist sinuous. When I ordered my first A&S suit, I didn’t have the body to accommodate soft tailoring. With a year of swim, sauna and steam, my body has been made to fit the tailoring rather than vice versa.
Bespoke attracts a very particular kind of man. There is nothing homoerotic about the relationship between cutter and customer but there is a common interest in the body Dandiacal. You want to make the best of what you’ve got and then some. The whole point of bespoke is to improve on what you have and mask your weaker points. With this in mind, I send you three snapshots sent by one of my more regular correspondents of Gilles. There isn’t a tailor in the world who can make him look better than he does unclothed. End of.
I think we all owe it to ourselves to keep very, very fit. We all have our vices. Mine are Prosecco and a few too many cigarettes. But I retain a good diet and exercise like crazy. I swim every morning seven days a week and must walk London’s streets like a New York pretzel man every day. This is what you must do to be a thoroughbred clothes horse. I am not fattist. Some people have a metabolism that simply precludes them from being sylphlike. However, the world does have an obesity problem and I suspect that we are already dividing into a class system based on weight. If for example I turned to fat now I’m north of forty years old, I would go to the elephant’s graveyard to surrender. If I can’t walk down a street and turn a head or two, life simply would cease to have meaning.
Until next time,
James.
Sublime London Cutting
Dear Breaks,
Sir Tom Baker has rocked it out for my ‘Northern Line’ black chenille DJ and waistcoat. As you know, I have had suits cut by the magnificent men of Savile Row. But I have to say Sir Tom’s tailoring fits me like hand in glove. End of.
Until next time,
James.
Second Fitting
Dear Breaks,
There are few days I enjoy with more relish than a fitting with one of my tailors. When it’s Soho tailor Sir Tom Baker, I usually delay the appointment until about 5pm and we crack open a bottle of Valpoliparrot or two after the business in hand has been taken care of. Last Monday Tom and I were joined by Savile Row photographer ‘gorgeous’ George Garnier who was shooting a portfolio of portraits of Tom and I for The Rake (a magazine for whom I am editor-at-large).
When I first really discovered Savile Row bespoke tailoring, I resolved to dress correctly. But as you know, I cut my teeth reporting on the international runway shows so soon got frustrated dressing in a full formal suit, shirt and tie. Once I’d got past Armageddon (my 40th birthday – who knew I’d make it?), I decided it was time to think again about how I wanted to dress. The beauty of a Savile Row suit is that it is timeless and unimpeachably elegant but it also limits one’s options to dress to attract as well as impress.
So, with this in mind I discovered Sir Tom Baker. Tom makes cocktail suits for me: the sorts of garment that the Row’s more formal tailors would disapprove of. Technically he is a classicist and as perfect a pair of hands with the shears as any Row head cutter. But creatively he is more in the spirit of a Vivienne Westwood or Jean Paul Gaultier than a London Cut tailor. In the works for my next book launch – The Perfect Gentleman - is a black chenille Northern Line dinner jacket and waistcoat with horseshoe cut breast. The cloth is shot with silver thread and Tom has included his signature details such as a back collar that falls into a point and an exposed seam on both sleeves. Can’t wait to show it to you.
Until next time,
James.
The Tipping Point
Dear Breaks,
So we’ve now decamped to Milan from Pitti Uomo in Florence and I have to say it’s like moving from A Room With A View to Metropolis. I’d forgotten what an urban sprawl Milan is or just how many unhappy memories come flooding back on rolling into Milano Centrale station. When I was writing runway reports for the Financial Times and Independent newspapers many moons ago, I was both grateful and conscientious. I was also minus the budget for the Principe hotel or a driver. So Milan for me means sweat on the Metro, fleapit hotels on the Via Scarlatti and a return to London having lost a stone, drunk my body weight in Chianti and earned about £250 for filing two reports a day for the week. One season my Better Half said he’d pay me £500 just to stay at home. So I did.
This visit is to see one show – Canali – for a project then out. Sure, there are fonder memories of Milan seasons’ past: cocktails at the Diana hotel after one of Tom Ford’s fabulous Gucci menswear shows and the night Donatella turned the Palazzo Versace into a casino with Carmen Kass as the croupier and Boy George in the DJ booth. Dolce & Gabbana’s shows were always, always a hoot even if not always in the best possible taste. Speaking of which, I’m staying in a hotel that would make Philippe Starck look minimalist in comparison. The hotel corridors look like a mash-up between a Roberto Cavalli boutique and a gay bordello in Miami.
Thoughts naturally turn back to Florence and lessons learnt for the future of menswear. It is very clear to me that the Hedi Slimane/Thom Browne drainpipe jeans silhouette has reached an extreme and now looks peculiar rather than cool. Savile Row is still the reference for the Pitti peacocks who make-up the passing show that is Pitti Uomo. But one can’t help thinking a tipping point has been reached. Thrilling though it is that the Duke of Windsor is a reference for young men of all nationalities, do admit that even the dandy Duke didn’t throw so many accessories at a single outfit as the fashionable set today. I enjoy a linen pocket square, a check tie with a stripe shirt, a Panama hat, Ray-Bans, tie studs, cuff links, boutonnieres and bow ties…but all in the same look?
The mad clashes of tartan, stripe, check, colour blocking, dandy accessories, skinny pants and brogues or loafers worn sockless is not so much lively as hypomanic. I feel men’s fashion may have to calm down. The winners at Pitti Uomo were the men who have moved on from the extreme slim silhouette and balance colours such as China blue with the calmest of neutrals. The men who dressed in a breezy, understated and elegant fashion made all those eccentrics chasing the Bloggers’ cameras look rather desperate and clownish in comparison.
Until next time,
James.
The Remains of the Day
Dear Breaks,
Twenty four hours after we arrived on the Tornabuoni Beacci roof terrazzo for a prosecco stop, here we are again. The Anderson & Sheppard team has just left for the airport and I’m awaiting my Better Half with cork popped and acqua frizzante at the ready. Florence is truly a magical city for me. I feel like whistling Consider Yourself from Oliver every time I walk down a street cobbled with stones where once walked Cosimo de Medici, Machiavelli, Michelangelo and Tiny Tempah. Only kidding about the last one. Who is he anyway? I always get Tiny Tempah Will.I.Am and Jessie J mixed-up, don’t you?
What news from the closing day of Pitti? Today was an Anderson & Sheppard day. We had a jolly super time and found what we think are the most masculine quality cotton polo shirts and cashmere/silk three-button sweaters. We also met our shirt makers to discuss some truly terrific absolutely true white cotton work shirts and gorgeous evening shirts for the shop at No 17 Clifford Street. You really want to be in our gang Breaks. We have Anda our fearless leader, we have Audie ’40 years in the business darling’ Charles, we have our financial wizard Andre and we have the baby of the family Emily who is Savile Row’s answer to Audrey Hepburn.
Much jollity last night when we were joined by Billionaire (ex-The Rake) editors Christian B. Barker, Andy Barnham and their best buddy Bob who is quite simply a New York publishing legend. When he told me he was friends with Liza’s third ex-husband Mark Gero I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. Bob was also a veteran of Studio 54 and has stories to tell from the basement VIP rooms that would make your eyes stand out on storks. I believe we polished off nine bottles of prosecco on the Beacci terrace before decamping to the most glamorous and top secret courtyard restaurant table in Florence.
But back to today’s activities. Terribly sorry I didn’t get to say goodbye to Sibilla but will text this evening with a ‘where’s the best and closest beach to spend the weekend?’ SOS. I didn’t pack my slutty Aussie Bums but can always buy a pair in Positano tomorrow. Not a clue where we are dining tonight but it is a gruesome twosome with Better Half so somewhere with a modicum of romance will be rather nice. We could do worse than the turret on the terrace at the Beacci just large enough for a table for two and an ice bucket. I know Dorothy always says ‘there’s no place like home’ but all I can usefully add is ‘there’s no place like Florence’ when Pitti Uomo is rocking it out with class, elegance and va-va voom.
Until next time,
James.
