Are We Nearly There Yet? January 2012.

Dear Rowley,

Forgive the last ‘goodbye cruel world’ letter. I believe I had reached what is known in the writing trade as the ‘scrape the barrel and drain the bottle’ stage of completing my latest opus The Perfect Gentleman for Thames & Hudson. When the manuscript finally leaves my hands I think I will emulate Australian Open champion Novak Jokovich who after his six-hour defeat of Rafa Nadal ripped his top off and posed fist-pumping and gurning at the crowd in a gesture that had echoes of Vladimir Putin.

Mind you, I am going to miss my partners in crime Mr Dawson and Miss Condell (art director and editor) who it has been an honour and pleasure to work with. Jennie has a plane ticket booked for a three month voyage to India and is due to leave in days. A year out is quite tempting, no? I’m sending you a couple of images from the book. We’re currently hunting for the Sargent portrait of Sir Philip Sassoon in picture libraries. That portrait is to me the quintessence of The Perfect Gentleman. The second photograph is something of a lost treasure. It is a detail of a diamond and white gold cuff link made for The London Cut exhibition in Tokyo by Shaun Leane. The links and matching tie stud were subsequently sold to a Russian client.

Shaun is a mate. He’s also in the book as one of the younger London brands that has the makings of history. The struggle to write golden prose wasn’t helped this weekend by a dreadful Radio 4 arts programme that posed a question worthy of Private Eye’s Pseuds’ Corner: ‘can contemporary dance communicate the pain of being a hostage?’ Well, as a veteran of Saddler’s Wells I can answer in the affirmative. Is there anything more torturous than being trapped in a middle stalls seat and subjected to hideous contortions set to jarring music that would panic the cat? All one wants from contemporary dance is an Adonis in flesh coloured tights doing something with a bent wood chair that makes your eyes stand out on stalks.

Now riddle me this Rowley. The Davos Summit. Baffled by it, aren’t you? I can understand why the world’s power brokers might want to gather hugger-mugger in a glamorous Alpine location just after Christmas. It’s what power brokers do, no? But, admit, do you really think that any gathering that brings together politicians, PRs, Web masters and media moguls is in any way altruistic or honest? Your heart sinks to hear that Matthew Freud, Prince Andrew and Peter Mandelson were amongst the ‘delegates’. You might as well call it the AGM of Wrong ‘Uns INC.

I’m genuinely surprised more questions aren’t asked about Davos. We’re facing a global recession and what do our public servants do? Go on a jaunt funded by the British tax payer and plot world domination like low rent Bond villains. Mind you, Davos is always good value for a round of  ’spot the random guest’ after your next dinner party. I understand why Boris Johnson, Tina Brown, Angela Merkel and Bill Gates might benefit from a couple of days’ moustache twirling in a swanky resort. But what precisely do Lily Cole and Ozwald Boateng bring to the party?

There’s always a few surprises on the Davos guest list. You half expect to hear ITNs correspondent to say, ‘George Osborne was joined at the Google party by Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, Rabbi Lionel Blue and Celia Imrie’. To dinner last Friday with my friend Judith Watt who has just finished a biography of Schiaparelli and is currently writing a new book about the late Alexander McQueen. Evidently, there is a wall of silence around the McQueen studio. The Gucci Group will inevitably want to protect its investment and build on the success of Sarah Burton and her association with the Duchess of Cambridge. Judith is a great fashion historian who will, I know, do a story such as McQueen’s justice.

I only met McQueen socially a handful of times and did one FT How To Spend It interview at his house in Islington. I recall McQueen being initially uncommunicative – shyness I thought rather than aggression – until I made friends with his dogs. Like many a great creative, he quite rightly thought everything that needed to be said about his work could be communicated by looking at his work rather than endless words. I must try to dig out the transcript of the interview for Judith.

What does this week have in store for you darling? I’ve got a pre-record to do for ITV about dressing for the season, a lunch with Brett at the Savoy, a day with the gang at Anderson & Sheppard working on the No 17 project and another shift with Pete and Jennie working on the layouts for The Perfect Gentleman. I’m sure you, I and Better Half will have a ticker tape parade when the page layouts go off to repro and our work is done. The best bit is not the book launch although my last two at the Savoy and Heywood Hill were a hoot and a half. No, the best best bit is celebrating a job well done with Pete and Jennie as we did at Royal Ascot last year.

We’re off to shoot royal shoemaker Lobb this morning for the book and do a cover test of yours truly with face obscured by a Lock & Roll trilby stating up and down St James’s Street in an enigmatic fashion. The terribly talented Andy Barnham is shooting the pictures today so it is entirely possible the shot will be a winner rather than a haunting echo of Don’t Look Now. Until next time…

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Tokyo Nights. January 2012.

Dear Rowley,

Well, as the saying goes ‘nostalgia ‘aint what it used to be’. I had a conversation last night with Better Half who is rather a wise owl when all said and done. ‘Why’, I asked him ‘does it get harder to do what you’re doing when you’ve been doing it for years?’ ‘Well’, says he, ‘the thrill of the new isn’t there any more. You see the bear traps before they’ve even been laid. The conclusion won’t surprise or thrill any more and you know full well the limitations of the rewards’. ‘Oh’, he added, ‘and if the sequel isn’t the equal then you feel like you’re going backwards rather than making progress’.

I put the phone down and thought ‘you’ve got three options: a date with Dame Chablis, the Dignitas Clinic or retreat to bed to ponder the indigenous profundities of life. Well darling, I plumped for the latter. When I signed-up to curate The London Cut exhibition at Palazzo Pitti in Florence in 2006 I could have had no inkling of the three act opera it would take to present the work of over twenty historic Savile Row tailors in a mannequin show in a palace in under 12-months. Thankfully, the BBC filmed much of the process so I don’t have to rely on the mad flashbacks still in my memory. It was in retrospect a magical time even though the inauguration by Prince Michael of Kent was something of a blur as was the black and white ball at Palazzo Corsini for 800 guests.

We then took The London Cut on the road to the British Ambassador’s Residences in Paris and Tokyo. These I remember with much more clarity and fondness because it forged the Savile Row family for me. We were like a travelling band of actors pitching up in a city to put on a show. Perhaps my favourite was Tokyo. This was special not least because of a cast change that included our art director Steve Lidbury, my oldest friend Anthony Keegan who flew in specially to help dress the show, Karl Matthews, James Hamilton and of course And a Rowland and Guy Hills. I likened us to a Carry On film with a core cast and many very entertaining cameos.

I’m feeling particularly nostalgic about The London Cut Tokyo because we were in such an alien, exotic environment and yet presenting a display of Savile Row tailoring in an Ambassadorial house inspired by Lutyens bang opposite the Imperial Palace. We worked like stink as my Grandmother used to say but had endless surreal Tokyo nights that I will never, ever forget. One evening I picked up the American Ambassador’s niece in the bar at the Okura and we went on a tour of the fleshpots of Tokyo that ended in a strip Karaoke bar on the 99th floor of a glass skyscraper at five in the morning. We dined at the aptly named Sparkle – a restaurant with crystal balls spinning in the orbit above our heads – and dined on creatures I’m sure Dr Spock wouldn’t have been familiar with let alone Mr Darwin.

Why this sudden trip down memory lane? Well, I’m struggling darling if truth be told. So far I’ve had two hits with Thames & Hudson: Savile Row: The Master Tailors of British Bespoke and Fashion at Royal Ascot: Three Centuries of Thoroughbred Style. Both are books of which I am proud. I worked with two superlative art directors. On the first book we had time to refine and it was a serious business. On the latter it was a lot of laughs despite being at full gallop and a good time was had by all. But Opus No 3 – The Perfect Gentleman - is proving to be a challenge to be the equal sequel. The story is sound even though I’ve not even finished all the text and we’re well into the layouts. The layouts are promising but they are not yet enchanting.

You think back, don’t you Rowley, and wonder if former projects were as much of a physical and mental test. Do you forget the graft when you’re holding the first edition in your hot little paw? I know I had those moments of ‘why put yourself through it?’ with the second two London Cut exhibitions but they are now banked in my memory as some of my happiest times. Perhaps memory is kind. When you’re proud of the conclusion, you simply forget what it took to get there.

Greater minds than mine have pondered such things. All I know this evening is that we might have got to the beginning of the end of The Perfect Gentleman but it still feels like a mountain that has to be climbed and one suspects that on the summit there won’t be so much of a piece of chocolate buried by the last sucker who made it. Perhaps come publication date in Autumn this year the thrill will justify the many nights when I’ve resembled nothing so much as the ship’s mate on the Raft of the Medusas. Until next time…

 

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Like A Prayer. January 2012.

Dear Rowley,

Where do I go to surrender? We’re in the final weeks of writing, editing and laying out my new Thames & Hudson opus The Perfect Gentleman and it has reached the stage when one becomes a feral beast who can concentrate on nothing but the business in hand and should really be kept in a zoo rather than be allowed out to terrorise London when it’s feeding time. The smallest things set me off such as the shoals of Chinese students who invade my local Waitrose come term time and seem to have no concept of spacial awareness. In their stampede towards the deli counter I seriously thought I was having a flashback to the Boxer Rebellion. Britain hasn’t experienced such hostility from the Orient since the Opium Wars.

Mind you, I don’t discriminate. The French tart who barged past me tonight as I was foraging for organic chicken in Sainsbury’s was no better than she ought to be. Said lady was wearing a pair of spray-on hipster jeans exposing just enough G-string to give me a rollocking good target. I gave her a terrific prod right between the bum cheeks with my basket while mentally humming Rule Britannia and thinking ‘put that in your pipe and smoke it’. Another particular favourite of mine came from the novel Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil as voiced by the Lady Chablis. ‘You got issues? Here’s a tissue’.

So as you can see Sherwood on deadline is not really fit for public consumption. I felt desperate for my art director Pete Dawson and editor Jennie Condell last Friday who were doing their best to work with a feral beast who was sleep deprived, hung over and on the verge of doing a swallow dive off Waterloo Bridge. It’s not that the book is looking anything other than magnificent. It will be a pretty thing when we’re cooing over the cot at the book launch. But the delivery has been anything but an easy birth. But do you know who has seen me through the desperate hours of writing into the wee small hours? Madonna.

I’ve got a bee in my bonnet about Madonna. Why isn’t the media more respectful to a woman who has quite literally never missed a beat in over thirty years leading the music business? I have grown up with her music: dashing down to the local HMV in Sheffield to buy her first singles, listening to Like A Virgin when I still was one (just) and dancing to In To the Groove in a hilltop nightclub outside Sheffield called Fanny’s when I was 14. I’ve Vogued with that woman in London gay bars, seen her perform at a private Camden Town concert for Dolce & Gabbana when she released Music and danced my last dance with my dear friend Judy Bennett when she bought us tickets for the Confessions tour.

In short, Madonna has written the soundtrack to my life. So – bearing in mind my current take no prisoners attitude – I’m quite ready to hunt down her critics with dogs before you can say La Isla Bonita. You’d think people would cut a woman of such talent some slack should she choose to experiment in film. Quite frankly, if Evita was the only film she ever made it would be enough to justify her belief that she had something to contribute to celluloid. There wasn’t another actress or singer who could have acquitted herself as well playing Eva Peron. End of.

I have yet to see W.E. The film may be flawed or not but it should command equal respect as that other fashion-led film A Single Man directed by Tom Ford. Madonna has been quoted as saying that she’s bored of every English newspaper having her age permanently typeset. This I think she is justified in having a beef about. The lady has earned her spurs so many times over that it seems churlish to point out that Madonna is in her fifties. So what? If she chose to retire tomorrow Madonna would still have secured her position as one of the most important women to have contributed to 20th and 21st century culture.

Madonna is not an idol I would like to encounter. I am ‘friends of friends’ as t’were and have news from the coal face on a relatively regular basis. Writing a book with a grand historical sweep like The Perfect Gentleman makes me all the more aware that history is kind to people who actually do things and shape the age in which they inhabit. This Madonna has done so honit soit qui mal y pense.

So you discover me at midnight on a Saturday facing another three sections of  The Perfect Gentleman when I’d much rather be sipping cocktails with one at Kettner’s. There is definitely something wrong with this picture. Surely being the captain of one’s own ship should allow for a little amusement. Then again, look what happened to Captain Coward who sank the Italian cruise liner off the coast of Giglio, Funnily enough, I visited the island of Giglio when at a house party with my dear friend Columbine Strickland in the late 80s. I remember laying on a rock just off the coastline and thinking this is a place I would be happy to expire. Funny how circumstances make you think twice…

 

 

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Leave by the Gift Shop. January 2012.

Dear Rowley,

Doesn’t technology make slaves and fools of us all? I’m clocking on at weekends now in the mad dash to finish The Perfect Gentleman but as the prostitute said, ‘it’s not the work it’s the stairs’. Picture the scene in Bloomsbury Towers. It’s Saturday morning, the muse is fluttering around my barnet like Tinkerbell and all is well with the world. I am flitting around the office in a Snow White fashion half expecting to see deer frisking at my feet and bluebirds resting on an outstretched finger. And then catastrophe. While wafting a duster over my desk, my MacBook Air plummets like Icarus to the floor cracking the screen as it falls like a suicide victim from Waterloo Bridge.

Now I am rarely deterred by the whoopee cushions that the gods place under our posteriors when we’re feeling particularly chipper. I’ve got through customs in Florence without a passport by batting my eyelids like Lie Low Lil, found an opera length pearl necklace in Tokyo within minutes of an exhibition opening and pulled diamonds out of the sky with three hours to go before a live BBC broadcast so the fickle finger of fate doesn’t usually defeat me. However, technology is a titan that strikes fear into a generation such as mine old enough to remember writing on a manual typewriter.

I’ve always been a fan of Apple. The products are as sexy and pretty as the rainbow tribe employed in the Covent Garden branch but whenever I enter Apple World I feel like I’m in an episode of Logan’s Run when anyone over 30 should volunteer themselves for euthanasia. The kids speak a different language and, rather like the Moonies, are hard wired to up-sell to their elders who are entirely at their mercy. It’s like going to a dodgy mechanic under the arches in King’s Cross. When a teenager tells me with sagacity that my hard drive is compromised, I feel positively deficient.

I chose a boy who looked like the Aubrey Beardsley de nos jours who fluttered his artefacts and ruled out a repair then passed me along to a perky blonde girl who reminded me of Little Boots. The prognosis was spend £1100 on a new MacBook Air and get my data transferred by the goblins of Gringott’s in the basement. Thus began 24-hours when my old laptop was on the critical list and I felt like a concerned relative waiting for a vital organ to be flown from Bucharest in order to breathe life into the new machine.

Casualty wasn’t even in it. The kids attempted to revive the patient before close of play on Sunday. This wasn’t possible so laptop was left on the life support machine overnight. It crashed and Monday was a bedside vigil hoping baby MacBook would pull through. Well, you’ll be thrilled to know I took delivery of the new machine after an hour and a half holding a lighted candle in the Genius Bar at the Covent Garden Apple Store. Of course all of my ‘operating systems’ were out of date – you ‘aint just whistling Dixie honey – so I had to shell out a couple more monkeys. But this is the price one pays when you’re a stranger in a strange land.

Naturally, I pointed out to the shiny, happy people that the Mac Store in Covent Garden used to be a nightclub. I didn’t share with them the fact that I used to dance on that very spot in my scanties when spam was dinner and Interfacing had a whole different meaning. After two hours in Apple World, I staggered out into the night with my throat screaming for gin and nicotine. Interesting that they choose to package a £1200 laptop in a white bag bearing an apple logo the size of Africa. It’s like a mugger’s charter.

Oh darling let’s get back to more salubrious subjects. While waiting for my technological glitch to be itched I spent a morning taking more photographs for The Perfect Gentleman. I was particularly pleased with my photograph of dragons over London. I also rather enjoyed the shot of the candle-lighters in Fortnum & Mason and Edward VII astride at the foot of Lower Regent Street. I’ve said it before and will say it again. If you want to appreciate and understand London’s history one only has to look up.

I know you’ve always favoured flowing Belle Epoque locks. As late I’ve been growing my hair into what I thought was a Byronesque sweep. Unfortunately, I wake up and think I more resemble those Troll Dolls sold in the less salubrious gift shops. Terribly ageing, long hair on men. This is something I have pondered long and hard. You know the major sign of ageing? When you’re in a public locker room and wrap the towel half way up your waist and down to your ankles rather than neatly folding it in half and forming a Ramses II short loincloth. It’s the test that all of us have to face. When I’m in the camp Graeco-Roman swimming pool and steam room of a morning I still fold that towel. The minute I opt for the mid-chest to ankle is the minute I go to the elephant’s grave yard.

So I have emerged from my ordeal by Mac Store bloodied but unbowed. As Stephen Sondheim says, ‘first you’re young, then you’re middle aged, then you’re WONDERFUL’. Amen to that.

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Strike a Light. January 2012.

Dear Rowley,

In tearing haste, I just couldn’t rest without giving you the second instalment of Letters from Piazza della Signoria as t’were. As you know I  migrated to Florence this week for the bi-annual Pitti Uomo men’s fashion fair and promised to give you the scores on the fashion doors for the season. But first let’s give at least two cheers that Turkey wants to extradite Sarah, Duchess of Y0rk on a charge that could see her banged-up for 22-years and for Tesco losing £5 billion off its shares. Makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside, no?

You know the old saying ‘a picture says a thousand words’? Well, if that were true I’d be out of a job. However, a group shot taken of the Anderson & Sheppard massive at large in Florence did give me pause for thought. I’d asked an extra at Pitti to take a picture of us all dressed in our best. Well, on checking the view finder it appeared I had finally reached ‘James Sherwood: The Blowsy Years’. The suit looked creased, the stomach a little too pronounced and the hair quit frankly lank. I could have wept.

So praise be for Guy ‘Dashing Tweeds’ Hills and his trusty lens. Quite unexpectedly, Guy took a snap of Edward Sexton and I sharing a cigarette. Look at those leg placements. It’s like a Helmut Newton shoot waiting to happen. When I grow up I want to be like Edward. He was the absolute star of Pitti this season as the guest of Chester Barrie for whom he has cut the most miraculous block for a ready-to-wear suit. Edward is a maestro of Savile Row bespoke tailoring: the hands that made Tommy Nutter’s creativity come to life in the late 60s and 70s. Though Tommy is long gone, Edward is still here and I think better than ever.

You know I am a great advocate for bespoke tailoring. But there are many young aspirants who wish to buy into the style of Savile Row without having the £4000 to invest in bespoke. Chester Barrie has stepped in to a yawning great gap in the market for a handsome off-the-peg garment that has the spirit of bespoke and it is a tribute to Edward’s genius that he can persuade factories in Italy to go the extra mile to make checks correspond, shoulders stand proud and waists to nip in sufficiently to look handmade.

I might have known my old friend Chris Modoo was involved. Chris worked for many years with Ede & Ravenscroft. He styled my first Ascot morning coat for the BBC fashion coverage and I have had nothing but respect for the man ever since. Chris has a natural, instinctive ability to choose adventurous but appropriate cloth and accessorises like the Duke of Windsor. He, like Mr Sexton, is an obsessive and will accept nothing but the best. It was truly a privilege to be on the Chester Barrie stand with Edward. The clothes on the Stockman dummies looked fabulous but they looked even better modelled by Edward and Chris.

At Pitti there is always the pressure to go a little too far with your personal styling. There’s nothing worse than walking past a bank of Japanese bloggers cameras ready and not even merit a ‘saburo’ said with reverence. This season I was feeling rather blowsy and decided to err on the side of understatement. Thanks to Mr Hills’ photograph, I’m rather glad I did. You cannot go wrong in Anderson & Sheppard grey flannel with a zinger of a pink spotty tie and a cigarette. Makes everyone else look too ‘try hard’.

That said, I still think I’ve eaten all the pies over Christmas and went to see my guru – Gail at Capri (you know the rest) – who looked like the puss who’d got the prosecco over the festive season. All I need to do is cut the carbs and get back on the gin and slim diet for a couple of weeks and the weight will simply drop off. Of course you’re demented after seven days on the mother’s ruin but you have a waistline of a teenage Abercrombie model. Seriously, Rowley, I haven’t reached the Elizabeth Taylor stage yet as in ‘Liz darling, you know you’re fat when the crotch on your kaftan is tight’. But I can pinch more than an inch and if you recognise that line you’re older than I thought you were.

They were all in town for Pitti this season: Jeremy Hackett, Simon Carter, Timothy Everest, the delovely Mr Miller from Turnbull & Asser and Prince Michael of Kent who was staying with the Frescobaldis the night before the Hardy Amies show. There is nowhere more glamorous than Pitti when it is showtime. My favourite bit of Pitti – apart from Tabasco – is the late afternoon promenade around the backstreets when I go searching for hidden treasure. This season I struck gold.

I had an hour to kill so thought I’d revisit a fun wine bar behind the Palazzo Vecchio. En route, I walked past an antique print shop that had the most marvellous charcoal sketches in the window dated 1932 of fashion in fur. You know I’m a sucker for a flapper in fur so snapped up the best of the bunch and had her all packaged up for deliver to the wall in Bloomsbury Towers. Don’t you adore her? The chic of a white shirt underneath a pelt makes me melt.

Well, tomorrow is a fun day with my Thames & Hudson art director Pete and my editor juicy Jennie. We’ve got to make a big start on the layouts for The Perfect Gentleman. Doubtless it will be a lot of coffee, a lot of cigarettes and a lot of laughs. Well, strike a light…

 

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