Savile Row Protest. April 2012.

Dear Rowley,

Much excitement on Savile Row today as The Chap editor Gustav Temple mustered an army of tweed-clad ladies and gentlemen dressed in their retro bespoke best to protest about the opening of Abercrombie & Fitch Kids at No 3. With a nod and a wink to the Beatles’ infamous last live performance on top of the then Apple building at No 3 in 1968, placards being held aloft read ‘Give Three-Piece a Chance’. Boom-boom.

Though not a subscriber, I am a great admirer of the wit, elegance and eccentricity the chaps and chapesses bring to London’s street theatre. I recall judging the Best in Show at the annual Tweed Run last year with Johnny Allen when the massed ranks of moustachioed, pipe-smoking tweed types cycled past Huntsman.

The Abercrombie incursion is cause for grave concern on Savile Row as is the imminent arrival of French fashion brand The Kooples at No 5. I’m about to pen my column for The Rake about the crisis talks currently going on behind the closed doors of Savile Row’s bespoke houses. With the honourable exception of Davies & Son, Richard James and Spencer Hart, the West side of Savile Row has already been lost to the bespoke trade. The Row can always survive one or two interlopers on the East side – seeing off Evisu jeans after an unwelcome tenancy – but No 3 and No 5 are two huge dents in our hull that will make it increasingly difficult to keep the ship afloat.

The Chap is to be applauded for affirmative action. At the last count, pictures of protesters made online editions of The Washington Post, The Daily Mail, the Evening Standard and Guardian. These ladies and gentlemen are unashamedly nostalgic and wearing what can only be described as fancy dress. But until the bespoke houses of Savile Row raise an objection in public let alone a placard on the street, I think The Chap deserves the bespoke tailors’ thanks for brewing a media storm and orchestrating an effective photo opportunity.

Cynical types might think The Chap‘s protest belittles a serious threat to British trade, tradition and livelihoods. Are we perhaps playing into Abercrombie’s hands by offering such a stark contrast between quaint British nostalgia and the face of Mayfair’s future?  Abercrombie’s pecs and sex marketing blitzkrieg has been the most successful branding ballyhoo exercise in Mayfair since Gordon Selfridge first opened up shop in the Edwardian era. If market forces judge the bespoke trade obsolete then why should landlords with pounds signs for eyes protect them?

Much has been made of market forces. These are, one imagines, the same market forces that allowed Mr Hitler the popular vote in 1930s Germany and we all know the consequences of that unfortunate empire’s rise. It is the duty of Westminster Council, the Row’s various landlords, the Savile Row Bespoke association and each and every Londoner to fight for the preservation of the bespoke tailoring trade with every fibre of their being.

Savile Row is one of the last streets in the world where the same craft has been practised for over two centuries. It is one of the only streets in London where a product is made by hand on the premises. Don’t even get me started on how multi-cultural the workshops are or how non-judgmental the ladies and gentlemen who work both upstairs and downstairs prove to be once you get to join the family. Every age, sex, colour and creed work together on Savile Row and the passion for fine tailoring is the only thing that unites.

When I first got to know the fashion tailors like Ozwald, Richard and Tim in the early 1990s and gradually – thanks to various newspaper features, book projects, exhibitions and archives – met the Row royal family, I developed a respect for the trade that remains unshaken. I was in  awe – in awe! – of the maverick creative spirit that was thriving discreetly behind the modest shop fronts on Savile Row. I am still in awe of them and it saddens me profoundly that minnows in the clothing industry now seek to bask in their reflected glory.

Without the tailors, Savile Row would be an unremarkable backstreet in Mayfair with little to recommend it but for two or three buildings of distinction. You know I’m no fan of political correctness and find positive discrimination a total yawn. But you do have to call into question why the people who safeguard London’s future – the Mayors, MPs, councillors, landlords and employers – preach diversity, sustainability and legacy but blithely allow Abercrombie to invade Savile Row. I’m all for pretty young people. But how on earth can the powers that be think a company that only showcases Adonis types on the shop floor and consigns the Ugly Betty’s to the stock room is to be condoned and encouraged to evict British manufacture from our capital city?

So tonight I raise a glass of rather palatable hoc to The Chap. Their demonstration today was a palpable hit in favour of British barminess and the individuality that is the life blood of London. However nostalgic their style, the young generation have led the way for the Savile Row establishment to wake up and take a very public stance. Until every man and woman employed by Savile Row’s bespoke industry organises a Flash Mob show of strength and contemporary bespoke tailoring on our precious street, we’ve got no right to comment on The Chap’s affirmative action. It is our duty to pick up the baton and rise to the challenge. Until Pentonville…

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House of Cards. April 2012.

Dear Rowley,

It’s not every day one is invited to the House of Commons. Don’t get excited Rowley, I wasn’t being hauled in front of the Levinson Enquiry having been intercepted relentlessly by James Murdock. The invitation came courtesy of UKFT (UK Fashion & Textiles) for a British luxury goods reception. This didn’t particularly come at a good time considering Aquascutum had just gone into liquidation and Gieves & Hawkes had gone the same way as Hardy Amies having been flogged to our Oriental friends. What with China, Quatar, the Chinese, Russia and India playing Monopoly with the capital’s real estate, it will be a miracle if we’ll have any of the family silver left.

Westminster isn’t particularly my beat and I wondered who made the invitation. Was it, perhaps, an MP who had seen my fatal charms in the swimming pool a la Christine Keeler at Cliveden and wanted an introduction? I had visions of being chained to Eric Pickles like Carrie Fisher in Return of the Jedi. I don’t think I’d make a terribly good cabinet minister’s moll. It’d be like Edward VIII all over again: cocktail glass stains on the red boxes and MI5 working over time to suppress rumours of my ‘Shanghai grip’.

It was all going rather well as I cantered down Whitehall in my Huntsman puppy tooth. The pace was good to firm until I got to Big Ben when the police insisted all pedestrian traffic stop and wait for Mr Cameron’s motorcade. It was at this precise moment when the phrase ‘April Showers’ fulfilled its promise. By the time the PM swept past, I looked like the witch after Dorothy had thrown a pail of water over her. When I finally got to the Cromwell Lawn entrance, the police  - smug beneath a canopied security booth – instructed us to join a queue fifty deep outside that led towards a subterranean entrance like something out of The Hobbit.

The thought of making my maiden visit to the Palace of Westminster looking like Mr Wet T-Shirt 1973 didn’t appeal. Neither, ordinarily, do industry meet-and-greet events when you’re introduced to people whose hands you’d rather not shake and plied with booze you wouldn’t wish on a wino in Soho walkway. My Sir Walter Raleigh appeared in the form of Luke Sweeney – he of dynamic bespoke duo Thom Sweeney – who offered an umbrella the wingspan of the Angel of the North and a ride back to Mayfair. So we were off like robber’s dogs.

But the day wasn’t wasted. Quite the reverse. I’d spent the entire morning playing truant from the daily grind and going tourist. Going tourist is the reverse of going feral or native. Instead of marching round like a Nazi stormtrooper from one appointment to the next trampling small children and their pets underfoot, you take a leisurely stroll with a smile as wide as Gene Kelly and a good word for everyone. I started with a walk through St. James’s Park towards Buckingham Palace beaming like a cat with a canary in its paws at the weeping willow, ornamental lake and wildlife.

The Palace and Queen’s Gallery weren’t open so I dropped into the gift shop for the newly released DVD of the 1953 Coronation voiced by Sir Laurence Olivier and the odd crested tea towel. From the Palace, I decided to navigate the backstreets of Victoria towards Westminster Abbey and found myself at St Margaret’s – the Houses of Parliament’s parish church and scene of many society weddings – and decided to revisit the burial place of Sir Walter Raleigh for the first time in twenty years.

The last time I’d visited St Margaret’s, I was writing a university thesis about Raleigh’s poetry and conducting a raging affair with an RSC actor. When the latter went into meltdown, a very kindly Verger at St Margaret’s who had been helping me with my inquiries spotted that my outlook had turned from sunshine to rain in the space of two days and invited me into the vestry to pour my heart out over coffee and a cigarette. I’ll never forget that random act of kindness so St Margaret’s remains one of the places I would bury a Horcrux should the necessity arise.

From St Margaret’s, I walked through Dean’s Yard and out into the Georgian backstreets behind Westminster Abbey. This is the London tourists dream about but never manage to find. You rarely see a soul except for the odd Westminster schoolboy or politician en route to a clandestine meeting. Smith’s Square is quite simply like a scene from My Fair Lady. You half expect seeing Jeremy Brett strolling past in Ascot rig singing On the Street where She Lives. This being a self-designated London holiday, I decided to cross the Thames to Lambeth Palace and St Mary’s: the deconsecrated church that now houses the Garden Museum.

If you haven’t been, I urge you to visit the Garden Museum. It is populated by marvellously gung-ho volunteers, winsome young ladies running a vegetarian cafe and a rag tag of students, horticulturalists and tourists not of the back pack and honking voice variety. The crowning glory is the secret knot garden accessed by a door leading off the Howard chapel where Anne Boleyn’s mother is buried. Now I’m no more drawn to vegetarianism than I am to Scientology but thought I’d give it a go. By the time I’d finished the soup, salad and apple and strawberry pressé, I could feel a Damascene conversion coming on. Who needs bespoke suits and Savoy nights when the path to true happiness lies in National Trust membership, homemade pottage and sensible shoes? Until next time…

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Photo Finish. April 2012.

Dear Rowley,

Has there ever been an event so inappropriately named as Ladies’ Day at Aintree? Should Little Britain make another series, they need look no further for inspiration than the tango-tanned, porcine, peroxide blondes absolutely crucifying the British fashion industry and teetering round Aintree on Louboutin-clad trotters. These ‘ladies’ walk like a transvestite on his first night out, behave with all the delicacy of a long distance trucker and grasp dainty little It Bags like baboons manhandling a Sevres tea cup.

It is terribly unfair of the newspapers to pick on Mrs Rooney who appeared to be channeling Adele but looked like a Julie Goodyear tribute act. She was positively demure in comparison to some of the monsters of frock on display at Aintree. I blame fast, cheap fashion and X-Factor culture that encourages every girl to dress like she’s auditioning for Girls Aloud. Perhaps most unforgivably, they attempt to upstage the horses.

The Grand National is one of those great sporting events that used to unite the nation. I remember being sent round to the bookies in Bakewell when I worked as a Saturday boy in my father’s shop to place our collective bets. Lorraine would bring in a portable black and white TV and staff and clients would gather round at 4.15pm to see the big race at Aintree. I always put a Lady Godiva on for my grandmother and we all hollered the winner home like fishwives poised to storm  Versailles.

Gambling is one of the few vices that I haven’t succumbed to since. At the last two Royal Meetings, I put a monkey to win on a horse with a cute name and long odds and won £350 and £500 respectively. The National is the equine equivalent of the Whacky Races and it’s anybody’s game. So yesterday better half and I studied the form and chose Sunnyhillboy. Knowing what a disappointment it is to lose your jockey at the first fence, I also backed Shakalakaboomboom to win.

Shakalakaboomboom led the field for most of the race before running out of steam over the last few fences. Sunnyhillyboy, having left the pace setters to it until the last four fences, shot into the lead and passed the finishing post nose-to-nose with Neptune Collonges. In the photo finish, Neptune had it and our collective winnings that would have been just shy of £900 evaporated like a Coalition promise. I could have sunk to my knees and ululated.

But frustrated avarice gave way to profound sadness at the news that Cheltenham Gold Cup winner Synchronised and another fine horse had been put down having fallen at Beechers Brook. The death of Synchronised was all the more poignant given that the horse had unseated its rider before the race and had been filmed cantering round Aintree showing the racing world what a magnificent beast it was.

The Grand National is a hazardous race and has killed many horses in its recent past. The racing fraternity has also quite rightly said RSPCA intervention to lower fences has made the race more rather than less dangerous. However, there is something of the Roman Forum about watching and betting on a sport that necessitates the death of thoroughbreds such as Synchronised. Jump racing is a danger for horse and jockey and this enhances the thrill of the chase. But surely the racing establishment could take measures that make a horse’s death an infrequent tragedy rather than an inevitability.

Speaking of the Coalition, one cannot help but think the granny tax, the tax on charitable donors, the lame runners and riders in the London mayoral race and Mr Cameron’s globe-trotting are brewing a perfect storm. Like Mr Blair, Mr Cameron tends to step onto the world stage like a toy poodle at Crufts every time he or his cabinet foul up on home territory. The Dave and Barak show was nauseating enough. The photo opportunity with Ang San Suuy Kyi in Nepal hasn’t raised Dave’s currency with the home crowd any more than posing in a kiss me quick hat with President Assad.

God only knows why the Conservatives are making such a meal of gay marriage. Puts one in mind of Bette Davis’s last line in Now Voyager about asking for the moon when we already have the stars. There’s nothing quite so irritating as the PC lobby categorising one as part of the ‘gay, lesbian and transgender community’. I am no more in coalition with the lesbians as I am with the Maoris. It’s rather like grouping people who have blonde hair and blue eyes…and we all know what happened the last time that unfortunate experiment was tried in Deutschland.

Praise be for mavericks such as David Hockney who wrote a strident defence of smoking in the face of our Health Secretary making it illegal to display cigarettes and lobbying for plain packaging on all tobacco products. If the government was truly altruistic it would ban cigarettes and we’d all live a couple of decades longer to eke out our final years in abject poverty and ill health not related to smokes. But the tax revenues are far too lucrative a bounty to ban hence the pointless exercises that now make scoring heroin an easier proposition in London than buying ten Marlboro Lights.

Still, every cloud has a silver lining. Perhaps anonymous cigarette packaging will revive the vogue for gold, silver or gem-set guilloché cigarette cases. Speaking of elegance, it never got better than Suzi Perry at Royal Ascot. Until next time…

 

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Going Down With All Hands. April 2012.

Dear Rowley,

Have you noticed the advertisement campaign on behalf of Stonewall on the side of countless London busses at present? The slogan – in bright red letters a foot high –  reads ‘Some people are gay. Get over it’. Is it just me or has homosexuality gone from the love that dare not speak it’s name to the love that can’t draw breath? Apart from in the odd radicalised mosque or sink estate, I think London is pretty laid back about the gays. The only people we hurl abuse at in the street these days are tourists, bankers and cyclists.

This puts me in mind of an amusing episode with La Farmer as we were stoating towards the Royal Geographic Society to hear a lecture by Mark Shand about Indian elephants. All of a sudden we were engulfed by a tsunami of pre-pubescent Italian tourists shrieking ‘Vamos! Vamos!’ at the top of their lungs as they ran away from us. ‘I told you red wasn’t your colour’, says I to Susan. That said, she paid me back in spades the other day at a meeting with the delightful Maurice Mullen who has quite the most tightly furled brolly I’ve ever had the privilege to see. When I asked if Maurice had my number, La Farmer skipped a beat and said ‘we’ve all got your number, dearie’. Priceless.

In the spirit of Stonewall’s ‘Some people are gay. Get over it’ campaign, I’m thinking of funding my own London bus advertisements in response to one of the burning issues of the day, namely, the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic. Don’t you think the commemorative TV shows, magazine articles, radio plays and reruns of movies are ever so slightly OTT? My ad campaign will read ‘It sank. Get over it’.

Now I know the glub glub of RMS Titanic in 1912 is a metaphor for the end of British imperialist ambitions, the class system and all that. Personally, I only remember 1912 as the birth year of my beloved Grandmother Sherwood who was as unsinkable as Molly Brown. But to the rest of the world 1912 signifies a moment of such doomed majesty, hubris and tragedy that there isn’t a dry seat in the house every time BBC shows a rerun of A Night To Remember or Titanic. Personally, I’d rather watch Shelley Winters in The Poseidon Adventure any day.

So what have the culture wonks provided for our delectation to commemorate the sinking of the Titanic? A Radio 4 documentary voiced by Jeanette Winterson who was chosen presumably because she has a thick northern accent that could pour suitable scorn on the people in first class because they had the temerity to survive a natural disaster. We’ve also been treated to a BBC1 doc voiced by Len Goodman of Strictly Come Dancing fame because he used to work in a shipyard before donning his tap shoes and has a cheeky Cockney lilt that can convey sufficient class bias and sentimentality.  Will a posho ever voice a BBC documentary again?

The iceberg on the cake was Julian Fellowes’s ITV dramatisation of the sinking. The first episode was like a government health warning about the dangers of being a pernicious aristo who cares only for her jewels in the Titanic strong box and tramples over hard working, decent folk, servants, children and pets to get to the lifeboats. It was pure panto and the acting so hammy you’d have to have a heart of stone not to laugh as the leading characters drown one by one in the briny.

I would hazard a guess that the reality on board the unfortunate vessel was that people behaved entirely in character regardless of class. Vanderbilts and Astors went down with the ship as well as Irish navvies and Scottish maid servants. The highest demographic of casualty was the crew. There’s food for thought for the class warriors. I’d like to think I would have been with J.J.  Astor who donned white tie, poured a brandy and waited for fate to take its course. But I suspect I would have tied my braces around Leonardo di Caprio and let him drown as I clung to a stateroom door bobbing in the ocean.

Speaking of going down with all hands, did you hear that the Royal Ascot TV coverage was moving from the BBC to Channel 4 next year? As you know, I was a lifer with the BBC at Ascot and clocked up eight years as fashion correspondent despite skipping a beat last year. I am sad that the crack team including Old Mother Balding, Willie, Rishi and Suzi Perry won’t be riding again in 2013. Royal Ascot should be a BBC flagship sports broadcast.

Being pragmatic I am proud of my contribution to Royal Ascot over the years. The Twitterverse – for what it’s worth – may say all sorts of things about elitism but Ascot has now issued guidelines for dress that I’ve been endorsing for ever. If I have been the cause of less exposed tattoos, navels, bra straps, piercings and fat bingo wings at the Royal Meeting then I’m a happy man. Until next time…

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Easter Parade. April 2012.

Dear Rowley,

Where have I been all your life? Well, truth to tell after finishing off The Perfect Gentleman I’ve gone from 5th to 1st gear. Bliss, isn’t it? Of course having time on one’s hands allows the devil to make work apropos of which I spent Easter at Better Half’s relations. Come Easter morn there was a three line whip to frogmarch the entire house party to the Sunday service. Whenever I enter a church I think of Charles Laughton’s famous line in Witness for the Prosecution when Marlene Dietrich is in the dock: ‘you’ve told so many lies, Fraulein Helm, that I’m surprised the Bible doesn’t leap out of your hands…In Flames!’

The good book didn’t quite immolate when I took a pew at Puttenham church but there was definitely a whiff of sulphur. Don’t know about you, but whenever a priest says ‘we will now sing hymn number…’ I always want to break into eight bars of I Want to be Evil. Don’t get me wrong. I absolutely adore – adore! – a sung eucharist at St George’s Mayfair with a full choir followed by a thundering sermon by the Bishop of London. But St George’s is a West End showstopper and makes every other church feel like amateur dramatics. Hard to know what to believe, no? I always think reincarnation is an attractive option. If at first you don’t succeed…

What news on the Rialto? Well, for starters there were no Fabergé eggs left by the Easter Bunny. To compound the crushing disappointment, I re-read Erickson’s The Last Tsarina to remind myself that those who receive bejewelled Imperial Easter eggs one minute can end up shot in the Urals the next. One of my favourite authors, Joe Keenan, wrote a brilliant description of a woman so rich ‘she ovulates Fabergé eggs’.

On Tuesday next Andy B and I go to Thames & Hudson to look at the first page proofs for The Perfect Gent. It is always gratifying to see the images chosen and art directed to scale and in colour. I had dinner – or rather two bottles of wine and a quail’s egg – with my publisher Lucas at a terrific new place on Endell Street called The 10 Cases a couple of weeks ago to talk about what next. It’s a toss up between proposing a new idea that is a million miles from men’s style or signing to do the Savoy book for Brett and Rizzoli.

I haven’t been living entirely for pleasure as Lady Bracknell would have it (frequently). The project to catalogue Henry Poole & Co’s ledgers has taken a new direction apropos I duck into the archive every Tuesday as if bobbing for apples and come up with an historic name, write his biography and trace his story with Poole’s. Next week’s subject (to be posted online at the Poole’s Hall of Fame) is Lord Rosebery: a man who declared in his youth that he fully intended to marry an heiress, become Prime Minister and win the Derby…all of which he achieved. We have Lord Rosebery’s racing silks pattern in the Poole’s archive with a wisp of silk as glossy as if it were woven yesterday.

Last week I was given the opportunity to go back to Titanic – or Atlantic as it happened – when Jeremy King gave me a hard hat tour of his new restaurant-bar-cabaret Brasserie Zedel in the old Art Deco ballroom beneath what was the Regent’s Palace Hotel. In the early 1990s, it was known as the Atlantic Bar & Grill as owned by Mr Peyton and was quite simply the most glamorous boîte in London. At the time, I was working as a cocktail waiter in a very salubrious watering hole called The Yard. After closing, we’d pool our tips and high tail it to the Atlantic where we knew the doorman so were waved past the velvet rope.

Walking down the sweeping staircase, past the cigarette kiosk and into the ballroom one felt as jolly super as Gary Cooper. It was a great privilege to go back to the ballroom and see Zedel rising up from the depths of the old Atlantic. I’m going to make a prediction. When Zedel opens at the end of June, it is going to rock London by the heels. As for the cabaret bar, well let’s just say I’ll be going like Elsie. Speaking of cabaret, the Savoy is introducing Burlesque on a Sunday night in the Beaufort Bar. That’s just what Londoners need on a Sunday evening: hits, glitz and tits.

Did I tell y0u I started working on the novel that’s been careering round in my mind for the last year shrieking ‘write me, write me’. Imagine Mapp & Lucia meets Evil Under the Sun and you’ve got the idea. It isn’t autobiographical but does feature some thinly veiled pen portraits of people who have crossed my path over the past twenty years in London. I can already hear the libel writs thumping on my welcome mat like lemmings. What I love about E. F. Benson is his affection for his characters such as Miss Mapp and Lucia despite – or because of – their flaws. That’s the tone I hope to emulate.

Having threatened clients with the kidnapping of their children/pets, I’ve hustled sufficient drachma to book our house in Corfu for September. La Farmer and Mr Bowering are joining us as might Mr Leane and Miss Watt. It’ll be like Carry On Up The Acropolis. Boo hiss that we’ve got six months until take off but the quadrangle behind Bloomsbury Towers always gives me a spring consolation prize when the trees start to leaf and the view from my desk quite simply lifts the spirits and melts the heart. Until next time…

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