VANCOUVER

Suitable Wardrobe

The Art of Composition
Spectacular bow tie, no? The trouble is the context - a jacket that is not powerful enough to stand up to it and frame the ensemble. Individually, shirt, tie and jacket are each beautiful in their own way, and they have complementary colors. Worn together though, the coat's light color means the observer's eye stops on the tie rather than the wearer's face. There is an art to composition of the day's clothing. The individual elements must fit of course. They need to be well made, from good cloth. And then they have to work together so that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The same shirt and tie worn with a dark blazer, for example, would blend together so that none of the individual elements dominate the look.

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A Square Stands Alone
Maestro Luciano Barbera demonstrates that the pocket square need not relate to anything else in an ensemble. I might quibble that a chalk striped flannel suit is not an ideal choice for evening, but his juxtaposition of a green paisley square next to a white shirt, pink necktie and pink boutonniere is inspired.

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Random Images From Pitti
Dawn on the first day. Pitti is a twenty minute walk through the city from my hotel. Michael Hill's Drake's London collection for fall/winter 2012 was arguably better than ever. In the photo, wool challis for neckties. The cardigan in the photo was one of the highlights of Inis Meáin's collection for next fall. Massimiliano Bresciani of the eponymous hosiery firm. Alpaca socks for next fall. Who would have thunk it?

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Corthay Opens in London
Historically it has been the French who come to London for their clothes rather than the other way around, but increasingly there are swimmers against the current. Pierre Corthay has been making shoes in Paris under his own name for twenty years. Eight weeks ago he opened the doors to a new Corthay store at 12a Motcomb Street in Knightsbridge, London opposite Louboutin and around the corner from Berluti (Corthay shoes are available in the United States at Leffot in New York).   The Corthay make is excellent and the style has some kinship with Berluti, Corthay's Paris neighbor, being pointed of toe and more colorful than the English makers. Both ready to wear and bespoke shoes are available at the store, with RTW priced from $1,100 (850 euros) and bespoke starting at $4,000 (3,000 euros). Ask for manager Francois Pourcher.-Christian Price

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Russian Leather
In 1973, divers off England's Plymouth Sound found the wreck of the Catharina von Flensburg, an eighteenth century brigantine that sank in 1786 with a cargo of reindeer hides. They had been cured in baths of rye or oat flour and yeast, hand embossed before being soaked in wood liquor and finally hand curried and soaked in seal oil and birch tan oil. The result is a unique finish that cannot be replicated. Though covered with mud for centuries, the hides proved to be water resistant and still very serviceable. Bundles have been periodically brought to the surface and sold by the divers who discovered them. They are dried, cleaned and sorted in a small workshop in Cornwall where some are made into attaché cases, belts and other leathergoods on the spot. Others are sent to London to be made into shoes in London by bespoke shoemakers G. J. Cleverley . There is some question as to how long the supplies of hide will be available. I have heard it estimated that half of them still lie in the mud of the seabed, but the diver who was given rights to them has retired and there is no successor in sight. For now, Cleverley continues to deliver a small supply of products from two hundred year old Russian leather. Photos: G. J. Cleverley

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Beau Brummels on $14,000 a Year
The following piece, "Beau Brummels on £60 a Year," was written by author Evelyn Waugh (Brideshead Revisited) in 1929. The strategy remains valid today. Of course, there is really only one way of being perfectly dressed - that is, to be grossly rich. You may have exquisite discrimination and the elegance of a gigolo, but you can never rival the millionaire if he has even the faintest inclination towards smartness. He orders suits as you order collars, by the dozen. His valet wears them for the first three days so that they never look new, and confiscates them after three months so that they never look old. He basks in a perpetual high noon of bland magnificence.It is useless to compete against him. If your object in choosing your clothes is to give an impression of wealth, you had far better adopt a pose of reckless dowdiness and spend your money in maintaining under a hat green and mildewed with age a cigar of fabulous proportions. If, however, you have no intention of deceit, but simply, for some reason, happen to like being well dressed, it is essential to have at least two tailors.There are about a dozen first-rate tailors in London whose names you may always see quoted by the purveyors of ‘mis-fit’ clothing. Below them are about a hundred rather expensive eminently respectable unobtrusive shops in fashionable streets, where your uncles have bought their clothes since undergraduate days. Below them are several hundreds of quite cheap very busy little shops in the City and business quarters. The secret of being well dressed on a moderate income is to choose one of the first-rate and and one of the third-rate tailors and maintain a happy balance between them.There are some things, an evening tail-coat for instance, which only a first-rate tailor can make. On the other hand, the difference between a pair of white flannel trousers costing five guineas in Savile Row or George Street and one costing two guineas in the Strand is practically negligible. The same applies to almost all country clothes. It is not necessary or particularly desirable that these, except of course the riding breeches, should be obtrusively well cut.The chief disadvantage of small tailors is that they usually have such a very depressing selection of patterns. It is a good plan to buy all your tweeds direct from the mills in Scotland and to have them made up. Another disadvantage of the small tailor is that he never knows what is fashionable. At least once every eighteen months you should spend fifteen guineas in getting a suit in Savile Row, which will serve as a model for him.It is never wise to allow any one except a first-rate tailor to attempt a double-breasted waistcoat; in some mysterious way this apparently simple garment is invariably a failure except in expert hands. But you can safely leave all trousers which are not part of a suit, even evening trousers, which ought, in any case, to be made of a rather heavier material than the coat, to our less expensive shop. The most magnificent-looking traveling coat I ever saw had been made up for four guineas from the owner’s own stuff by the second -best tailor in a cathedral town.It is usually an economy to buy your hosiery at an expensive shop. It is essential that evening shirts and waistcoats should be made to your measure; cheap ties betray their origin in a very short time.There is only one completely satisfactory sort of handkerchief - the thick squares of red and white cotton in which workmen carry their dinners. Socks wear out just as quickly whatever their quality, and are the one part of a man’s wardrobe which ought never to attract attention. Expensive shoes are a perfectly sound investment, particularly if you keep six or seven pairs and always put them on trees when they are not in use.Waugh goes on to calculate that by using a mix of the great and the merely good a man could be well tailored for the sum of £60 a year in 1929 money. Converting the cost of a Savile Row suit in 1929, some 13 pounds and change, to the current price lets us estimate that Waugh's proposed purchases (a couple bespoke suits, shoes, accessories, country clothes and fractions of outerwear and evening wear) could be made today for roughly £9,000 (about $14,000) a year. $14,000 is of course still a contemporary millionaire's budget, or that of a man who makes a priority of his clothing, but when Waugh was advising his readers how to look like Brummels without the resources of the 'grossly rich' he was referring to his own upper middle class struggles to look good in the company of people with Mitt Romney's sort of income. And that can be done for $14,000 a year.

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Three Sock Drawers
Socks should also complement a day's ensemble. Consider the three sock drawers of three mythical (though I know each of them) men. The first is full of navy socks in wool and cotton (navy being a bit less of a black hole than black). A pair for each day is about right, plus a couple of spares (throw in a pair or two of black silk for evening wear). Easy to choose each morning and particularly awkward with light gray trousers. Comparable to a closet containing nothing but navy worsteds. The well dressed man's sock drawer should at least mirror his suits and odd trousers. For example: -dark gray -2 navy-3 mid-gray-2 brown (tan in summer)The third drawer, my personal preference, adds some less than obtrusive pattern:-dark gray with a black clock pattern-navy birdseye, navy with a gray clock pattern-silver ribbed, mid-gray birdseye and mid-gray with dark gray pinstripes-brown ribbed, beige heather mixAnd into that same drawer might go an extra pair of prune. In the photo, mid-gray flannel colored Bresciani socks worn with gray flannel trousers and black suede shoes (the combination of flannel and suede is every bit as good as that of flannel and a grenadine necktie). The combination is quite a bit better looking than navy would have been, in my opinion, though a birdseye might have been even better.

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The Fourth Type of Bow Tie
There are four principal types of bow ties, in my opinion. There are the wool challis and ancient madder designs that some of us love to wear with tweed. There are black and midnight blue grosgrain and satin bows for our dinner clothes, as well as the inexpensive printed silks often worn with seersucker in the American South. And there is a rarer group of beautifully woven silks that add panache to worsted suits and blazers in the evening. This latter category is the newest of them, as men did not begin wearing lounge suits and blazers after the sun set until relatively recently. It is a look with multiple things going for it: attractive, evokes the past, and steps on no customs that I am aware of (which wearing patterned bows with dinner jackets certainly does). The key to it is the quality of the silk, which should be exceptionally rich looking under artificial light. I know of few domestic sources for these bows. My first came from Charvet in Paris twenty years ago and I have been wearing them ever since. The ties in the photos are of course at the ASW store.

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Other Ways To Think About Dressing
Dressing is not an isolated art. The principles which govern coat, tie, and shoes, at least the most fundamental among them, are not specifically about clothes at all. Things like proportion, color combinations, craft-value, etc. can be found elsewhere and for the clothes-minded man applied back to what lies in his closet.I could recount a few hundred anecdotes of style-education, but instead I will restrict myself to a few recommended pieces of reading and inspiration.Food is a good place to start. Think about it for a minute - how is food typically presented? You usually get a solid white or off-white plate, with something centrally presented and peripherally adorned. Not a far cry from the effect of shirt, tie, and accessories. This might sound sort of weird at first, but looking through haute cuisine cookbooks is a great way to get a sense of balance, restraint, and how to make various elements of your kit pop against others. The Lever House Cookbook is a particular favorite of mine. Just do not go around telling people that my white shirt, green tie, orange pochette combination was inspired by a lamb chop with herb frittata and piquillo vinaigrette.My next recommendation is a little more obvious. I do not think anyone would argue with you if you told them that color appeared other places than in clothing. Eve Ashcraft's book The Right Color is a masterclass in balancing the bold and the reticent to get exactly the right feel you're looking for. I am not saying you need to breakfast in a cerulean lounge with lemon accents and eggshell trim, but you could take a powerful blue suit and offset it with more subtle partners.Ashcraft is particularly good at taking colors we might deem too much and making them look just right. A great lesson for all of us. It really is a book as much about theory as interior design. Finally, we can look to architecture. There is no easy book recommendation here, though Assouline's offerings in this department are pretty solid. Generally speaking, it is not lessons in color I take from buildings, but instead suggestions of form. When you are dealing with objects hundreds of meters high, the ability for something a foot or two wide to still be subtle is miraculous. Thinking about how shapes are elongated, where the broadest parts of skyscrapers are, and how lines of various shapes and sizes craftily guide the eye to just the right place is a productive exercise.-Stephen Pulvirent

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A New Stock Of Braces
We received a new shipment of Albert Thurston braces this week at the store, including the new-to-us green boxcloth with hand stitched ends in the photograph. Braces of course are anathema to the young, who apparently fear that no woman would ever be attracted to a braces-wearing man. They forget that this is patently untrue or the world would have been depopulated before the second world war. Nonetheless, braces are generally relegated to married suit-wearers, who appreciate that their trousers hang better and remain in place all day without the tugging and general nervousness that is part of the belted trouser experience.The general preference for belts has relegated braces to the evening, for, thankfully, most men seem to recognize that a belt looks completely out of place with a dinner jacket. This is borne out by sales, as the white moiré Thurston braces that were worn by Daniel Craig as James Bond several years ago come close to outselling all other styles added together these days (and we are re-stocked with those at the store as well).Once safely married, many men who try braces for the first time are forever after unhappy with their belts. They begin by sewing buttons on to the waistband of their belted trousers, perhaps having the empty loops removed by an alterations tailor. From there they usually migrate to higher waisted trousers, which have a better fall from the natural waist. And since no two tailors make trousers of the same length, the final step is the acquisition of one pair of braces for each suit, so that no adjustment is required to make one's trousers hang perfectly down to the shoes. Braces being underwear, no color coordination is required with the rest of the day's clothes unless, like the television host Mr. Larry King, a man removes his jacket in public. That said, the aforementioned bottle green boxcloth works particularly well with tweed as well as gray flannel.

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A Bleak Prospect
A link-cuffed and signet ring wearing T. S. Eliot, the naturalized English poet and playwright known for The Wasteland, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and other modernist things is shown in the photo (probably taken before the second world war) wearing a heavy worsted suit which I will guess weighs in at 18 ounces (540 grams). That would make a topcoat today but was once a standard English suiting.Worsteds of that weight predated central heating and passed from the scene as homes and offices grew warmer. Indeed, the 16 ounce (480 gram) suit is about as heavy as a man can comfortably wear for hours indoors in a place like New York where the steam heat is always turned up, and 13 ounces (400 grams) is more common. But the best cloth of those weights makes for clothing that is comfortable and lasts decades. The move to Super wool qualities has done much to cause these weights to go on life support. Not too long ago, good quality wool from an entire fleece averaged about a Super 80s, where the Super number refers to the width of the wool fibers (higher numbers represent finer fibers). Then came demand from mills in emerging countries weaving cloth in great volume for lower end ready to wear, whose indicator of quality became the Super number. These Supers are in turn woven into suits that are lighter in weight and less expensive because they use less wool. The result is that most of what was once suiting quality wool has had the finer fibers sorted and as I understand it what remains is less than satisfactory for tailored clothing. So it is relatively easy to make more fragile lightweight cloth and much more difficult to weave heavier stuff with a nice hand. My one suit from Smith Woolens now sold out 15 ounce (450 gram) Whole Fleece has a lovely feel without being in any way Super, but only five or so years after it was offered Smith can no longer replicate it. This is obscure stuff of course, that matters only to those few who understand that heavier cloth drapes better, wrinkles less and is warmer in the cold while remaining comfortable indoors. Cloth for summer is easier than ever to obtain, but the best worsteds for winter may rarely be seen again. Mr. Eliot would have found that a bleak prospect.

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Know How To Fold Them
According to Stu Bloom at RAVE FabriCare, about 80% of men get their shirts back from the laundry on hangers, and this is certainly the wisest course since they are free of the creases that come from having them folded. The challenge with the practice comes when it is time to pack for a trip, and the shirts must be folded anyway. The usual way to prepare shirts for packing is to fold them in thirds, replicating the commercial laundry folding machine (see the shirt on the right in the photo). Whoever designed that machine was apparently not very clothes conscious as that fold leaves the vertical and horizontal creases it imparts placed so that they can be visible under a jacket, which might not be a terrible thing with some cloth as it will hang out in an hour or two but heavier shirtings like oxfords and twills can remain creased for much of the day, contributing to a messier look than a man ought to aspire to (here we deliberately ignore no-iron shirts on the grounds that the well dressed man eschews them). Now, it is only natural that a man would assume that folding meant visible creases and that there is nothing to be done about it, at least until like me he noticed that RAVE's clean by mail shirts are folded so that any creases that might occur in parts of the shirt front are not visible when a man has his jacket on (the shirt on the left was folded by RAVE). The secret is to fold the shirt in half rather than in thirds. In other words, when the shirt is on its front laid out for folding, turn the sleeve sides over only a quarter of the way, leaving a space between them. Then fold the bottom up so the shirt is roughly halved into a square. Leaving all the folds loose will also help the shirt's appearance, but only marginally as the state of being packed will inevitably press it to a certain extent. I will be the first to admit that the square shirt fold is fairly obscure advice, and has the downside that otherwise useful suitcase accessories like Eagle Creek's folders and cubes seem to all be designed to accommodate shirts folded into thirds. Nonetheless, a supply of heavy duty polyethylene bags makes for a reasonable substitute and having a supply of pressed looking shirts when one unpacks is worth a little one-time trouble.

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RJ’s Alternative Style Icons II: Omar Sharif in Pleasure Palace
By the time he made the justifiably forgotten 1980 telefilm Pleasure Palace, Omar Sharif was known in Hollywood as a gambler with an acting hobby rather than the other way around. How did he get there, and why should we care? As Sharif later recalled in an interview, after Lawrence of Arabia launched his Western film career in the 1960s, he worked with four different prestigious directors on four high-profile but unsuccessful films: Anatole Litvak’s Nazi murder mystery The Night of the Generals, which handles the same material as Valkyrie much better; Fred Zinnemann’s bleak Spanish Civil War drama Behold a Pale Horse, Sidney Lumet’s answer to Belle de Jour; The Appointment; and Anthony Mann’s Gibbon adaptation of The Fall of the Roman Empire, which seems to have inspired Gladiator. Despite his committed performances in a varied set of roles, these flawed films’ commercially unpalatable themes meant Sharif’s career sputtered after Lawrence and Doctor Zhivago.(All but one of the films above were period pieces, so we will not discuss Sharif’s wardrobe in them – though nowadays dressing as if one cares is tantamount to costume, I have no desire to cross into that uncanny valley and urge us to wear costume clothes.)After 1970, the film industry didn’t seem to know how to use Omar Sharif except as visiting royalty or shadowy gamblers, soldiers of fortune, and other stock characters, often satirically – deliberately underused as a cynical cruise ship captain in Richard Lester’s delightfully subversive disaster movie Juggernaut, damned with faint praise by Pauline Kael for bringing “more spirit” to his tiny role as the Egyptian Assassin in The Pink Panther Strikes Again than to his feature roles, compacted into a walking hunk of metal in Top Secret!. Even in the 1960s, positive reviews of Sharif as an “atavistic” romantic lead reminiscent of Valentino suggested that he was a man out of his time. Yet like greater actors, he had created himself in the image his audience had desired. As he notes in his memoirs, the long out of print The Eternal Male, he grew up Catholic and the child of Syrian-Lebanese parents in Egypt, speaking French before Arabic, and eventually speaking with fluency in many languages, all, however, with a slight, unplaceable accent, which resonates a little with this writer. He changed his name and his religion after starring in his first major film and grew his iconic mustache for the first time at David Lean’s request for his role as Sherif Ali in Lawrence. However, religion played no role in his gambling or romantic pursuits, and Sharif was threatened and vilified in the country of his birth for playing a Jewish gambler and kissing Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl – on and off set. After they broke up, Streisand declared that Sharif talked about nothing but bridge. A world-class bridge player who gambled away most of his movie earnings, over time Sharif eventually settled into a suite at the Royal Monceau in Paris, which sets up the amusing premise of Pleasure Palace: in this movie, playboy gambler and rootless nomad Omar Sharif plays a playboy gambler and rootless nomad… who comes to the rescue of a saintly casino owner (!) and battles for control of Caesars Palace in a high-stakes card game. By this stage in his career, from the late 1970s through the 1990s, Sharif seemed to turn up at shooting for his mixed bag of films and miniseries in his own clothes. In this respect, he was no empty suit. Magnificent dinner jackets and sports coats, masterfully cut in beautiful materials, still look wonderful when viewed thirty years later, despite coming from the moment between two of the lowest points in modern menswear: the 1970s’ abandon of taste and proportion and the early 1980s’ rejection of fit and notch height. And Sharif looks comfortable and natural in his clothes, pointing to a good collaboration between client and cutter. I say cutter for, if Sharif was wearing his own clothes, they were made by some of the best – tailoring by Huntsman and Cifonelli, who elegantly suited powerfully built men like Sharif and Lino Ventura. And Sharif was loyal for nearly half a century to his shirtmaker, Turnbull & Asser, ever since they made Cossack-style shirts for him to wear for his role in Doctor Zhivago. Contrast his effortlessness with the trussed-up self-consciousness of stars in certain recent films with high-profile designer tie-ins, wearing their clothes as if they were not only brand new but still had cardboard and pins in them.Other reasons to watch? Not many, apart from the odd, anachronistic bromance between Omar’s character and his BFF José Ferrer, whom he appears to have since forgiven for raping Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia. Based on the strangely exhaustive tour of Caesars’ facilities the characters take, I suspect that the production was sponsored by Caesars Palace (Marvel at Caesars’ state-of-1980-art gym and Omar’s frumpy gym clothes! Gaze in wonder at the hidden ranch VIPs can retreat to!). The film does also feature a young Victoria Principal, fresh off her Playboy spread, and the final climactic gambling scene is appropriately tense and somewhat unpredictable: if my memory serves me correctly the game is baccarat, so this terrible film features characters better dressed and gameplay more elegant than Casino Royale (Texas Hold ’em, really?).But if you don’t see this film, many others from Omar Sharif’s 1970s-1990s canon offer similar wardrobe epiphanies, including:- 1976’s Crime and Passion in which he plays a womanizing Austrian investment advisor turned on by financial risk who is oddly oblivious to the Sony Betamax video cameras a jealous client has placed everywhere (It must have seemed like a great idea at the time - Ivan Passer directing! Score by Vangelis! Karen Black fresh off of The Day of the Locust And instead fails at both black comedy and suspense.)- 1981’s Green Ice, in which he plays a gem dealer exiled to Colombia who loses his fiancée and jewel stash to Ryan O’Neal in a hot air balloon, and- 1992’s Sidney Sheldon melodrama Memories of Midnight, in which he plays a murderous Greek shipping magnate out to repress Jane Seymour’s memories.Now, of course, simply by living long enough to have his failures forgotten and his talent remembered, Sharif has made a comeback of sorts, and reportedly given up gambling and T&A and moved home to Egypt. His disappointing body of work lies in the shadow of his persona. Still, according to legend, upon meeting him Peter O’Toole said, “No one on Earth is named Omar Sharif. I shall call you Fred.” Cairo Fred, this is for you. ‑ Réginald-Jérôme de Mans

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