I've been reading a few books on clothing recently, Esquire's Man at his Best, and Boyer's Eminently Suitable. While both of them are excellent, they seem repetitive. They share the same stories about blazers, about Harris Tweed, about Cary Grant. What I feel we need, and perhaps desperately, are not new styles, but new perspectives to add richness to the old styles. New stories, new memories. Unfortunately, to this I can add very little.
Some of the best writing about clothes I can remember is writing about one's father's clothes. The smell of his tweed. The strange, unearthly shine of his shoes. I have none of these. I was not interested in clothes when I was young, and, on top of that, my father had no aged Edward Greens. He dressed well, certainly, and wore suits regularly, but there was no age there, not enough money for rich style. He made do. He made do very well, but it was, ultimately, making do, at least, from what little I remember. Even if he had a strong sense of style, it was not a lesson he taught me. He taught me better things. And so, I feel like a sartorial orphan, with strange, adoptive parents, Gary Cooper, or James Dean... adoptive parents who were never personal, and have all the strange, otherworldliness of a shining screen.
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