Showing posts with label photo. Show all posts
Showing posts with label photo. Show all posts

Thursday 24 March 2011

A Portrait of a New Suit

It's Houndstooth Time
Right before the spring arrives to make it obsolete, that is

Monday 21 March 2011

A Glimpse of a New Suit


   From the waist up, that is. Please excuse the rumpled hem caused by a restless foot

   More to follow,

   BON

Thursday 17 March 2011

Psyche Out - An Ensemble Dissection

Warning: this entry contains scenes of a carousing nature:

 


   Fun fact: not counting the Holliday & Brown Special Re-edition print on the shirt, the only vintage item is the silk paisley brocade tie; its red lining especially comes through under a camera flash. Of course, my semi-regular readers may know that I've quite the thing for vintage silk paisley brocade; exactly the sort of thing that deserves a comeback, if I do say so myself

   One may also note the lack of a pocket square/pochette. This is very much deliberate - the severity of a shirt in the overall ensemble can, and should, determine the necessity for extra adornments, particularly around the chest area. It is already commendable if one has complementary ties to hand, in this case, but it rather pushes the boat out a touch too recklessly to find a pochette when such a shirt already adds that eyecatching element. Dressing is always a balancing act

   Mind you, I could have done with a hat

Sunday 6 March 2011

Springspiration



    Consider one or two traditional accoutrements like neckscarves, a matching yet complementary shirt and tie combination and lighter coloured suiting for the incoming season. It will be good for you. It's to our cost that illustrators are no longer charged with the content of lookbooks

Scans by Sator from Grafton Fashions For Men 1971

Friday 4 March 2011

Boutonnièred



   It felt like time for an actual tiny slice of nature in my jacket buttonhole. And for good measure, a map of Delaware (of all places) in my breast pocket

Saturday 26 February 2011

Worn Out

   The recent loss of my various autumn/winter dress trousers and jackets from Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche, Gucci (vintage) and Loewe (vintage) has impelled something of a re-evaluation. No, I have not become that fellow who burnt all of his worldly goods to rid the taste of liberal guilt he felt over living in a branded world from his mouth; neither am I about to lose my Barimanastic (copyright: Maxminimus) sense of presentation and start purchasing my looks wholesale from whatever is dictated by Topman, The Guardians's Petridis column or The Daily Mail's style section this week

   But I did dump around three recycling bags' worth of clothes at an undisclosed charity shop in an undisclosed borough of South London at an undisclosed point in time, rather recently

   Wardrobe purges require a ruthless, confident style of self-editing to make a dent in the overabundance of styles and clothes that comprise one's clothing collection. I, by contrast, threw a great many things in a plastic bag and swore off the chemical cocktails I'd been consuming at the time of purchase. It's a rehabilitative experience all round

   One of the dominant aspects of my wardrobe was a fondness for a particular vintage brand: Father's Hand-Me Downs. Certainly, the sentimental sway of his 1980s and 1990s suiting and accessories was assiduous, but there was a key to the pleasure they gave me: I was matching them with my own finds and when the pieces that form the real cornerstone of my ensembles are lost, much of the cohesion goes with it

   So, out have gone formerly loved garments crafted by the likes of Turnbull & Asser, Hawes & Curtis, Hermes, Jaeger, Haines & Bonner, Savoy Tailors Guild and myriad others, even including a very well made but very well dated suit by the venerable Italian tailoring house, Angelo Roma. So, who are my replacement names? I am pleased to say that a mental list was drawn up in mental crayon over the past year; this was subtly threaded through various Mode Parade entries as I wrote about those whose wares I desired to wear. So, in step the likes of Mr. Fish, Holliday & Brown, Tom Ford-era Gucci/Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche, Hedi Slimane-era YSL RG, Prada and Etro to mingle with my remaining perennials from Junya Watanabe, Miu Miu, Hilditch & Key, Maison Martin Margiela, Aquascutum, H&M, Turnbull, Dries Van Noten, Paul Smith and Liberty. If my intended return to full-time London life succeeds, there may even be tailoring - perhaps Pokit, possibly Cad and the Dandy; maybe the budget might even stretch to Edward Sexton, Chittleborough & Morgan or one of the Lamb's Conduit Street houses

   Oh, and the fondness for 1950s - 1970s vintage is not going away. There's nothing like seeing a pair of lapels stretched right across my chest like a hang-glider; the pleasure increases when it's double breasted
  
   To reward all of you that have willingly read (or hastily scrolled down) this far, here is a photograph of me playing with some lizards:


   More as it develops

Friday 25 February 2011

Mile High Confidential


Maestro? Some travelling music, please:

When they banned smoking and stopped opening the bar seconds after lift off it changed it for me. Drinks were free and it was expected that you needed a buzz ASAP if you were flying. A shorter flight, like SF-Seattle, they would come by 2-3 three times with drinks

There was glamour in taking people to the airport and seeing them off. Or waiting at their gate for them to arrive

The better airlines had a full roast beef on board that they carved for you to order. They used to pass out free playing cards and mini packs of smokes

TWA used to have an open bar and buffet on the SFO to St Louis route. You didn't really mind if the flight was delayed. They would just open the bar and let you eat and drink yourself silly

I recall sitting on the runway at JFK in route to St Louis in the late '70's. A electrical storm hit, so we just stayed on the runway for an hour and a half and had a frigging party in the back of the plane before taking off
-- PSG, 27/05/2010, The Forvm


Friday 19 November 2010

Wan Chai/At the Races


   I schlepped to the Hong Kong Expo at Wan Chai on a Wednesday, which was perhaps too deeply commercial to be of any worth to tourists. The guest speakers, there to expound on matters of Asian investment and infrastructure, would probably have been interesting for those concerned with the scale of such things

   That night, I joined the weekly pilgrimage to the racetrack at Happy Valley. I'm not much of a gambling man in this sense (primarily because I bring others greater fortune than I do myself), but food, beverages and camaraderie are in abundance, and horse riding is better viewed live. The photographs do not clearly connote the scale of the track, but I think they still capture some of its expansiveness

   Besides, it is certainly a setting in which wearing Junya Watanabe Man S/S07 can be considered fitting

Friday 12 November 2010

Local Sampling


   In this outfit, I'm wearing a custom-made jacket and shirt combination that originates from here in Hong Kong. The jacket is a vintage late 1970s number; the shirt is far more recent and actually a light shade of orange linen. A number of the other pieces were probably manufactured here, also

   Something of a "When in Rome" ensemble, then

Saturday 6 November 2010

Birds/New Friend


   I recently paid a visit to the State-Of-The-Arts Gallery in Central, Hong Kong, where I met this fellow. He was encouraging visitors to unleash their inner animal, rather like the Power Penguin meditation sequence of my favourite film, Fight Club

   Like this man and Fight Club's unnamed Narrator, I suspect that my own animal is avian themed - apposite and appropriate - although a peacock might be a tad obvious. Our sartorial fandom does make us - dare I say - birds of a feather

Friday 17 September 2010

Roll It



Not bad for a man named Lewis


   Posthumously speaking, Brian Jones is my favourite Stone; the butterfly to Charlie Watts' beetle (and this also takes into account Keef's splendid purple suit); never a grown-up, always a child. Where Watts today is precise, sharp and structured in his appearance to the point that he may as well be armoured, Jones' flamboyance at its peak suggested that a mere brush with his chimerical finery would result in a psychotropic trip

   And those caught up in his personal whirlwind must have suspected the come downs would be as debilitating as they were scandalous


   Brian is perhaps the quintessential Rock Polymath of Doom, since, as it is sometimes seen, with great ability comes great disaster. He was charismatic, popular, sexually overactive and indulged in a great many interests; one could see the self-destructive predisposition a mile off. He was a rebel within a band of rebels and a quintessential outside-insider, a feeling to which I can sometimes relate

   He was also a Peacock sans pareil, with a mid-to-late 1960s wardrobe  practically custom built to outrage the sensibilities of the most conservative echelons of sartorialism and stir the loins of the girls and women who flocked to the itinerant father of five and his bandmates.  With finery to source from the likes of Mr. Fish, Hung On You, I Was Lord Kitchener's Valet, and Granny Takes A Trip, Brian had little difficulty in establishing himself as a leader of the psychedelic plumage set

   Bandmate Bill Wyman later summed him up as thus:
There were two Brians... one was introverted, shy, sensitive, deep-thinking... the other was a preening peacock, gregarious, artistic, desperately needing assurance from his peers... he pushed every friendship to the limit and way beyond
   Of course, even without the motivation of court appearances to moderate his excesses, he was perfectly capable of affecting a more reputable presentation when the occasion arose; indeed, the earlier days of The Rolling Stones - interesting enough to serve as a reference for Stefano Pilati's Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche collection in Fall 2008 - feature a more relatively sober Brian, with he and his bandmates more attuned to the calmer attire of the earlier 1960s. I like to think that he was good at that, also:



   But don't think that I cannot appreciate the contrast; the immediacy of Brian's psyched out latter period may attract more attention, but these different modes instantly resonate with me, used as I am to modifying my appearance when social engagements call for it. That, by the by, is a choice I make - it's rather an interesting exercise in adaptability where I'm concerned

   Nevertheless, the Dandy In The Sky look that Brian made his own has such a compelling F-U grace to it that it rarely fails to inspire.After all, peacocks rarely exist to be 100% replicated; it is their ideas that are to be admired or reviled, absorbed or discarded. For all the white men who can be found fretting about their suitability for a wider palette of clothing colours, there's Brian's blithe mixing and matching; a riotous visual patchwork of glee for dressing up that doesn't occur to most fellows even once in a lifetime. Where concerns persist over the use of odd striped trousers, Brian went to tour sporting a dark jacket and corresponding tie (3rd photograph from the top), confidently displaying the desaturated version of his own adventurous glamour. When I need an interesting guide or 5 to donning neckscarves and other silken accoutrements, I have over a dozen pictures of Brian to show me how it's done

   Certainly, he looked like the sort of fellow one might proffer to a hippy at a Dead concert to lick, but I enjoy that. I draw the line at his blazer suit and the fondness for python skin boots he shared with Keith Richards (though I suppose that he had to share a few tastes at least with The Glimmer Twins), but with such a bombast, there's usually a line that must be drawn somewhere

   Let us put it this way - he is not the Lapo Elkann of the 1960s - for a start, Lapo's binges seem to have had a more all-encompassing deleterious effect on his own creativity than Brian's did his. At least Brian had the good grace to keep it consistent

   Mick Jagger, appropriately, wore one of Mr. Fish's shirt dresses when performing at The Rolling Stones' free concert in Hyde Park, two days after Brian joined The 27 Club upon his death on 3rd July 1969. Having dedicated the performances to the founder who eventually became isolated from his peers, the band's frontman took a moment to play orator in memory of his one-time friend:


   Brian, as it is famously known, was ultimately discovered dead at the bottom of his own swimming pool at his Cotchford Farm home in West Sussex. It bears noting that in later years, the tiles from the pool were individually sold for around $210 per 6-inch tiles, courtesy of his own Fan Club

   Such as it was, Brian earned a place in checkered history. And popular culture and rock 'n' roll were certainly the more interesting for having had him there to develop their milieus in a most uncommon manner

   Roll with it

Further reading:


http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/r/jeremy-reed/brian-jones.htm


http://www.amazon.com/Brian-Jones-Untold-Mysterious-Legend/dp/0749941537/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1284753677&sr=8-3













And a pictorial to close out proceedings:


Thursday 9 September 2010

Smoking Shirt (Dance Dance Dance)

   Tintin said:


   So, I wonder what he would make of this:


   A flashback to more immobile times follows:

Tuesday 31 August 2010

Blue/Green Again

   It's the return of that  allegedly irredeemable colour combination; a suitably optimistic presentation for the latest wedding I attended recently. And I barely believe in marriage, so my high spirits surprised even me

   ADG, a member of my personal Band of Blog Brothers, has written an exceedingly kind and trenchant tribute to your author, with one commenter noting an accessories trifecta of mine; namely, my rose pin, pochette and pen. This time, on the grounds of ensemble dissonance, my writing instrument remained at home

   Even I have my Coco Chanel Moments

Monday 30 August 2010

Akwapim Hills


   Aburi, one of Ghana's cuter townships, is favoured as a weekend retreat from the pulse-pounding bustle of Accra and its ever-fractal traffic. It nestles amongst the Akwapim Hills, which provide the benefits of a reasonably high and pleasant altitude, as well as a more moderate temperature. One easily feels at home in tailored linen, mohair, ramie or cotton, reclining on the porch of one of the various colonial or neo-Ghanaian residential forms that dot the area


   The area seems to offer more than one different viewpoint: ex-pats from various walks visit often to meet, discuss, broker and recline. The cleaner air may be more conducive to bonhomie and reason - perhaps it is provable by science

   I just go for the air. And the abandonment


Friday 27 August 2010

Go Faster


As it was unwritten in Ecclesiastes 1:9, "There is nothing new under the Ghanaian sun"

ShareThis