10 DECEMBER 2005, Page 51

Suits you

Jeremy Clarke

For the first time in five years I have a brand-new suit. Charcoal grey with wide grey and blue pin-stripes. Singlebreasted. By Christian Dior. I got it in a Cancer Research charity shop. The jacket fits like a glove; the trousers are too long by only a couple of inches.

Coco Chanel once denigrated Dior’s stuff by saying it was designed by ‘a man who doesn’t know women, never had one, and dreams of being one’. But with luck only a Coco Chanel will be able to perceive any sexual ambiguity in the design of my charity shop suit and there aren’t many of those at the dog and ferret club monthly meetings where the suit will be mostly on view. Should some ferret-, lurcheror terrier-owning committee member question the masculinity of my suit, however, I have only to pull open the jacket and draw their attention to the label. Anticipating controversy, perhaps, the label underlines that the suit is from Christian Dior’s ‘Monsieur’ range, a range especially designed, moreover, for Harrods.

My suit’s first outing wasn’t to the dog and ferret club monthly meeting, as it turned out. Its debut was at The Spectator Christmas Carol Service, held last week amid the architectural glories of St Bride’s, Fleet Street. I was down for the first reading, from Luke, in which the Angel appears unto Mary and says, ‘Here is the news.’ Terrified at the thought of standing in front of all those luminaries and pronouncing from the King James version, monument of the language, benchmark of my trade, and therefore a kind of examination, I wanted at least to look like I hoped to be taken seriously. Dressing smartly and appropriately, I hoped, would be a start.

An hour before the start I studied my reflection in a shop window in Covent Garden. The suit was fine. No one, hopefully, would be able to see the folds of material gathered around my ankles as I stood at the lectern. The tie, tiny mallards, in hallucinogenic colour, hundreds, possibly thousands of them flying strenuously upwards towards my left shoulder, unfortunately was not fine, I decided. Too frivolous. If the Angel Gabriel had turned up with a flock of mallards on his tie, would Mary have believed his forecast about the conception and subsequent delivery of the Son of Man? Unlikely. Thank goodness I’d belatedly come to my senses.

I darted across the road to Tie Rack and stood in front of the display. Overwhelmed by the gaudiness and sheer volume of ties before me, I turned in desperation to the manager. Could he choose me one?

The manager bounded forward. But in an instant eagerness to help became undisguised contempt. He looked me up and down as if trying to work out whether my dress sense was due to a want of taste, credit, or one of those chromosomes that make all the difference. ‘To go with the shirt, sir, or with the suit?’ he said. I made a decision. ‘The suit,’ I said.

A tanned wrist, elegantly cuffed, extended from a sleeve, and an exquisitely manicured hand lifted a silk tie from the display. Lifting silk ties from displays, and feeding them back again, was the roughest manual labour that could have reasonably been expected of such a hand. The tie, tangerine with diagonal pink stripe, was held up to my chest, though not so closely as to contaminate the tie. ‘Any good?’ I said. ‘Too good. It looks like you’ve stolen it, dear,’ he said. He put it back and had another think. He tried several others, including one with Father Christmases doing cartwheels, which, when I protested, he admitted had been a facetious whim. Finally, we agreed on a tie comprised of very realistic-looking electric-blue fish scales, which he tied for me, looking me appraisingly in the eye as he did so.

Next, on his advice, I dodged across the road to Marks & Spencer for a plain white shirt. Entering the menswear department of M&S after the hurly-burly of Tie Rack and the jostling street was like finding myself in the dappled silence of a secret garden. (I sincerely hope, for the shareholders’ sakes, that I caught the place at an unusually customer-free moment.) I chose a cheaper, cotton-rich white shirt and even cast about until I’d found one the right neck size. There was no one about so I stripped off in front of a handy mirror, put on the new shirt and tie and the cashier zapped the barcode on the wrapping.

I put my old shirt in a litter bin and presented the tie with mallards to the first person to ask me if I had any spare change. And when the time came for me to step up to the lectern in my brand-new suit, shirt and tie, and read from St Luke’s Gospel, I felt pretty good.