Ersatz gentleman's clothiers

John Diamond

JUST as basic physics holds that when matter meets anti-matter a molecular Armageddon blows the end out of the test-tube, so when fashion meets anti- fashion there is a resultant pop which is to be heard at its shrillest in Jermyn Street.

A decade or so ago the concept of the gentleman's suiting was reborn. With it came the gentleman's shirting, the gentle- man's over-welted Oxford brogue, the gentleman's club tie and, latterly, the gentleman's gusseted underpant. Call it a nostalgia for a more elegant age, call it a reaction to the multi-coloured, cheapjack Sixties, call it the sartorial manifestation of the new prospect of honest wealth, honest- ly displayed. Whatever the reason, clothes which were once reserved for the man who wore his father's suits and bought his shirts by the identical dozen suddenly became high fashion.

At first the fashion was called Young Fogey, and reserved for that loose band of trainee museum curators, putative Swan Hellenic tour guides and aspirant literary editors for whom the Church shoe and the Harvie & Hudson shirt had been created in the first place. Indeed, it was not so much a fashion as a coming out of the wardrobe by those who had never much cared for Levis and for whom the term sweat-shirt was altogether too descriptive.

I presume that what happened next was that one or other of the Sunday supple- ment style arbiters heard a Clarendon Press junior sub-editor discussing the vir- tues of the Tricker shoe as opposed to its Alan McAffee rival with one of Bonham's younger ceramics experts or saw a younger son of a younger son coming, laden, out of Swaine Adeney Brigg. At a time when the only real fashion choice was between a Sex Pistols T-shirt and a Stranglers T-shirt the existence of the fogey styles came as a revelation. A style became a fashion.

In Blitz and the Face and ID magazine, teenagers who until that time had been shabbily accoutred in stone-washed this and bleached that, started writing pieces about the quality that only existed in any garment made before 1958. In truth, they said, real quality stopped in 1939, but as there were precious few Oxfam shops with stocks of pre-war Gieves & Hawkes, this was wholly academic.

And indeed, it was Oxfam to which the early fogey clones flocked. Then, gradual- ly, in Camden Passage and the Fulham Road poky little shops started to spring up. These styled themselves as antique clothiers, and were staffed by fashion entrepreneurs who knew the precise value of any pepper-and-salt suit or pair of cavalry-twill slacks made since the Fifty Shilling Tailor went out of business. They quoted each other the bits of Wodehouse where Jeeves pontificates on the inadvisa- bility of the heather mixture sock, and they all knew that one doesn't wear brown shoes in town. Never mind that six months earlier they had happily worn odd shoes or no shoes at all; now they knew how to dress ersatz gentlemen in ersatz clothes.

It was, of course, only a matter of time before the Italians took the whole charade over. Shops which had been selling fashion were now selling style and the style they were selling was an Italianate version of the English Gentleman.

Hi-tech boutiques were gutted and re- placed with wormy-wood-panelled chang- ing rooms and racks of discreetly striped shirts. Clothes shops suddenly adopted chi-chi Edwardian titles: they were no longer sellers but 'purveyors'. Turnbull & Asser were never purveyors, for God's sake. Ad agents and City barrow boys queued at Thomas Pink and learned the difference between a plain and a French cuff. A 20-year-old Liverpudlian in the Sunday Times art department accused me, by brand-name, of wearing the same Alan McAffee shoes as he. A book came out listing 20 different ways of knotting a tie complete with historical references. The suit, worn by Jonathan Ross with an élan which suggested he was the first to think of wearing jacket and trousers made out of the same cloth, was sufficiently in to allow Time Out to devote a whole issue to it.

But however difficult Bertie Wooster found it to permutate the three dozen suits and 60 shirts in his wardrobe, the fact was 1 that until the Fifties there were only a few styles available to even the most sartorially conscious British man. His shoes were Oxford, Gibson or walking, his suit was single- or double-breasted, his shirt had a flyaway or a pointed collar, his tie was club, school or regiment and tied with a Windsor or a four-in-hand knot. Three styles are not enough for a Nino Cerruti or a Giorgio Armani, who needs dozens to make a season.

What's more, if every rag-trader had to stick to a few styles, how would he prove his superiority over rival stylists making exactly the same clothes? Thus was born the concept of the Modern Classic. The logic went like this: 'Classic' clothes (and

FASHION SPECIAL

by this the admen did not mean Virgil's Sunday best toga) were typified by a fulness of cut, a muteness of colour, an elegance of design. Classic clothes were well made from good cloth and there was an attention to detail. On this basis any- thing half-well cut and in Prince of Wales check counted as classic.

But where the new classicists really went to town was in the matter of detail. There is a particular type of kimono, plain on the outside and incredibly richly patterned on the skinside. This is something to do with the Shinto concept of modesty, but it is a pattern that has been adopted with men's- wear. Classic clothes are modest, but modesty is not a becoming trait for the sort of man who needs to spend £600 on a ready-to-wear Italian suit. The inner waist- bands of navy worsted trousers are made of lime-green silk, the inside pockets of dull jackets are lined in paisley. I have a plain blue shirt which has silk (all right then, viscose) embroidery on the hidden inside of the cuff and the neckband.

The result is that every well-dressed man is not a fashion expert but a tailoring expert. Look at any pre-war catalogue from, say, Simpson, and you will see suits listed which carry no more detail than 'Grey-worsted single breasted lounge suit'. Now look at the panoptic Next catalogue. Their chalkstripe suit (a 'classic design' of course) is described as having trousers with 'pleated front, side seam pockets, one button through back pocket with flap, turnups'. The jacket is 'double-breasted with flap pockets, welt breast pocket and plain back'. The average Next shirt needs six lines of description. My. grandfather worked at Simpson for 20 years and I doubt if he knew a welt breast pocket from a hole in the ground.

None of this would matter much if it was just a fashion like any other. But the rise of the ersatz gentleman has created a whole new snobbery to go with it. Once you could tell a man's class from the cut of his jacket or, more to the point, from the lack of its cut. Fictional detectives in the Thirties could always tell whether an unidentified corpse or a wandering amnesiac was born in the purple by his shoes. Now the fashion world is divided into tiny sub-classes where the true heirs to the Jermyn Street empire laugh down their leather-elbowed sleeves at the modish pretenders.

There can, of course, only be one result of all this. In a couple of years' time, when the rest of us have wardrobes full of French mass-made copies of Savile Row suits, the young chap blinking behind the round glasses as he sits down to his first lunch at White's will be clad, simply and classically, in his father's Levis, plimsolls and bomber jacket.