These Gala Times

The vision and the reality of course, are seldom the same things...

For the greater part of my younger life, I would have quickly said that I wore English gentleman's clothes, only to realise much later when I actually started to look inside at the tailors' names and consciously think about it – that in fact I had been virtually always been wearing Italian tailoring!

Yes, the Bond Street origins of the clothes appeared to indicate English tailoring but the truth was the actual cutters were all Italian. And then I also tended to favour fabrics from Italian and Swiss and even French rather than the generally heavier typical English styles. Eventually, Loro Piana dominated. I still have an old Milanese sports-jacket by Mainardi & Co., which is a very rare tailoring house, but it is still around in various guises and occasionally goes by its own name too under a bespoke format. This jacket is not only far and away the best piece of tailoring I own, it may be handed onto my son – which is an experience I managed to enjoy myself with a good few of my dad's coats and from memory at least one pair of handmade suede shoes. Quite an accomplishment both by my dad – who somehow managed to look after the stuff incredibly well – as well as the makers, whose art in the products simply did not diminish with time.

Even now I'm a hell of a snob and might easily opine that the Italians go over the top with their daring attitudes to the rules of dress.

But then, at the immediate moment, I have been reconsidering all of this peculiar snobbery of mine. I watch the dead boring black suit brigade in all of the world's financial centres, and the world's political elites, with their standard conservative uniform dress code – and I consider how embarrassed they all are for real substance, whether in mind or spirit or actual lawfully-earnt money. And I consider my own wife's Sicillian family, who manage to sweep a few by-laws to one side and put on the most impressive fireworks displays on the city riverside each time one of the daughters gets married... And I think about the brace of Maseratis that park out front of the mansion (it is a mansion, by the way) when the family functions take place, and I especially think about the way the men dress in absolutely – well, to me anyway – outlandishly excessive mens 'fashion.' The silver satin jackets... The coloured batwing bows and cummerbunds... The velvet and gold embroidered slippers...

I've always considered a lot of this carry-on fairly tacky, and it is tacky and even they all think it is too – but, it is also a very special kind of tacky. It is based on a complete self-confidence that they are above and beyond formal dictat from anyone who pretends to cultural and civilized elite-ism. And moreover, that they are above and beyond other people's rules about what to be civilized means. They know the rules before they break them. And that's the significant difference.

I've stuck a couple of pictures in here of some attire by an Italian manufacturer called Ottavio Nuccio. It might look at first sight that they break numerous rules of formal attire and dress codes – but they don't break even a single one. And that is an amazing testament to the style and cultural high-ground that some Europeans possess. I'm not going into details about what is so subtly correct about this picture, suffice to say that it is ideally correct. One of the bits of 'clever' trivia going the rounds among the Western literati and cognoscenti of men's formal attire is the meaning of the phrase red sea rig, or schooner rig (which is the same thing), but this picture goes into even more rarified atmosphere about exquisite formal attire for a gala.

Breaking rules of formal attire? No.

Now you or I may not have the absolute budget to go to all of this excess, but to be careful about dress, even in some small symbolic way, is a reflection of your mind. The point about civilized people enjoying themselves is that they don't need the rest of the whole world to know or approve of what they are doing. It suffices that they know what they are doing and why. The great Italian writer Petrach lived through some of the most terrible and terrifying of times, but he still managed. Old knowledge, manages in the worst of times. Petrarch is generally credited with having first used the term Dark Ages. His insights into what wealth is, and where it is, prove remarkable reading... And as we are currently also in a form of a Dark Age, Petrarch is a useful guide to living in it.

Petrarch's vision, and reality, are closer than commonly understood by the masses and their masters in Fox and in Washington, in Singapore and Beijing and every other place run by tyrants and knaves.