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.