Thursday, 21 April 2011

A black sweater


A sweater from Jil Sander's first menswear collection (from 1997?). 

When I tried it on, it wasn’t really me; but it was so well cut, and appeared to have been knitted without any seams, as if it had been found in the wreckage of a spacecraft that had crashed in SW3.  

As I paid for it, the assistant told me no one else had yet bought anything.  So there I was, the first person in the country to own something from Jil Sander’s first menswear collection. Woo-hoo.

“Actually...” he added, “that’s not true.  Tom Cruise was here with Nicole last night, and he bought a few things.”  [This is the last time that Tom Cruise will feature in this blog].

That night, I drove to my then-girlfriend’s house for dinner (vegetable jalfrezi).  She lived with her sister, who was a costume designer.  And there on a dining-room chair was a pile of clothes belonging to ‘Tom and Nicole’, whose alterations she took care of when they were in town.  And among them was a dove-grey wool Jil Sander coat.  

She encouraged me to try it on.  It was gorgeous; though a size too big across the shoulders, it draped beautifully.  But the cuffs....  She had already unpicked the stitches and pinned them back, to fit ‘Tom’; and you could have made a pair of shorts out of the fabric she had to remove. 

I’ve never met Tom Cruise; I’m sure he’s a nice guy, but judging by the length of his arms, he’s not a thetan from Venus, he’s an Oompa-loompa.

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