A checked shirt

One of five designs made by Turnbull & Asser for their 125th anniversary in 2010. 

I have no history with this shirt, but it comes with its own, albeit that of a simulacrum - that very modern form of provenance in a branded garment: its fabric is a reproduction from Turnbull & Asser's first swatch book.  

125 years ago, Victorian men wore shirts with this exact pattern on them. 

The shop manager said that this was one of the tamer designs in the book. How amazing to think of the emergent middle class, grown newly fat on industry, wearing such colourful shirts. What of the buttoned-up-tight plain raiment we expect from the Victorians, as they dressed the erotic turnings of table legs? Then again, perhaps 'Walter' was wearing one of these shirts as he twitched at his desk penning eleven volumes of "My Secret Life"...

A morning coat

Another WG Jennings creation, made for my grandfather in the early 1950s.  

My father (who wore it for 30 years before me) said you could always tell who was wearing their own morning coat because it wouldn’t fit; and he enviously spoke of a friend whose hand-me-down coat was ‘green with age’. Ironically, this is in perfect condition, and fits as if it were made for me.  

However, it has a serious downside: it is wildly, Britishly, impractical for summer wear, made of a heavy cloth that could probably stop a bullet. I wore this to a wedding in Burgundy during a July heatwave, and fainted in the front pew before the rest of the congregation had even arrived. My horrified then-girlfriend drove me back to the hotel, where I flopped on the bed for several hours in my underpants, before abandoning the coat in favour of a shabby linen suit for the rest of the day. 

With any luck, if people are still compelled to wear morning coats to weddings when my son is grown-up, it will at least have started to turn green. 

A pair of shoes

A pair of Fat Shoes designed by Ian Reid, who was apprenticed to John Moore, the most original shoe designer of the 1980s. These were made for me about a decade ago on the original last, by Daita Kimura at The Old Curiosity Shop.

When I bought them, I wanted rubber soles to protect them, so I took them to my local cobbler - a Greek Cypriot called Michael who smoked more than any other man I’ve met. When I went to pick them up, there was a notice on the door saying that anyone who wanted to collect their shoes should return the following week. When I returned, his son explained that his father was gravely ill, and the shop would now be closed. He wouldn't take over the business, having just graduated from London University.   

When he gave me the shoes, he laughed and said that his father had talked about this ‘pair of clown shoes’, which is exactly what they look like. How nice that my shoes could make a man laugh even as his father lay dying, as he carried out his last obligations. 

A silk scarf

 

My grandfather’s evening scarf, given to me in my 20s by my grandmother. 

Worn only with a dinner jacket, and then only when cold enough for an overcoat; knotted once for the walk between car and party, then again in reverse at the end of the night. At most, this happens twice a year. Even by the time my son gets his hands on it, it will have been used for just a matter of hours, despite being 60 years old or more. Its long life has been measured out with short dark walks and steppings-out of cabs.  

But the result is magical: I have appreciated every minute that its heavy ivory silk has touched my skin, and I can say that about no other item of clothing. A five-foot length of fabric, cut, stitched and bought by the dead, whose purpose is only to beautify an evening’s liminal minutes and the otherwise non-spaces between travel and celebration. It is the most un-usual garment that I own.

A suit jacket

A jacket made for my father by WG Jennings, in 1968.  

This is actually part of a three-piece suit, but head-to-toe check is something I couldn't pull off; I’d look like a clownish advertising exec doing ‘eccentric’, or a deranged bookie. But as an odd jacket, it’s electric. The combination of cut and fabric really gets in people’s faces - in the nicest sense, of course.  A slightly nipped waist, slightly roped shoulders, slightly narrow lapels, and slightly short in the body; it looks perfectly modern, and it fits like a cliched glove.  

How proud I am that while hippies were flopping around in Hyde Park getting stoned to the Mick & Keef show, my father was swaggering around town in this absolute beauty.  Real style really is timeless.  

A loud shirt

A Richard James shirt, bought 15 years ago. I wore it twice before I realised you could only wear it once; otherwise people say, “he’s wearing that shirt again.”

Any likelihood of my ever wearing it again evaporated when it became the fashion-stylist’s choice for a mid-to-late-90s moment. Weeks after I bought it, both Jarvis Cocker and Noel Gallagher were on magazine covers wearing this shirt. So, it probably remains the most expensive ‘cost-per-wear’ item I own; either this or a ghastly man-blouse from Gieves and Hawkes with an over-printed rose motif, which my wife forcefully suggested I never wear again.  As soon as I get myself organised, that’s going on eBay.  For God’s sake, don’t buy it; it’s ludicrous, and you will never wear it.

A shaving brush

Found in a cupboard this morning, this derailed my plan to speak of underpants and morning coats: my shaving brush, from Taylor’s; only ever used with a pewter dish of unperfumed soap from Truefitt & Hill.  A seven-year beard has made them long redundant.

Briefly, they were tools for an intimate task I could never have imagined while turning them over in my hands in the panelled shops of St James’s. Silver-grey stubble roughening slackening, papery cheeks in a dull-pink hospital room. He would never go so long again without a shave.

This is a test that you must not fail; yet you will.  Removing the prickles that reddened the skin in the dried-spit corners of his mouth; it was too hard. Good enough would have to do; to do it again would do no good.  

Malt whisky and water wiped on his lips with a miniature sponge on a stick; a dangling bag on the bed-frame, gathering liquor the colour of 15-year-old scotch, drawn from a barrel charred on the inside.  The too-warm air was thick with him, as he dissolved a little more with each breath.  Trying not to breathe him in, I pulled the blades through the soap between the rise and fall of my breath, just like shooting a gun.  

   “Having to dab and work
    Closer than anybody liked
    But having, for all that,
    To keep working.”  

              Seamus Heaney, The Butts 

When I asked the barber if the badgers were harmed to get the brushes' bristles, he replied, “Well, I don’t think they hold the badgers down and shave them, sir.” 

A leather belt

An army-issue belt, from the mid-1950s.

Almost a decade after my father’s death, I found this in my parents’ garage, hung from a hook with a machete and golok; both were blunt, and as old as the belt. The maker’s name is illegible, but the government arrow remains, along with the year it was made: 1945.

There is a drawn-out archaeology of grief, as objects with unknown histories emerge from boxes, drawers and wardrobes. Their origins and use are inferred or construed from the signs of wear that remain; they tell cryptic, trivial stories, which can change what we know of the dead.  

That it was hanging in the garage suggests it was used to hold up gardening trousers; these, along with the gardening jacket, were also fifty-year-old kit: faded olive-green reverse sateen. Robust, hardwearing, both saw out their owner; his surname still sewn to the breast; stitchholes from long-gone insignia still yawning slightly on the epaulettes.  

The leather was dry and brittle when I found it, suggesting it had been unused for years. You age, you thicken round the middle; you no longer need the belt to stay your trousers. You take it off one day and without thinking, hang it on a hook next to the workbench. You will never touch it again. 

Soakings and smoothings of neatsfoot oil have brought it back to life. But back to what life? At what prior point in its life did it look like it does now? The answer of course, is never. 

A French shirt

“I have said you can have too many clothes. But I take that back where shirts are concerned. The shirt is a triumph of modern life, like the automobile or the web.

"It is easy to put on and take off, quick to wash and easy to store. Plus, shirts look great. A man should own as many shirts as he wishes - the more the better.

"I personally have so many shirts that I sometimes walk into my closet, pull one out, and think to myself, “Now where did that come from?” Having lots of shirts will allow you to surprise yourself with your own good taste.” Luciano Barbera

Whenever I see this shirt, bought in 2000 from Charvet on the place Vendome, I surprise myself at having let emotion over-rule my taste: I was still young, and blinded by the uncanny aura of the brand. 

I should have trusted my eyes: this shirt is a big bag of overpriced Gallic wrong. Beautiful fabric; but a small, too-mean collar with a cheap-looking shape that goes convex when worn, cramping the slimmest of ties; and the buttons have parallel stitching, leaving their centres naked; I hate that. Soft spread collars, cross-stitched buttons, God's in his heaven.

The day I bought this, I was caught out by bad packing and heavy rain, and wore a North Face parka with narrow APC jeans, combat boots, and a Turnbull & Asser candy-stripe shirt: a bizarre city-boy/hooligan/drug-dealer trifecta. According to my French then-girlfriend, I looked “a total plouc”, which might explain why the shop assistant was so reluctant to help.  Or maybe he didn’t like the shirts either.