A covert coat

A single-breasted charcoal-grey herringbone covert coat, with a black velvet collar, made by Aquascutum. Another gift from my mother, it was old when I got it (pre-war, given the coats of arms on the label), but had many years left in it. I gave this coat away last winter, because it had always been a little too short in the body and arms; hopefully it now keeps someone else warm (my wife gave it to the local Jesuit mission for the homeless). 

If I don’t still have it, why put it in here?  When my father was dying, it was the end of a mild October, and I sat at the foot of his bed, repairing this coat; re-stitching the buttons, preparing for winter.  A week later, I wore the coat on a grey, damp, bitter day to his funeral. 

A tweed jacket

This was made for my father in the late 50s or early 60s by his tailor, WG Jennings.  Mr Jennings would weight my grandfather’s bill (on his instruction) to ensure that my father was able to pay. How very civilized.  

It has tight, high armholes, slim arms and narrow, nicely roped shoulders. The result is that it’s not a very comfortable jacket to wear; but boy, has it been worn a lot, and it has suede cuffs and elbows to prove it, which were put there 20 years ago at least. 

Overall though, the tweed is still going strong. From a distance, it’s a rusty brown colour, but up close, there are beautiful sky-blue and grass-green threads. This must have been the first tweed jacket my father had made, and it strikes me now that he made an inspired choice. 

My mother claims he wore this jacket on their first date, at the Crooked Billet pub in Wimbledon, which by coincidence was where I used to drink as a teenager. It’s a good pub; you should try it sometime.

A Jean-Paul Gaultier jacket

OK, it’s actually Junior Gaultier, from the first collection, which must have been Spring/Summer 1988.  My mother and I had colluded to get my father to pay for the two of us to go to Paris, after my French teacher urged his class to go to France to improve our language skills before the summer exams.  As he so presciently said, “I hear a lot of people speak French there.”

I had only one destination in mind: Jean-Paul Gaultier’s flagship store on the rue Vivienne.  We went there the first evening we arrived, to find it closed; but I was floored by it - the mock 19th-century French design alongside the mosaic-fragment and concrete floor; the giant, indecipherable digital clock in the wall; the peep holes and videos in the Victorian galerie Vivienne that ran alongside the store.   

The next morning, we were back.  The staff wore wide-legged wool trousers that moved with a fluidity I had never seen before: fabric did not move like that in my world; it made them look as if they were gliding just above the floor.  These were objects that had a power I had never encountered; clothes that looked even better worn than they did on the rails - and they looked astonishing on the rails - behind heavy glass doors on rubber rollers, which would float back when pushed by these charming avatars of glamour who hovered unobtrusively behind you waiting to help.   And of course, all these transformatory garments were eye-wateringly, prohibitively expensive.   

I saw this jacket, and my mother encouraged me to try it on.   The changing room was a huge oxidised-metal drum, which the assistant would swing open for you, and close with a magnetic clang.  I was alone with a green long-sleeved T-shirt (which I also still have), and this jacket.  I can almost taste the sensation I felt then.  

Today, over 20 years later, the shoulders on this jacket look comically, ludicrously wide; almost on a par with David Byrne's iconic suit from "Stop Making Sense".  But this was the 80’s, at their peak, and I looked in the mirror and saw a fucking super-being looking back at me.  I would have been happy with the T-shirt, but my wonderful, generous mother bought me the jacket too.

This jacket's crowning moment was at a party that summer.  I recall a thuggish oaf at school (whose nickname actually was “Oaf”) relentlessly taking the piss out of me for wearing it. But what intrigued me even then was that I really didn’t care - because I was so sure of this jacket: it was unimpeachable, an impervious coat of armour.  If he didn’t ‘get’ it, it said more about him than about me.  Then, Lucy Taylor, who was (as I recall) pretty foxy and feisty, came up to me and said, “Is that a Jean-Paul Gaultier jacket?  It looks fucking amazing...”  and then walked away.  
 
And that was probably the moment when the power of a man’s dress to shape the way he feels about himself crystallized for me.  I’ve heard all the arguments about how ludicrous this is, and how frivolous fashion is; but they don’t wash with me, I’m afraid.  Nothing could take from me how I felt at that moment.  Lucy Taylor, wherever you are, thank you.  

Favourite shirts

My father’s favourite shirt, alongside what used to be my favourite.  His is the lilac striped, double-cuffed, spread-collar from Thresher and Glenny.  He would have bought it from their shop in Gresham Street in the City, which is now closed.  

When I gave him a lilac herringbone from Turnbull & Asser for his birthday one year, he told me that  he would buy their shirts when he went to his company’s head office in Lombard Street; but he had no others, since his were from Thresher & Glenny.  Perhaps the brain tumour was already going to work on him, as he confused the two companies; or maybe he just didn’t care that much about who made his shirts.  

After he died, I took a pile of his Thresher & Glenny shirts to the charity shop, including a red gingham, a blue gingham, and a white shirt with black narrow stripes, all of them lovely, all of which I now miss; God knows why I got rid of them.  For a long time afterwards, whenever I visited my mother I would go up into the loft in the hope of finding them there; it took years to accept that they were gone.  

So this is the the last of his Thresher & Glenny shirts.  The collar is very frayed, so I rarely wear it.  The last time was on my wedding day two years ago (alongside a grey herringbone Harris tweed jacket from Anderson & Sheppard, a navy and white polka-dot tie from Turnbull & Asser, natural-indigo jeans from Pure Blue Japan, and bespoke boots from Trickers; more on most of those in due course).

The Turnbull & Asser shirt was my favourite in the late 90s (pre-dating the glut of late-90s/early 00s multi-stripe shirts that spilled across the land). To my shame, I now have too many shirts to be able to pick a favourite.  Like the other one, I don’t wear this any more because its collar is too frayed (and the stripes look very dated).  Sadly, the way both shirts are made, with pockets for collar bones, means the collars can’t be turned to give them more life.    

Anyway, this was bought at the T&A shop on Jermyn Street, probably around 1997.  After buying it, I went for lunch at The Stockpot on Panton Street with some colleagues, including the lady who eventually became my wife.  I probably had the broccoli cheese, with chips.

A gold signet ring

Something that I wear every day.  An 18-carat yellow gold signet ring that was my father’s, given to him by my mother when they were engaged in the 1960s.

The first time I wore it was for safe-keeping while my father had an MRI scan in 1999. It was too big for me, so I wedged it on with the silver ring I was already wearing; then I sat by his head at the end of the machine, playing Patience on the floor with a tatty pack of Piatnik cards I had taken travelling round Europe ten years earlier.

When he died that Autumn, my mother gave me the ring.  I had it resized twice to get it to fit my bony fingers. When it came back from the jeweller, all the scratches and dents had been sanded and polished from its surface; all trace of him was gone, and you could see a reflection in it for the first time in decades. Now all the marks on it are my own.