Here's the original of my 'way in' story. An edited version of this was briefly up elsewhere but is now down... So here's the tale as was intended:



On the face of it there was nothing wrong with my Father's plan to send me away to my Uncle's house in Yorkshire to steep me in the life of 'All Creatures Great and Small'...
Not that my Uncle was a Vet, in fact I think his only encounters with animals were strictly limited to the dinner plate, but that isn't really the point here. Yorkshire was well known to be a healthy, no-nonsense kind of place. Everybody knew that in 1978 when I was 13.
Since 1976 I'd been increasingly restless and after two years of putting up with me it was decided that my habit of sneaking out late at night, or disappearing from school on the London train, to Soho might finally have to be addressed.

The only problem with my Father's plan was the one thing which never occurred to him: My Uncle's record collection.

Harrogate has many charms, but they were all lost on me. Within my first day at my Uncle's (it rained) I had quickly set up home in his study with his records and the ever present smell of his cigars. Here at last was a world which captured my imagination after far too much good behaviour in the past: Loud poly rhythmic music which you could never predict unlike Pop or Classical, graphic design and clothing on the record sleeves like I'd never seen before, and most of all this grown-up masculine world of my Uncle's study where everybody was referred to by slightly derisive nicknames and where even my very much loved Aunt was never allowed to set foot.

If you've ever been a teenage boy then you'll understand the appeal of what I'd stumbled across.

The music worked its spell first. The drumming of Art Blakey and Philly Joe Jones especially connected with all those aggressive teenage instincts. There was a hardness there mixed in with all the rest which I found especially appealing at that age.

And then shortly after the music came the clothes. I started modestly with a pack of two knitted ties from Burtons for about £4.99 and a pale blue Van Huesen button-down from some department store or other.

I'd never really had my own style before or even my own taste in music to be honest. I bought my clothes with my parents & I liked Bach because I had a mathematical brain. My soul was withering on the vine, hence my restlessness.

The thing I remember most about those record sleeves was how hard it was to piece together all the clues to work out what the clothes actually were - The pictures on the back were so small. Shirts were button-down collared, but not like any button-down collars I'd ever seen  - These belled out from the neckband unlike the meagre flat little English collars that knew. Ties were slim & often knitted and equally slim were the shoulders on the jackets of the musicians. They had this lack of definition about them when compared to the straight edged shoulders of any jacket that I'd ever seen before. These jackets just hung on the wearers and they had this wonderfully deliberate slouch about them. To me it just seemed so cool - Here was a world where nobody was standing up straight and taking their hands out of their pockets like the world I came from at home and at school. And I wanted more of all this. I wanted as much of it as I could get.

And so I became hooked.

All my money went on Jazz LPs and clothes from that point onwards. Knitted ties, button-down shirts, jackets and suits which I'd have disastrously altered to approximate the look I was after, shoes which looked almost American - It became a real obsession. In 1981 I had a suit cut based on a John Coltrane LP sleeve by a tailor in Soho and then wore the suit every chance I could until it was threadbare.

And it didn't stop there.

I consumed films, books, imported American magazines and television shows. I even used to check out American tourists in Fortnum & Mason's food hall! Bit by bit I discovered places like Ray's Jazz in London and Flip on Longacre, finally building up to my discovery of J. Simons shop in 1985 and I was home dry at last.

Or at least I would have been had the guys who introduced me to J. Simons not had other plans for me. They'd been customers of John Simons' Ivy Shop in Richmond in 1970 and from there had moved on to Brooks Brothers in New York through family connections. And so yet another door was opened to me, and so in constant debt and with probably more enthusiasm than was sane I made my first trip to New York City and Madison Avenue at the age of 19.

You just know that a story like this deserves to end badly. No good can ever come of a boy who runs away to Soho and who discovers Jazz in Yorkshire instead of all the wonders of nature. But as this is fact, not fiction, in this story everything is going to work out just fine.

From 19 to 25, when I settled down and got married, I lived the life that I'd always dreamed of whilst growing up. America was mine from NYC to the Canadian boarder. Well, a wafer thin slice of the Eastern seaboard was with a few trips inland...
Back home in England between US trips in Christmas of 1987 I was briefly a Saturday Boy at the Ivy Shop in Richmond  - Hallowed ground for an English Ivy fan and I haven't shut up about it ever since. There I was standing in the place where Ivy Style in England had really taken off for the first time in a big way talking to people who had actually been there at the time.
Gradually I slowly got out of debt and started to buy clothes at a slow and steady rate instead of just buying one of everything in each colour as soon as I saw it and somehow life just carried on.
Recently the Internet has provided yet more scope for me to explore my interest in Ivy and that pretty much brings me to today, 30 years on from that first rainy afternoon in Yorkshire.

The American Anglophile is a well recorded phenomenon, Brooks Brothers used to make quite a good business out them, but less well know are stories like mine I think. And the great thing about my Ivy style obsession has been meeting other people with remarkably similar stories to mine. People who just love this style because they love it & have stuck with it while mainstream fashions have changed all around them. The style has taken me to parts of London I'd never been to before, to America and today increasingly to Paris where new friends are helping me to explore the cult following of American Ivy style which once flourished over there.

It's all been and continues to be nothing but fun.

A very commonly asked question by Americans is to ask whether or not I stick out like a sore thumb in London wearing American clothes and the question highlights one of the things that I like about Ivy style very well. The style is so subtle that unless they really have an eye for clothes most people don't spot it. And those who do, unless they are well informed, really struggle to pin down just what the style is. There is this element of familiarity about the suits, blazers and jackets which is then completely blown away by the styling details of the clothes like the Natural Shoulder and the lapel line of a three button jacket rolled to two buttons, leaving a buttonhole seemingly orphaned alone in the line of the lapel.
From a distance I blend into the crowd, but up close it all falls apart. I'm not who you think I am in my Blazer and Flannels because my Blazer and Flannels aren't like any you've seen before and come from a place you know nothing about. I'm MJQ not MCC. And any preconceptions you might have about what a 'conservative' dresser is like are about to get well and truly spoiled when you meet me!

Like I say, it's all been nothing but fun - Keeping the Squares guessing!

http://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-media/product-gallery/B000063NDD/ref=cm_ciu_pdp_images_0?ie=UTF8&index=0


Best -

Jim

Sadly that's a rather messy story involving a pile of coats at a party. The usual kind of thing.

And I have never defiled a coat from that day since.

*Sheepish Blush*

What I only ever very lightly touch on is that I wore about seven years of shit before I 'found' JS & wasted a load of money trying to re-tailor English clothes to get that 'US' look.

That's the way to train an obsessive - Starve him of what he wants so he really agonises over it before he can ever buy it.

If the kit had been easier to get I bet I wouldn't have valued it as much. As it was Troy's shirts hit me like a f*ckin' meteor...

... I really think I belong in some kind of zoo...

Welcome, Tom Pinch!  A rather Dickensian handle!

Sounds mighty familiar...  remember 'Starman' on TOTP?

Last edited by Moose Maclennan (2008-11-12 15:47:23)

Very happy to notice that a copy of Points of Departure has been sold since I linked it up above! It is indeed a good read.

Mr. Bragg seems to like the slouchy jacket look & wears them in quite a few pics I've seen. Wonder if he regards it as one of his style trademarks?