A Bit Of Character

It was a parody of a London day yesterday, which is to say that when it was not raining it was drizzling or at least threatening to drizzle. It is of course relatively easy to affect the weather in one's immediate vicinity: closing one's umbrella causes the rain to begin, opening it has the opposite effect, and attempting to share the canopy with another lets the wind know it is time to change the angle of the rainfall to something approaching horizontal.

Despite the wet, we, meaning myself and photographer extraordinaire Chloe Lederman, were out and around Savile Row and Jermyn Street yesterday, visiting a selection of shoes and tailored clothing that will appear in these virtual pages once Photoshop has been given the opportunity to perform its magic. There was another pair of the late Baron de Redé's shoes to ooh and aah over at Cleverley (bespoke shoes in the fifties were made with roughly double the labor that goes into them today and the quality of the stitching is extraordinary), where I was told that my Russian Calf cap toes had developed a small crack across the upper. This may or may not be a problem - that Russian reindeer hide from the wreck of the Catherina von Flensburg is nearly 250 years old after all and somewhat prone to splitting - but we will not know until the shoes are worn for a while and we can see whether the crack grows larger. At this point it simply adds a bit of character.

After returning to the hotel, several hours of work and a short nap the day ended at Galvin's Bistrot de Luxe, a very good English-owned place that has somehow managed to employ, at least the other night, a wait staff with spoken English that is actually worse than that found in the typical Parisian brasserie. The language barrier is only a challenge because, in spite of the integration of the EU and the easy movement between London and Paris afforded by the EuroStar, the concept of gin shaken over ice continues to be alien to the French. Words fail.

Photo by Chloe Lederman