Libra Season (I)

Another trip around the sun

It is my birthday week, so it’s just a quick spotlight on some articles I liked and then a self-indulgent look at some ads in The New Yorker from the week I was born. For the weekend we’ll be hanging out in the Palos Verdes landslide zone.. The weather is not cooperating, which is great for tamping down apocalyptic wildfires, but middling for getting shortchanged on a month of what should otherwise be 26C weather. I’ve gone ahead and pulled out my wool City Hunter Jacket from The Armoury—putting on this teba and knowing it’s going to be in heavy rotation through February is one of the changing season’s consolation prizes.

I’d rate these awning stripe overalls for my 1st birthday a ten out of ten.

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I. Internet Bycatch (Abridged)

• From the Los Angeles Review of Books, Ray Bradbury once had to adapt Moby-Dick for John Huston and the screen. The entire ordeal would probably make its own great movie.

• The menswear sphere has been clutching its pearls about this article from GQ, which declares the chore coat is boring: Friends Don’t Let Friends Wear Chore Coats.

  

  I don’t agree with this assertion, but I think a chore coat would be a weird choice for you anyway if you adopted it as some kind of default in lieu of other things. If you’re a painter, a street photographer, or any other kind of professional creative then congratulations, bleu de travail becomes you naturally. For the rest of us, the chore coat has powerful-but-selective opportunities for wear. And then for every opinion piece like this, there’s a counterpiece from Mr. Porter, Esquire, or even…GQ itself (from 8 months ago).

I picked up my Le Mont Saint Michel chore coat after I saw it a few years back in a style issue of Hemispheres magazine, of all things (that’s the magazine for United Airlines, in case you’re missing out on an opportunity to feel vicarious embarrassment for me). I wear mine to do yard work, hang up Christmas lights, or for when I have to start the smoker before the sun is up. It’s OK to get into something because of a magazine, but don’t let a magazine, or the endless, pointless fashion cycle and its ancillary businesses, ever get you out of something.

The longer you wear something, the better it will be, as Drake’s reminded us with this well-timed Instagram post for their military-inspired Tunic Jacket:

• I try not to repost things that are highlighted on other Substacks, but this one came to me through The Material Review before I had received it in print. The New Yorker with an engrossing multipage story showcasing Rivendell bicycles out of Walnut Creek (the sleepy Bay Area suburb home to the Ruth Bancroft Gardens). Death to metrics and lycra—just go ride your bike.

II. Hot Chambord and Iguana Stew: Selected Ads from September, 1988

If graffiti tells archaeologists about life in pre-Christian Rome, our advertisements might be similarly illuminating to future scholars. I have an enduring love for old ads as art, but also for their power to transport you a particular time and place. Here are my favorite ads from The New Yorker from the week I was born. Each one is a kind of tone poem and an aesthetic exercise. Please enjoy.

It’s not a Saab ad, but it’s still pretty good. We’re asked to schedule a test drive for the Volvo 780 “personal luxury coupe.” Its seatbelts (?) are “[a]n engineering achievement even an artist can appreciate.”

The idea that Macy’s opened a hat shop in its New York flagship, right before the 1990s, is fascinating to me. It gives a glimpse into one of those transitional moments—hats weren’t so long dead for men when this store debuted (and dumb hat styles seem to have proliferated for women in the 80s and 90s). The ad and the announcement of the shop (with borrowed French trappings) are more interesting to me for pointing to the existence of a long-since-vanished monoculture. You could go get your hat from the department store, and what they carried was probably the only kind of hat you could get unless you were willing to venture into a milliner’s shop. Today you would use a search engine’s SEO to get pointed to hat guides (and products) put out by the brands themselves. The department store as a way to discover and buy products, which arose from catalogues, yielded to the physical magazine, then the digital magazine, and finally digital catalogues put out by the brands directly. I’m currently suffering through BBC’s The Paradise (about a London department store in the 1870s) in case that helps explain my fascination.

Just in time for the holidays, it’s… hot chambord and cognac? Going to give this one a try and report back. Los Angeles might also be burning (“with a brilliant discovery!”).

Land’s End wants you to buy a parka. The comic below is a lighthearted attempt to remind a Chicago area breadwinner he is an individual who can do whatever he wants (so why not consolidate pieces and modernize?). Thirty-six years later we’ve lost the war on casual clothing and are demanding our commuter coats back, but we remain deeply suspicious of conformity.

One the subject of fashion being cyclical (and the notion that really great things are immune from trends), this D&B leather collection would be looking pretty good today in 2024.

It’s nice to see Condé Nast Traveler doing its thing back in 1988. I don’t think Nicaragua or iguana stew ever really entered the zeitgeist, but this is certainly a more compelling angle for visiting than the more customary “it’s only a day trip from Costa Rica!”

Finally, I love this ad for a Russel Glenurquhart district check fabric from Southwick (it’s on the last page of the magazine, so it’s a fairly prominent placement). In the ad they introduce Hunter Thorburn of Peebles, Scotland (how can you not love the pub lighting and framing him in front of a dartboard while holding a pint?). Thorburn is pictured here in the jacket he’s been wearing for 30 years. The ad proposes this pattern may as well be called “Thorburn” check, and since his family was the one supplying it, who are we to argue?

I couldn’t find the exact fabric (the “Russel” Glenurguhart Check) anywhere online (although this one from O’Connells comes close). Sloppy and basic internet research finally brought me to The Scottish Register of Tartans, which has this to say generally about Glenurquhart Estate Check:

From E S Harrison's 1968 book 'Our Scottish District Checks' : This is one of a small list of outstanding designs that have influenced designers all over the western world in men's and women's clothing. Adopted in the 1840s by Lady Caroline Countess of Seafield for her Glen Urquhart estate. Being a handloom weaver she is sometimes credited with being the designer but it seems more probable that it was made up by Elizabeth Macdougall of Lewston, a little village at the foot of the glen.

And here’s a close up photo of the design. A pattern made on a handloom 180+ years ago, and a reminder of what gets lost when we allow analog crafts to erode. The best things aren’t online, they are sitting digitally forgotten or omitted in storerooms, libraries and personal collections.