Sharp Dressing
I went in to see Max today. He’s got a tailor’s shop down Berwick Street, I been saying for ages that I’m going to get a suit made one of these days and it’s been a kind of running joke really because I never wear anything that’s not denim - denim shirt, denim jacket, denim jeans. OK, so my socks and Y-fronts are not denim, but just about everything else is. I got paid today and it was a decent whack so I thought, what the hell, let’s get that suit at long last.
Max himself measured me up and then he had this long argument with Eric, his cutter. I told him I wanted a 1930s style, classic cut, the kind of thing you’d see in an old James Cagney movie. So Max picks out a roll of grey worsted with a thin pinstripe and he says that I’ll be wanting is a double-breasted jacket with no vent, four buttons on the cuffs, no flaps on the pockets and the trousers will be fitted for bracers, a button-up fly, three pleats at the front and legs tapering to 18 inches at the turnups. That’s what started the argument.
“1930s,” says Eric, “That’d be 20 inches all the way down, no taper. In the ‘40s you might have had a taper, but the ‘30s, the ‘classic’ ‘30s cut, I mean, 1932, ’33, you’re talking a straight leg, twenty inches.”
“What are you talking about?” says Max, “A twenty inch leg is more of an Oxford Bag. ‘30s he says he wants. You’re going back to the ‘20s, you are.”
“Twenty inch isn’t an Oxford Bag!” says Eric, who seems kind of angry as though he can’t believe that anyone would doubt his superior knowledge when it comes to trousers, “I’m telling you, a tapered leg would look as out of place on a classic ‘30s cut as a 3-button cuff.”
Anyway, in the end, Max gave in and I went for the twenty-inch leg. I have to go back for a first fitting next week. A first fitting, in case you’ve never had one, is when they drape the suit all over you and pick out the stitches and stuff to make sure it goes in and out in the same places your body goes in and out.
As I was leaving Max’s, I saw a couple of the Murphy boys come into the shop. I smiled and nodded to them and they ignored me back. Max does a lot of tailoring for the shadier elements of London life. That and theatricals. He does a lot of work for film people too. Michael Caine came in last week to have six suits made, apparently. All the suits had to be exactly the same, Max says, on account of the fact that five of them have to have daggers stuck through them.
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