🚀 go-pugleaf

<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-0eq6Y3vOQvE/Ulr4SGeieuI/AAAAAAAAMQg/UrVLizyM8NI/s1600/lasbar+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-0eq6Y3vOQvE/Ulr4SGeieuI/AAAAAAAAMQg/UrVLizyM8NI/s400/lasbar+2.jpg" width="325" /></span></a></div><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I have a secret sharer, a friend whom I have never met.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">  </span>My <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">frère d’une autre mère, </i>as I refer to him (ma brotha from anotha motha), lives in a town with a name far more picturesque than its reality, Folkestone.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">  </span>“In Folkestone,” he writes, “even the seagulls are on Prozac.” He is a poet without knowing it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">  </span>Our paths have crossed in place if not time, crisscrossing each other’s footsteps at Anthony Delos, Anderson & Sheppard, Poole and Gaziano & Girling.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">  </span>He called himself “Savile Row’s only working class customer” (your correspondent is simply a grasping member of the middle class), causing our normally stolid salesman at A&S to crack a smile.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">  </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Our dreams help us transcend our respective grey realities. Our complexes straddle that divide of space and time between us to create the perhaps illusory feeling of kinship, shared sensitivity to the void, to the acuteness of emptiness, particularly in those deads of night when work or the demands of parenting find us awake, in front of a computer or a phone until sleep returns.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">  </span>Recognizing the insatiability of our thirst for acquisition, he once said, “A last pair of shoes is like a last breath.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Which puts me in mind of the story Alan Flusser likes to tell about Basil Zaharoff.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">  </span>In point of fact, Flusser says that it’s the people at bespoke shoemaker John Lobb in Paris who like to tell the story, but as Flusser mentions it in two of his books, it’s clear he likes to tell it too.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">  </span>Zaharoff was a fascinating character, a true international man of mystery who was the inspiration for the titular character in Eric Ambler’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Mask of Dimitrios</i>, an arms dealer and financier who was involved in the Balfour Declaration, and perhaps the only historical figure to have inspired characters in both the Tintin comics and an Edward Gorey story.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">  </span>According to Flusser/Lobb, when Zaharoff was on his deathbed, he contacted Lobb’s Paris shop to order a new pair of bespoke shoes on a new last.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">  </span>The irony is poignant. Even though he knew he was dying, the knowledge that he had another pair of shoes underway, on a new bespoke last which would take more time to finish, even though he might never receive them, was a comfort and a way for this merchant of death to feel alive another day.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">  </span>Ordering something as prosaic as shoes became a way for Zaharoff to buy time, as if one could.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">François and I, deeply and wryly aware of our daily battles against an immediate and needy sense of meaninglessness, can appreciate this desire, the desire to punctuate some moment to come with fulfilled anticipation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">  </span>Like many pathologies, the anticipation that used to obsess us when the fulfillment of some long-held aspiration was near became weaker and less rewarding over time and with repeated purchases.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">  </span>Renewal required bigger sacrifices, deeper investments, digging back to even more fundamental sources of need.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">  </span>When it became too easy to achieve, when an order was merely a whim, we risked feeling nothing. Our minds are cruel that way. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In that vein these new shoes from Anthony Cleverley, the made-to-order line of bespoke shoemakers George Cleverley, arrived eight months after I ordered them through the genial folks at LeatherSoul, a long enough time for anticipation to build, for doubt to flirt with us until the confirmation comes and the package, finally, is in the mail with a teasing tracking number and the final product awaits in its newness at last.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">  </span>The Anthony Cleverley shoes usually come with sleekly beveled waists, but with my usual perversity I had Cleverley put Dainite studded rubber soles on instead.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">  </span>The design (called the “Cameron,” which I hope is not after the current British PM), unusually heavy antiquing and rubber soles will allow this shoe to replace the Berluti Tibetas I finally got rid of some time ago.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">  </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">As briefly described <a href="http://asuitablewardrobe.dynend.com/2012/03/convergence.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">in a prior post</a>, the Anthony Cleverley shoe line is named for bespoke shoemaker Anthony Cleverley, maker of some of the most elegant bespoke shoes of memory, whose relative George Cleverley eventually acquired his order book.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">  </span>The George Cleverley firm offers models named for famous customers of Anthony Cleverley both in its bespoke line and in a line of very dashing ready-to-wear, ranging from the slip-ons of Baron de Redé, the customer most closely associated with Anthony Cleverley, to Mr. Chow of the eponymous 1970s LA restaurant (typing this means I will not get that Steely Dan song out of my head the rest of the afternoon).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">  </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">When everything we own and order has meaning to us, we risk losing ourselves in self-absorption.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">  </span>When we put so much of ourselves into our material surroundings, making them talismans of psychic significance, perhaps we irretrievably expend some portion of self, like the evil magician in the Ray Harryhausen classic <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Golden Voyage of Sinbad </i>(starring alternative style icon <a href="http://asuitablewardrobe.dynend.com/2012/04/alternative-style-icons-john-phillip.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">John Phillip Law</a>. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">As time has passed both François and I have found healthier ways to feel alive.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">  </span>Family, of course, is a constant reminder of how life’s best rewards are not material.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">  </span>Still, from time to time we both make the occasional leap into the abyss again.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">  </span>As it becomes less frequent the pleasure of anticipation heightens, becomes sharper.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">  </span>So it was that receiving these after more time than most of my bespoke shoes have taken provided ample opportunity </span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/null" name="_GoBack"><span style="font-family: inherit;">for </span></a><span style="font-family: inherit;">that bittersweet internal drama.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">   </span>I wonder how long Zaharoff’s Lobbs took, and whether, after his death, Lobb Paris sold them off for a song the way bespoke shoemakers do now with their unclaimed orders.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">   </span>Similarly to Anthony Cleverley, Lobb Paris named many of its ready-to-wear models after the bespoke commissions of famous customers, including the “López” penny loafer, which I believe was named for Baron de Redé’s former patron Arturo López-Willshaw.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">  </span>(Aubercy boasts that it shod López, but one catty source informed me that López used them for his servants and went to Lobb for his own shoes.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">  </span>As to François and I, the wait for our last shoes again gave us that sense of prolonging our existence to one more hand-lasted milestone.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">  </span>As we look beyond it to a future free of plans for new material attachments, is it also a tombstone?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">  </span>We must confront our existential crises.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">  </span>But as the Immortal refrain goes, Who wants to live forever?</span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> Words and photo by Réginald-Jérôme de Mans</span></div><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span><div class="feedflare">
<a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/ASuitableWardrobe?a=8fiiw4mKzSI:VYpuqgaeZg8:yIl2AUoC8zA"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/ASuitableWardrobe?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/ASuitableWardrobe?a=8fiiw4mKzSI:VYpuqgaeZg8:qj6IDK7rITs"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/ASuitableWardrobe?d=qj6IDK7rITs" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/ASuitableWardrobe?a=8fiiw4mKzSI:VYpuqgaeZg8:gIN9vFwOqvQ"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/ASuitableWardrobe?i=8fiiw4mKzSI:VYpuqgaeZg8:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/ASuitableWardrobe?a=8fiiw4mKzSI:VYpuqgaeZg8:4cEx4HpKnUU"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/ASuitableWardrobe?i=8fiiw4mKzSI:VYpuqgaeZg8:4cEx4HpKnUU" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/ASuitableWardrobe?a=8fiiw4mKzSI:VYpuqgaeZg8:63t7Ie-LG7Y"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/ASuitableWardrobe?d=63t7Ie-LG7Y" border="0"></img></a>
</div><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ASuitableWardrobe/~4/8fiiw4mKzSI" height="1" width="1"/>
<p><a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ASuitableWardrobe/~3/8fiiw4mKzSI/for-francois.html">Link</a>