Cambridge and the Trad Mother Church: Charlie Davidson’s Andover Shop

After absurdly hot days in South Carolina last week, my business meetings in Boston were an absolute treat if for no other reason than atmospheric moderation. I won't play the airport carpet trivia game with you as most are on to my predictably few departure ports these days and frankly, I've exhausted options for snapping any new tog pics 'cause you've seen them all. I won't need new clothes for a hundred years.

And yes, this is how I travel in the summer weather-avoiding the issue of packing my sportcoat. Shut up.

The Copley Plaza hosted my stay and as usual, I’m sitting in elegant digs alone, speculating about how nice it would be to share some of these posh accommodations with someone else. 

LFG's mother and I had a blast here one night...dinner in the Oak Bar while listening to great jazz. I reconnected with the Oak Bar-on two consecutive nights.

Proper dress? Thank goodness someone still requires it. Much to my dismay, the current definition of Oak Bar Proper Attire is laughable. Don't come in naked...otherwise, join us.

Unfortunately I was the best dressed guy in the joint.

I had a lunch meeting and then the balance of Monday was free for my Boston ganderings. I’d already settled on The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, having just finished reading the Gardner Heist by Ulrich Boser as well as a swing by Bobby from Boston for another look. Seemed like a great way to spend a Monday afternoon. There was only one problem with my plan. Both are closed on Mondays. Damn.

My disappointment led me to one of my most enjoyable Trad adventures to date. Trumping quite frankly, my sartorial ganderings in London last January. Miffed about my blown plan, I jumped on the train and headed over to Cambridge. I’m in Boston a lot but just haven’t made my way over to Harvard Square in quite a few years.

College hamlets, villages, enclaves…NOT towns-but you know- the little centric neighborhoods that host them are always fun to slink around and observe. I love doing it on the ever changing Nassau street in Princeton…usually being disappointed with the discovery of yet another independent little business falling by the way…consistent with what I find every time I go to London. Cambridge isn’t like that for me because I’ve not been there often enough to know what was there before and what’s sadly replaced it. What I do engage my imagination in is wondering what the streets of Cambridge looked like fifty years ago when WASPy students, swathed in sometimes tattered—patinated Trad garb handed down from their Ivied forefathers occupied the place en mass.

The Harvard COOP offered a glimpse of the Cambridge WASP heyday-courtesy of Harvard illustrated history books.

Certainly, the students in the COOP weren’t’ personifying anything Trad.

 My cousin Tintin accurately and aptly stated many things Trad in his recent Styleite interview. Not the least of which was the corrective response to his interviewer’s question about The Trad entering the blog worlds of “Giuseppe and ADG”.  

“S: What has it been like entering into the world of menswear bloggers, with people like Giuseppe and ADG?

T: I think they entered into mine. All of those guys share one thing in common; they all have a point of view, they all have an opinion. But I think most importantly they all have this wonderful voice…Unfortunately, there’s a lot of guys now who don’t have a voice. There are a lot of guys who have come to this party late, and they basically Wikipedia everything.” And let me assert that he is one hundred percent correct. Tintin and a few other bloggers were my inspiration for sharing ADG drivel.

My first sartorial stop was the original Cambridge Mother Church…J. Press. Tintin said this about the J. Press guys in his Styleite interview… “You walk into J. Press now and it’s a bunch of mean old men who make fun of young guys when they come in.” Well the Cambridge antiquarian shopkeepers weren’t mean or crotchety but they were...well …old. 

Old to the point that I can’t really see a Harvard student enjoying an interactive experience with one of these guys. I suppose it doesn’t matter because based on what I see walking down the streets of Cambridge and everywhere for that matter, there aren’t too many devotees of Trad style, decorum and deportment.

I loved the patinated cluttered indifference so manifest in the Cambridge J. Press. The old location in NYC was consistent with the Cambridge shabbiness but the new store in Manhattan and the Washington D.C. store sterilizes the J. Press experience to that of a too crisp-too clean-too scrubbed-hand sanitized institutional freshness. Not so good.

I reveled in the memories that the Cambridge store evoked for me and my haberdashery lineage. I worked summers in a store that still had random things stashed in cubbies and drawers from it’s opening in 1927.  J. Press Cambridge still delivers on that amiable tattered smugness. I enjoyed my twenty minute-two button downs on sale-J. Press Cambridge experience.

But that was nothing compared to my final stop where I spent almost two hours. J. Press was a fully clothed sartorial lap dance serving soda pop only...compared to the Trad orgy of indifference manifest over at the Andover Shop. 

For those who don’t understand or appreciate the purity of WASP Trad clothing, the balance of this post will be lost on you. I thrive on lore and the proverbial back story of almost anything and this tacky little four hundred square feet slapdash assemblage of natural fibers is a Plato’s Retreat-esque fabric bolt brothel. Brothing since 1949.

And what a muddled brothel it is. The cluttered, fluorescent-light washed little shop still declares with aplomb the proverbial don’t give a damn if you buy anything aura of founder Charlie Davidson. The lore on Davidson and his demeanor regarding customers is rich. The jumbled contrivance of the store...layout would be way too generous a description—says to anyone walking in the door that this isn’t a place to browse. 

The stories abound regarding Davidson being as indifferent as a minimum wage men’s department clerk at Macys if he surmised—in a nanosecond—that you weren’t interested in or knowledgeable about clothes. He’d barely give you the time of day and was actually known to refuse selling things to customers if they requested made to measure goods that didn’t align with Charlie’s paradigm of style and correctness. Shitty picture I know-surprise-but the off the rack dress shirts at the Andover Shop rival Jermyn Street.

Interestingly, they had several shirts in my size.

Here’s what Alan Flusser had to say about Charlie in his first book, Making the Man… “The Andover Shop shines because of Charlie, who has great taste in selecting fabrics and has as much knowledge about making a suit as the masters of Savile Row. But like many top chefs, Charlie needs to be inspired to do his best. If a customer shows real interest, Charlie will respond in kind. He may pull out his special English buttons or linings or some select fabrics hidden away. Otherwise, he is liable to seem no more knowledgeable or involved than the guy down the block.”

But what really rivets me about Charlie and the Andover Shop is the Richard Merkin-George Frazier-Charlie Davidson-Jazz connection. I discovered the acerbic and witty pen of Boston Globe columnist George Frazier through my devotion to the words of Richard Merkin. 

Merkin and Frazier were close friends. Learning about Frazier’s life and writing led me to the quintessential treatise on men’s clothing written by Frazier for Esquire in 1960…The Art of Wearing Clothes. If you don’t have an original copy of the September 1960 Esquire—your sartorial library is incomplete.

Frazier loved jazz. Frazier loved clothes. So did Charlie Davidson and he and George Frazier were wingmen extraordinaire to each other for years. Here’s what Charles Fountain posits about Frazier, Davidson and clothes in Another Man’s Poison, his Frazier biography……“It is not fair to say that Davidson taught George Frazier everything he knew about clothes. Though George had always been a fairly natty dresser, he never tried to pass himself off as an expert in the field until he got to know Davidson and started picking his brain. Davidson would take Frazier with him on buying trips to New York. Davidson was a big help in the preparation of George’s “The Art of Wearing Clothes,” a 10,000-word piece on men’s fashion that ran in Esquire in September 1960. Because of its thoroughness and its status as an Esquire cover story, this piece established George as America’s preeminent writer on men’s fashion.

He used to spend his Saturday mornings in Charlie Davidson’s Andover Shop, thumbing through sample swatches of fabric, talking to Charlie about this and that. When word of this habit got around, the Andover Shop became the busiest place in Harvard Square. George would sit in the lone chair in the back left-hand corner of the tiny shop on Holyoke Street, and along the left hand side of the shop the people would line up for their turn like the wedding guests waiting for a moment of the Godfather’s time. George thrived on it.”

Consider this little Holyoke Street hovel and now imagine jazz great Miles Davis seeking out jazz lover and haberdasher Charlie Davidson for trad togs. Christian Chensvold from Ivy Style shares this…

“In 1955, Davis signed his first major-label deal, with Columbia Records, and just as the silhouette of his suits changed from broad to natural shoulders, so did Miles begin setting styles rather than following them. “In the mid-’50s, Miles to the Ivy League Look in fashion,” writes jazz historian John Szwed, “having his clothes made at the epicenter of preppy fashion, the Andover Shop in Cambridge’s Harvard Square, where tailor Charlie Davidson dressed him in jackets of English tweed or madras with narrow lapels and natural shoulder, woolen or chino trousers, broadcloth shirts with button-down collars, thin knit or rep ties, and Bass Weejun loafers. It was a look that redefined cool and shook those who thought they were in the know.”

Picture the shop and an exchange between Miles Davis and Charlie Davidson… “Charlie Davidson of the Andover Shop in Cambridge, who tailored Miles’ and the band’s Ivy League clothes in the ’50s and ’60s, is a storehouse of casual Milesiana, like this from Charlie: “One day I asked him: ‘Miles, do you really like Frank Sinatra?’ ‘Do I like him?’ he said. “If he had one tit I’d marry him!’”

So do you think it’s any wonder that I could spend a couple of hours in this fabric bolted nook of such rich lineage? Even absent Charlie himself, the other slouch dressed eccentrics were more than happy to talk fabric and fables. My first step inside the old Savile Row location of Anderson and Sheppard—sartorial destination of Beerbohm and Astaire pales like a mother f_ _ _er in comparison to my Andover Shop stopover Monday past. The orange windowpane fabric will haunt me forever for according to the Andover guys…what’s left of said bolt was there when Frazier held court in that lone chair—on the left.

Onward.

ADG