Sterling and Burke Hosts Benson and Clegg

My appreciation for Sterling & Burke is well established. I feel Bond-ish when I’m there. New and Old Bond that is. The streets. In London. Or maybe the Arcades…Piccadilly, Burlington and Royal—whatever. All I know is that in a world of consumerism marked by trendy, built-in obsolescence, Sterling & Burke offer an unguent to short-lived fripperies. Their goods have staying power. Like me. Shut up.

In our sound bite world of temporal edginess and drive-by irony, Sterling & Burke’s strategy is the opposite. They purvey things that are intended to last—out-last us actually. Things that are awaiting the patina that comes from cherished use…things that are leading candidates for being passed down and valued by others.

My buddy Scottie-the-Eff got me started on the Sterling & Burke journals that I now use routinely for work. I’m on the way to filling journal number two with my professional irreleventia. And I commissioned my replacement silk canopied Brigg umbrella with the graceful and accommodating folk at Sterling & Burke.

I mean, where else are there folk who will tolerate my long-winded back story about finding my first one in a cab in London and having the cabbie insist that I take it 'cause "some bloke left it in me cab this morning and I'm tired of hearing it wallow about."? And where else would someone, even if they were pretending, listen intently to me regarding why I HAD to replace my umbrella with the same silk canopy as the first one--because raindrops ping off of silk and just thud when landing on nylon? Try some of that lore-spreadin' caca over at J. Crew and they'll call Paul Blart. Damn.

I was in Sterling & Burke the other day, killing some time between LFG dance class sorties and revelling in their leather goods, journals, cufflinks and every conceivable umbrella contrivance. Sublime. And for some absurd reason, I walked into J. Crew to kill another fifteen minutes. The J. Crudités' tray of  paper-thin, ersatz artisanal whateverishness…courtesy of sweatshops the world over, seemed even more so after my Sterling & Burke visit.

And I’ve always associated Benson & Clegg with blazer buttons. At least one of my navy blazers has B&C sourced buttons and the visual treat of visiting their roost in Piccadilly Arcade is a routine part of my London visits. I wasn’t aware of their bespoke tailoring niche till I received an announcement from Sterling & Burke recently.

If their cutting and sewing was good enough for George VI, then who knows? Maybe we are about to discover a well kept secret. The B&C team will be on premises at S&B March 14-16. I’m on spending lock down but it won’t keep me from going by and seeing what these guys are all about—Bespoke and Made-to-Measure wise. Shoot me an email. If you’d like to meet-up for drinks and then walk over and buy me a B&C rig-up over at Sterling & Burke, I’ll allow it. Here’s the announcement…

Benson & Clegg visits for Bespoke Suiting Event

March 14 - 16, 2013

Sterling & Burke welcomes Benson & Clegg to Washington, DC for their first overseas Bespoke Suiting Event outside of New York City.  

 The cutters Kenneth Austin & Tony Martin from Benson & Clegg in London will be visiting America in March offering their range of tailoring services, bringing Savile Row style and quality direct to Sterling & Burke Ltd customers in the USA.

Offering the latest patterns of fine English and Italian fabrics, including such prestigious brands as Scabal, Holland & Sherry and Hunt & Winterbottom, to name but a few. Appointments will be held at Sterling & Burke Ltd, 2824 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW. Alternatively, if a home or office appointment is required, they are happy to accommodate.

Please call 202.333.2266 or email enquiries@2824penn.com to schedule your appointment.

Thursday, March 14:  9:30 am - 5:00 pm
Friday, March 15:  9:30 am - 7:00 pm
Saturday, March 16:  9:30 am - 3:00 pm

Made to Measure

For the first time on our overseas visits Benson & Clegg is offering our superlative 'Made to Measure' service. These garments produce an excellent quality suit, custom made for the individual. Their cutters use their wealth of experience and skills to ensure your garment is crafted to the highest possible standards. 

With a large range of classic and modern fabrics, lining choices, as well as finer details such as real horn buttons and working cuffs, your garment will be an individual creation designed to your specifications.

Prices start from £770.00

Hand Made Bespoke Tailoring

The best clothing you can get. Entirely handmade on the Benson & Clegg premises in London, England. The craft and workmanship is unparalleled, with typically over fifty hours of precision labour in each suit. They pride themselves on comfortable individually styled clothes of subtle elegance, with an emphasis on top level workmanship. Benson & Clegg have a traditional handmade look, from the natural shoulder line to the elegant silhouette of the side seams. The majority of our customers opt for a two button single breasted suit jacket. However our cutters are able to work to almost any brief, for example single-breasted button one, two or three, double breasted formal, smart or casual. We have a vast selection of cloth to choose from, all of the very highest quality.

Prices start from £2,333.00

(As always—‘till someone tempts me with an offer I flat-out can’t refuse, I have received no favor from Sterling & Burke or Benson & Clegg for writing and posting this announcement)

Sunday in Georgetown: Part One

I’m sure many of you would love to face a day with literally nothing on the mandatory to-do list or the parental carpool transport docket. I get that and believe me, as LFG enters week-two of her Ponte Vedra paradise experience, I’d rather have had an LFG commitment last Sunday. I’m flying down next week to procure my raison d’etre but Sunday last found me schedule free. And obviously, Sunday saw me free of any desire to step up my sartorial game to anything beyond trad-homeless.

So I went over to Georgetown. Surely my foray into the little hamlet could have been trumped by more productive undertakings like re-caulking the bathroom, finishing the chair rail and crown moulding projects that I began at ManCaveMinimus eight years ago. Shut up. Home projects, like my post-divorce romantic efforts, begin with energetic and aspirational what-ifs and generally, after six months, trail off into benign whatevers. I’ve already told you to shut up.

My primary reason for heading into Georgetown was to reconnoiter the establishment of Sterling and Burke Ltd. I was surprised actually, that such a purveyor hadn't hit my radar screen already. But the catalyst for visiting Sterling and Burke was a gift I received from them last week. Many, many of you have sent me very thoughtful gifts from time to time. And I’m proud to say that all of them have been gifts of kindness and friendship, not some thinly disguised come-on to shill a product. As a matter of fact, my blog is so inconsistent, so thematically undulating and Ritalin-be-damned random, that I have a couple of luxury goods creators who pay me a stipend to NOT use or mention their product. Surprise, I digress.

I received a parcel, courtesy of Sterling and Burke, from my buddy S.F. who’s now in Pakistan. He’s a classic, man-in-full kind of fella…Naval Reserve Officer…married to the same woman for years…father of two boys…sportsman who’d make Tone, my Main Line Sportsman, take him in as blood kin from the get-go. He’s so classic that he makes J.Press look edgy. A reader of Flashman, dabbler in antique toy soldiers, subscriber to The Field, historic preservationist in his community, caricature collector and a lover of food that will kill you if eaten regularly. My kinda guy.

Long story longer…I’d never met S.F. ‘till he emailed me and told me that he’d be billeted in Old Town while doing some pre-Pakistan required work at the Pentagon. “Would I like to have a meal?”  Does ten pounds of flour make a big-ass biscuit? Well of course I would. Presumptuous of me I know, but I’d venture that most of the people from the blogosphere whom I’ve met up with for drinks and/or dinner would agree that the proverbial good time was had by all. I don’t as a routine matter; catch my damn clothes on fire like I did with Main Line Sportsman. S.F.’s Pakistan deployment kept getting delayed so we kept eating and drinking and sharing stories and visiting my buddy’s vintage toy soldier shop on Capitol Hill and eating and drinking and talking about cars and women and clothes and such. And I suppose that S.F. figured that our grumpy middle-age in denial old men sorties warranted a thank you gift…from Sterling and Burke. The leather journal personifies precisely the kind of gentleman S.F. manifests.

I should'a dressed better. Walking into (after ringing the buzzer) Sterling and Burke becomes a visual and olfactory wafting of St. James Street. The old world attention to detail and quality, coupled with breadth and depth of inventory makes me worry about their sustainability. Kinda the same way I feel about the sartorial magazine The Rake. The general quality and uncompromising commitment to it is so good that it won’t last. Do enough people care about how special these things are to patronize them enough? I sure hope so.

The nice lady at Sterling and Burke was as impressed with S.F. as I’d been and as soon as I mentioned the journal gift, she lit up. When was the last time you bantered with someone in a retail establishment who genuinely wanted to talk about their wares and their customers with you? I suppose it helped that S.F. commissioned some custom travel case, now en route to Pakistan where he’ll be for the next year.

Sterling and Burke have depth of inventory to satisfy any impulse, spur of the moment desire but a big part of their business is special order and custom goods. Nice Lady, after I shared with her the tragic story of my lost Brigg umbrella, told me about a customer who’s bespoken a dozen or so umbrellas over the last many years. Black silk outer canopy and custom color silk inner canopy (I didn’t know Brigg did this) to match the color of his next vintage car acquisition. She appreciated my assertion that raindrops don’t sound the same when landing on a nylon canopy and since I choose not to afford the same silk canopy I had on my first Brigg, I’ll just, for now, do without.

Depth of inventory and a Cape Buffalo on the wall. Courtesy of a part time employee whose grandfather shot the thing. Folks, this is one of the most deadly animals on the planet. Worry not about crocodiles and tigers any more than you should concern yourself with this beast. Centuries of effort, literally, hasn't bred-out of this esteemed member of the Big Five, a desire to kill you.

Then we talked leather goods. I showed her my beat-to-death card case that I've carried for twenty years. An inexpensive vessel but unique in dimension and one that I've never been able to replace. I've tried similar stand-ins and once loaded with my stuff, they don’t feel/fit right. I've had this card case in my back pocket amidst every defining moment and inflection point I've experienced in the last twenty years. I told Nice Lady so. And she got it.

This cheapie accompanied me to a career resignation, a business start-up, first dates and last ones, meeting LFG’s mom and later, proposing marriage. It sat with me during breakfast when I asked my future father-in-law for his only daughter’s hand and it was astride my right flank when I said “I do”. It lurked back there during every trip to the Reproductive Endocrinologist as we focused on having a baby. This now gnarly cowhide enclosure accompanied me to the labor and delivery realm of Sibley Hospital and the joyous arrival of LFG. It's carried two caskets with me. Same said case sat through all of the toxicity involved in even the most benign no-fault divorce proceedings. I know it was rooting for me when I was asked, two Februaries ago, to "step out of the car please". And surely it was equally elated to not be headed to the drunk tank. And other sorties it’s accompanied me on post marriage can’t be shared here in toto.

Ok, so I attach memories and ideas to things. What’s your effing point? After sharing none of the above with Nice Lady; other than the fact that I couldn’t find a replacement, she pulled out a manila file folder and began sketching my card case. Measuring the precise dimensions of it, she then let me know that in a few months, she’d be in touch. Stay tuned.

The other good news is that my leather journal from Sterling and Burke, courtesy of S.F. isn’t so expensive that I can’t use it for my pedestrian work notes and then not be able to replace it once full. It’s affordable and I’ll be happy to have this as my go-to journal when in client meetings and amidst discovery and to-do list creation.And maybe, just maybe, I’ll choose to swing a silk canopied Brigg at some point.

Onward. Seeking tanned ankles but currently still pasty…still no reason not to be shod in a kick-ass pair of shell cordovan Venetians.

ADG, II

Sartorial London: What I Bought-What I Saw

I've still got several product-purveyor-theme specific London posts to do but I thought I’d drop a post based on the emails that I’ve received asking me what I purchased while there.  It was amusing to sense that many of you thought that I would be rolling back in with tons of loot. Remember... I NEED nothing-most clothes nuts don’t.

Keep in mind that I went over the pond to relinquish several watercolours to a dealer and fully intended for the trip to make me money not cost me much. The restraint and discipline required to assure I accomplish this was almost beyond my scope. Due to an embarrassment of travel points and the limitations of only six days-I’m proud to report that I accomplished the mission. Beau Brummel remains in command of all things Jermyn Street-albeit at half price and in my opinion-under the same stress as high end purveyors in the States.

What I Bought

So my scant haul was limited to five items- three half price purchases and a pocket square from Luca Rubinacci and corduroy trousers from David Saxby. New and Lingwood offers a cashmere and cotton blend shirt. I treated myself to the only one they had left in my size-navy blue gingham. 

Two pairs of top pocket trousers from a Jermyn Street purveyor of minor repute-I’ve thrown the bag  away and the togs don’t have to store label in them-but at 50% off-I’m not worried about my inability to name drop. There’s moleskin in green and a pinwale corduroy in such a garish gold colour that I HAD to buy them. Again at half price-the risk is minimal.

The David Saxby cords are bulletproof. Very high quality and a superb cut-fit. Chocolate brown wouldn’t have been my first choice but he was sold out of all the fun colours shown on his website. Flat front-dress extension-side tabs. One rear pocket-shut up.

Savile Row is almost a goner-in my irrelevant opinion-I’ll do a post on what I saw on the Row. But I did have fitting number three-of course-when it’s finished you’ll be the first to see it. Patience please.

As the original fuzzy diced redneck from South Carolina-I was forced to contrive some level of acceptable garb for my fitting on the Row. This be the best I could contrive to assure that my country ass wouldn't be throwed off the Row. Savile or Rotten.

I had to buy a souvenir of my visit with Rubinacci. I’ll explain in a separate post.

What I Saw

You might recall that my thirty year old Briggs Silk Canopied umbrella is AWOL. I truly want another one and I’ve completely bought in to the lore that rain drops landing on a silk canopy have a unique sound and I’d like to experience that sound again. At about a thousand dollars to replace the identical one I owned-I’m just gonna have to get over the silk canopied thing. 

I first stopped at Briggs in St. James and after fingering the silk canopies and then the nylon ones-was completely transported from Buckingham Palace to Aunt Tootie’s trailer back in South Carolina. Yes, the hand stitching and craftsmanship is consistent on the nylon canopied Briggs brollys and the cost is about one third-they even promised to engrave my initials on the warrant band if I could give them a few hours. I couldn’t pull the trigger.

Briggs sells an array of stunning goods. I'll have one of each please.

So then I went to James Smith and Sons over in Bloomsbury. Their Umbrella Shop is worth seeking out even if you aren’t in the market for one-it’s a quintessentially British shop and they are dying off every week. 

I checked out their offerings-a bit less in quality and price than Briggs. They don't even offer a silk canopied option anymore. Again-couldn’t do it and thus came back to the Colonies with no umbrella-it’s all good. I’ve got baseball caps-in cotton.

Cordings worried me as soon as I walked in the door. Even with Eric Clapton owning fifty percent of the quintessentially English Country home church-no purveyor is immune from demise. I don't think I've ever been to London without buying something at Cordings. I was there fifteen years ago with a friend who couldn't have been any less interested in things sartorial. He watched as I pondered with great excitement the choices in box cloth braces until he finally said-"I've seen anyone so taken by something as inane as a pair of suspenders-I'm buying them for you". 

Cordings always has a great selection of moleskin and corduroy in fun colours-alas they had none.Their tattersall shirts are always faithful to the old patterns and that's what I wanted this time. I'm thinking that it's all over-they are going out of business since they have almost no inventory. Then I learned of their unfortunate fire that broke out on the ground floor just before Christmas. Everything is back in order now but the odd trousers and great shirts that I like were on the ground floor and smoke/water damage explained their absence.

I suppose one of the comforting things about having a shotgun custom made at Purdys on South Audley Street is that if you ever want to sell it-they'll add it to their inventory of pre-owned guns. This one was on offer for one hundred and thirty five thousand pounds. Nice. A London trip for me would not be complete without traipsing through Audley House. The exterior still has pock marks from the Blitz. More later on Purdy in a seperate post.

The shoe climate in London has never been better. Restraint was required but even at half price my money was best kept stateside when it comes to shoes. Shipton and Heneage on the Fulham Road had a nice array of slippers for the likes of those fruit loops like Tintin who seem to wear such.

John Lobb offered shoe rubbers in yellow. Yellow rain wear. Not my thing.

Suede-my leading choice in skins abounded with aplomb. Green suede boots-yessireeee. Shut up.

Holmes Hats-Deerstalkers-Panamas-Borsalinos....Toad would have been in heaven. 

Tintin did a great holiday series on evening wear and on smoking jackets. I'm pleased to tell you that Turnbull and the Boys still have every contrivance imaginable in velvet.

The Arcades remain impressive butcept for a few interlopers who've made their way in. Budd is still toiling away bespoking shirts.

My favorite watch of all time-the Rolex Prince is abundant in London-at about fourteen thousand pounds for the least fancy version of this classic. I'll stick to my repros.

And of course the grooming goods purveyors always stop me in my tracks. If hygiene was a priority for me perhaps I'd drop a dime or two there-but it ain't.

Ok-back to work before the snow becomes a full blown distraction. Gonna be a long lonely weekend without  LFG here to frolic in the snow with me. Anyone (girls only-sorry) wanna come over and console me?

Onward-ADG