Bespoke shirts will always improve your image. I found Regalia, who make good looking bespoke shirts, a few days ago.
Regalia are a bespoke menswear shop in Sicilian Avenue in Bloomsbury in London. They sell some ready to wear suits and shirts but they specialize in bespoke shirts. Regalia is run by Joe Martins and S-J Aldeen, gentlemen tailors of considerable experience.
Joe and SJ have a very geared-up bespoke shirt service and here is a quick run-down of it.
Bespoke Shirt basics
The shirts are made from English or Swiss cottons and tailored in Spain. They take three weeks to make. Once they are made, they are pressed and boxed. Completed shirts can be picked up from the shop or you can have them shipped on.
As you would expect from a bespoke service there are a wide range of options available to customize your shirts. You can choose from 35 collar types, five cuff types, various body types and fronts. They can also embroider your initials on the shirt.
They also provide over 350 shirt fabrics to choose from. Besides cottons of various qualities, there are also a number of silks to choose from.
Shirt Making: The Fitting Room
Shirt making takes place in Regalia’s fitting room. Here they have collar and cuff samples on display, which makes it a lot easier to choose your shirt finishes. There are also sample shirts of various kinds, to try on. Best of all, the fitting room has a wall-mounted rack frame, on which there are samples of all of the shirt fabrics.
This racking works really well, because the fabrics are graded by price, which means that you can work to whatever budget you have, whilst looking at and handling the fabrics.
The Shirt Fitting process
The process is simple, there are four basic stages:
You choose the fabric you want the shirts made up in.
Joe or SJ will get you to try on a sample shirt, to establish which basic shirt type suits you best.
You choose the collar, cuffs and any other detailing that you want. There are samples to handle and try.
Joe or SJ will measure you, build a specification for your shirt and,
You are done!
These gentlemen tell me that they can complete the whole process in fifteen minutes. Quick, simple and easy. You could do it in your lunch hour…
Costs
Shirts cost from £49 for a poly/cotton shirt through to £120 for a superfine Swiss cotton shirt. For a full list of prices and everything else you can go to their website at http://www.regalia-bespoke.co.uk/
Orders can be for a single shirt or multiples.
Bespoke shirts at competitive prices. Works for me.
Beas’s is on Theobalds Road in Bloomsbury in London and is a combined bakery and coffee-shop.
I was walking to my next meeting and I wanted coffee and I wanted to feel like I was having coffee, not sit in a chain-cafe with a cellophane-wrapped brownie. I wanted Hemingway in Paris, not Joe Ordinary at Heathrow Airport. Well, the Van Rijn subconscious good taste kicked in as I passed the door of Bea’s.
Beas is a combination bakery and coffee shop. Literally. The front of the shop is a coffee/tea cafe and the backroom is Bea’s bakery. The bakery room is raised up a couple of feet but entirely open. You can see everything and watch the bakers at work. When I was there they seemed to be making meringues the size of small trucks. I do not know how they get the air-con to work with two such different environments but they do and the coffee-shop in front is comfortable.
Bea’s has lots of glass shelves holding lots of cakes. The wall’s are a gray-blue-green wallpaper with a floral overprint that looks oriental. The overall effect is modern but somehow very comfortable. The room is long and narrow. split about equally between the counter and table space. At the end of the counter they have a large and bulky coffee machine that looks like it was converted from a piece of Bugatti chassis. It has more brass than a steam train.
The staff are welcoming, the display’s are good, it is easy to see what they are selling. As a man that works for me, I like the simplicity and ease of service.
Coffee and Food
The important things first. They make a superb cup of coffee. Without exaggerating I can say it was the best coffee I have tasted in recent years. I am really particular about the coffee I drink (look for a coffee posting soon) and this was the best. Secondly the food. I did not have any of the cakes but they look inviting and inventive. Some of them are mini-works of architecture. However the sandwich of the day was Chicken Caesar and that was just excellent, really tasty. The service was quick too.
So I asked about the shop. They are a cake shop and sell all manner of cakes large and small that Bea makes (more about Bea in a moment). They also make cakes to order, and I suggest you look to their website for that. They also run the coffee shop.
They do not have a big menu, except for the cakes, which seem to run to several pages. But from my experience what they do they do well. They sell coffee, tea and hot chocolate (the chocolate is Valrhona, the French gourmet chocolate) some sandwiches of the day, some soups and some stylish and original salads.
Good atmosphere
Everything about this place was good. The tables are nicely spaced, the acoustics are good and the ambient noise not too loud, the atmosphere (aided by the bakery at the back) is pleasant and unhurried. If I had one criticism it was that it was a little untidy, with pieces of cardboard boxes stacked against the counter. Still, it was the end of lunch, which I guess is their busiest time, so maybe they had not caught up yet.
Bea’s is also a little sexy. When you see people who are really good at their jobs and mesh together well, handle the work elegantly and without strain, there is something sexy about that competence. I do not know how politically correct they are at Bea’s but I can see it, and it’s my blog, so I can say it.
Bea’s works on a summer’s day and is cool and laidback. It is the kind of place where, if it was hammering a thunderstorm outside, you would just want to sit and drink coffee until it was over.
I looked on their website and found out a bit more about them. Bea’s is the inspiration of Bea Vo, who is the founder/head chef. She has a CV of culinary expertise as long as your arm. She has four businesses running in the shop:
The Bakery, both retail and bespoke cakes (bespoke cakes, that fits right in on this site)
The Coffee shop
A cookery school, for anyone who enjoys good food
A corporate food service.
Their food is home-made and locally sourced wherever possible. They operate a green business and they source their coffee from independent roasters. They call the coffee machine “Enzo” and pride themselves on making great coffee. What clinched it for me was when I left there was a man sitting in the sunshine at one of the outside tables, wearing shades and drinking a cappucino. Perfect.
I took the picture above from their website. Next time I go I will take some pictures and post them. Beas’s has style, go try them.
If any of our readers know Bea’s and want to comment, please feel free to do so, it would be interesting to get more impressions of this fun coffeeshop.
Today is the birthday of Ernest Hemingway, one of America’s greatest writers. He changed the shape of American literature for all time. In his novels and stories he defined the heroic modern man, a definition that in large part, holds sway to this day. His influence on American literature and men in general, has been immense.
There are many better qualified than me to write about Ernest Hemingway. But Ernest Hemingway helped shape my life and has been an important part of my journey as an adult man. I cannot let this day pass without a celebration of a writer who wrote so elegantly and expressively about the lives of men.
A brief biographical note
Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on 21st July 1899 in Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago. He died in Ketchum, Idaho on July 2nd 1961.
As a young man, Hemingway was interested in outdoor pursuits, sports, hunting and fishing. However he was also a gifted writer from very early on in life. From the age of 15 he was writing seriously, learning his craft. In 1918 he joined the Toronto Star as a journalist, staying six months. He left to volunteer to fight in World War 1 and was rejected because of his poor eyesight. Determined to make a contribution he joined the Red Cross and became an ambulance driver on the Italian front. At the very end of the war he was wounded by an Austrian mortar-shell and invalided out to hospital. This willingness to cast himself into the unknown and risk everything stayed with him all his life. His courage, sometimes recklessness, was an indelible part of who he was and his writing.
He returned to America after the war, then moved to Paris with his first wife and child. Here in the mid-nineteen twenties, his first successful books were published. Hemingway took the big subjects, love, war, the knowledge of death and wrote about them through the eyes of a man who was both sensitive and brave. His books were beautifully written, exciting and meaningful. He became hugely famous and was the first non show business celebrity. By the end of his life the legend was very mixed up with the man. However whatever you thought or thought you knew about him, there were always the books, and they stand for themselves.
My introduction to Hemingway
I was sixteen when I picked up a battered paperback copy of The First 49 Stories, the classic collection of Ernest Hemingway’s short fiction. Literature was alien to me and the books I liked, crime and science fiction were definitively not literature. They had told me told me this definitvely, school. As far as I could tell, literature meant Victorian novels of manners or novels about middle-class English couples, one or both of whom was having an affair. This was thin stuff for an adolescent who thought Clint Eastwood was God, and I stayed away from it.
I remember how exciting Hemingway’s stories were (and still are). I was overjoyed to find a writer who talked about things that were part of my world, like boxing and fishing. That he could make a story around them seemed incredible. He talked about things that happen with men, how they could become violent when they had been drinking. Things I knew about. Ernest Hemingway taught me to value fiction, his work led me to writers as diverse as Herman Melville, F Scott Fitzgerald and John Steinbeck. As a result of reading Hemingway I began a life-long love affair with American writers.
As I grew older, I continued to read Hemingway. His work spoke to me as a man, about how men fall in love with women, about how there will be times in life when you lose and how you talk to yourself about that. I read A Movable Feast, his memoir of living in Paris in the nineteen-twenties, and was beuiled by his Paris. I first went to Paris two years after that, I walked the streets he walked and his writing became even more real for me.
His Writing
We read him because he writes elegantly and beautifully. His writing is terse, observant, visual and perceptive. From his earliest work he always tried to write simply yet capture the essence of his subject. To achieve this, he wrote and rewrote, always seeking to strip away the non-essential words, to build a sentence that would be true. In A Moveable Feast, he talks about doing this. Here he talks to himself about writing;
“Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”
A Moveable Feast
He would make revision after revision, believing that he could capture feelings and ideas in simple, beautiful language. Stripped down short sentences, his writing has a virile, staccato drum-like rhythm to it.
This care over language, his courageous insight into men’s lives and his willingness to speak of courage, honour and love, give us bare understated writing of great beauty and wisdom.
The popular view of Hemingway is that he was as much showman as writer. Yet he was a wonderful observer of others and a keen listener. In 1950, when he was a famous and accomplished writer, he wrote Across the River and into the Trees. Here is the opening paragraph of the novel;
“They started two hours before daylight, and at first, it was not necessary to break the ice across the canal as other boats had gone on ahead. In each boat, in the darkness, so you could not see, but only hear him, the poler stood in the stern, with his long oar. The shooter sat on a shooting stool fastened to the top of a box that contained his lunch and shells, and the shooter’s two, or more, guns were propped against the load of wooden decoys. Somewhere, in each boat, there was a sack with one or two mallard hens, or a hen and a drake, and in each boat there was a dog who shifted and shivered uneasily at the sound of the wings of the ducks that passed overhead in the darkness.”
Across the River and into the Trees
I believe that the visual beauty and simple accessibility of Hemingway’s writing is one of the key reasons he is still read so widely today.
The big questions
We read him because of his ability to address the big subjects in men’s lives, love and war. He wrote his greatest works when the old certainties of the nation state were slipping away, and individuality took on a new emphasis. In A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell tolls, he wrote about war and its fascination for brave men. Hemingway had found a truth about men and courage, that brave men measure themselves against Death. That they see every risk, every battle, as preliminary contests for the final one, the one they cannot win.
In the Snows of Kilimanjaro he writes about love and the tragedy of men, how they are unable to see happiness when they have it. How there always has to be something better, and how they break what they have for what-might-be. In the Sun Also Rises he shows us why men chase unattainable women, and even why they are unobtainable.
His heroes are surprising vulnerable. They often lose their battles and Hemingway writes in the knowledge that the world often wins. However Hemingway’s men have an inner integrity which is rarely defeated. What Hemingway’s novels were telling us was that if a man is not defeated on the inside, then he has not lost. If he knows that he can hold his head up and try again then he is still a man. Hemingway wrote “The world breaks everyone and afterwards many are stronger at the broken places” I believe there is considerable truth in his view of the world.
Truth and love.
We read him and love him because he is true.
I once took a class in creative writing where the teacher, a famous feminist author, told me that “Hemingway was full of swank”.
The truth is he was not. All the things he wrote about he did. The fishing, the boxing, even the brawling in bars. He wrote about danger and courage so well because he had forged his own feelings in the heat of battle in several wars. Apart from the First World War, he also took part in the Spanish Civil War and World War 2, as a war correspondent. He was always on the front line, trying to get a better story, often in danger.
Men know the truth when they read it, and it is what they do with that knowledge that counts. Hemingway’s men were tough but sensitive. He writes “A tough man is a man who makes his play and backs it up”. That commitment, keeping going when you are afraid, is the hardest part. Hemingway’s men are brave but afraid, they act despite their fear. He wrote about the little rituals that men have when they are about to do something difficult, or dangerous. About how men talk to themselves when they are in extreme situations.
The greatest that men can hope for is to have grace under pressure, to act with courage and clarity in the gravest danger. I identify with Hemingway’s men because they are fallible and uncertain, yet always strive for the courage to do the right thing. He writes about this in ways that most men can understand. In the 20′s and 30′s writing about fear and courage so simply and cleanly was new to literature and men revered him for it.
Honour
One of the big reasons that Hemingway is still relevant today is his belief in honour. Having seen the brutality of war, Hemingway rejected glory and honour, said that they were scant reward for the horrors of battle, the dead and the maimed. However he knew the attraction of both honour and glory and his protagonists feel the old pull, the compulsion to believe in something greater than themselves.
Hemingway knew that men have to have honour, to believe they stood in good regard. Hemingway’s men have personal honour. Their honour lies in being true to themselves, to their own concept of what is right. And this is very much how we are today. Our bonds to our country are weak and we know so much, maybe too much, of how our countries are governed. Men today are a lot like Hemingway’s heroes, obliged to fall back on their own concept of honour. Like Hemingway’s heroes, we find this difficult and in his stories and his men we find a kindred spirit. We see the tug-of-war of personal and group values in For Whom the Bell Tolls, whose protagonist, Richard Jordan, is prepared to die for the truth (as he sees it) but not for glory.
Style and men
Almost as soon as Hemingway became famous for his writing, he became famous for his lifestyle. He personified a type of man that many man found attractive, the virile talented sportsman who was at home all over the world. Combine this with his democratic American charm and you had a man who was equally happy to talk to commoners and kings. It was a potent mixture and the press loved him, he became the first jet-set celebrity, long before the term was coined.
Ernest hemingway with his fourth wife, Mary.
Hemingway had great style. His outdoor lifestyle led him to casual clothes that naturally suited him. He was a connoisseur of food and wine. He understood and loved guns, especially hunting weapons. He had an eye for quality and gives his characters beautiful things to illustrate this knowledge, like Colonel Cantwell’s Solingen clasp knife in Across the River and into the Trees. Here again Hemingway shares something with modern men. Men of style look for quality, look to know and have the best. Hemingway presented a big, rugged style and it still works today. The rugged man of the world is still a look, a style, that can be worn and lived.
Ernest Hemingway’s world was vast and he wrote bravely of men, their courage and their inevitable death. However he loved and celebrated men, for all the good and bad within them. For me he has always been an inspiration.
The last words here are not mine, but those of Martha Gellhorn, his third wife and a critically acclaimed writer in her own right. She said;
“He was a genius, that uneasy word, not so much in what he wrote as in how he wrote; he liberated our written language.”
Below are some of my favourite Hemingway books and movies.
Books
A Moveable Feast
A memoir of Hemingway’s time in Paris, as a struggling writer in the Nineteen-Twenties. Beautifully observed and the love and happiness of Hemingway and his first wife Hadley are palpably. Funny, joyful and just plain beautiful.
Hemingway’s story of the Spanish Civil War. Robert Jordan, an American fighting for the republican guerillas, falls in love with a Spanish woman while on a deadly mission. Modern warfare and it toll on brave men is the theme, with meditations on love and duty.
The story of an aging Cuban fisherman and his struggle to capture and land a gigantic Marlin. Hemingway’s most profound meditation on the courage and steadfastness of men.
Short Stories of love, war and the intensity of living courageously. From a white hunter lying wounded in the shadow of Kilimanjaro to simple stories of Americans and their lives. Stories both sharp and poignant, this collection is the best introduction to Hemingway.
Henry Frank is an American volunteer ambulance driver on the Italian front in World War 1. In the pain and madness of war he falls in love with a British nurse. A passionate story of love, honour and manliness.
Ernest Hemingway’s work is difficult to adapt to the screen. We lose his language and his simple dialogue needs to be carefully handled if it is not to be lost to images and movement. Here are five movies that did it well.
Islands in the Stream
This should not have worked as well as it does, being based on Islands in the Stream, one of Hemingway’s least well-regarded books. However the combination of Hemingway and Geroge C Scott, directed by the superb Franklin Schaffner is magical and moving. George C Scott absolutely nails it as the Hemingway/Artist character and all the other performances are equally good. Franklin Schaffner had a deep understanding of powerful men and he gets every once of emotion and drama from the story.
Directed by John Sturges and Fred Zinneman, with Hemingway employed as a consultant, this is a faithful adaptation of the book. Spencer Tracy is perfect as Santiago, the aging fisherman, and the movie is a true celebration of the human spirit.
Gregory Peck, a writer and hunter, lies wounded in the shadow of Kilimanjaro. In flashback he re-traces his life, from his one true love in Paris thru his adventures as a writer. Crafted from several other stories besides the Snows of Kilimanjaro, with Gregory Peck bringing a sympathetic cast to the character of the world-weary writer. One of the best Hemingway adaptations and a real adventure movie.
Directed by the great thriller director Don Siegel, with Lee Marvin in the lead, the Killers is violent, fatalistic and cynical. Hemingway’s dialogue was never handled better than in this movie.
This story of a squad of guerilla fighters in the Spanish Civil War had superb leads in Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman. Gary Cooper had the real life gravitas of a Hemingway hero and really filled the part, as did Bergman. A surprisingly fast-paced movie for its time, true to Hemingway’s story, mood and spirit. It is also a classic Hollywood movie, with an epic sweep and exciting action.
In Modern Menswear, Hywel Davies attempts to unify current menswear design around a single theme. Davies’s believes modern menswear is primarily concerned with communicating individuality. That contemporary menswear gives men a huge range of clothes to express themselves in, both in terms of design and the types of manhood they might want to express.
Davis refines his definition of modern menswear with the belief that the old rules no longer apply and that definitions of formal and casual are unimportant. Now on one level I found this useful, because there are very few books that discuss non-formal men’s clothes with any degree of knowledge. However Davis then goes on to say youth and youthfulness has come to define modern menswear. I do not agree with this, especially in the light of the huge investment that brands like Corneliani, Zegna and Ralph Lauren have made in non-formal menswear. These are not brands that consider themselves to be aimed at a youth market. However they are not included here and Hywel Davies illustrates his argument well, with designers such as Aitour Throup and Raf Simons, who do appeal to younger men.
Hothouses of menswear design
For Davis, the exciting work in modern menswear is being done in London and Antwerp, which he sees as hothouses of new menswear design. However the book ranges across all of Europe, finding designers to support his thesis in Germany and Italy, amongst others.
Davis surveys thirty-five modern European designers, talking about their clothes and their history. Designers range from the successful (Paul Smith, Burberry Prorsum) to the very trendy (Viktor and Rolf, Blaak) to the cult (Martin Margiela, D Squared2). Each designer gets a handful of pages, in which we get a short tour of their design philosophy, and more importantly, a view of their clothes. Where the pictures (the illustrations are beautiful) the designer and the author all click together the book is fascinating and leaves you wanting more of that particular fashion house. Many of these pieces could be fruitfully worked up into much bigger articles.
This is a useful book and Davies does a good job of describing the vision of these designers, especially considering that, with the honourable exceptions of Paul Smith and Yohji Yamamoto, they are not a very articulate bunch. Frankly one or two of the designers included here are too concerned with building an art concept, and while fashionable, lack any sense of style and connection to men’s lives. This makes commercially-oriented designers like Marc Jacobs and Stephan Schneider (both included in the book) look even more defined and concrete. I found that, with a few exceptions, Modern menswear reinforced my preferences about which designers I liked and which I did not.
Menswear Guidance
Modern Menswear works best as a guide or reference book. The book is beautifully designed and handsomely produced. It would make a fine gift for any man interested in style. Visually stunning, knowledgeable and concise, this is a practical book for men who are building or updating their wardrobe. I remember my own evolution from teen style to young adult and this book would have been really valuable back then. It is also useful for those going in the other direction, mature men who need to lighten their style for less formal occasions. Here is the one-stop reference to finding those less formal clothes. It contains a reference list of the designers, which includes their websites.
This is a well-conceived and valuable book, in an area of menswear where not much is being written. I enjoyed it and expect to return to re-read it in the future.
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