My Hunt Cup Runneth Over

Off a road and off another road...shopping strips, gas stations and drug stores disappear.

I stare out and see a horizon of blue and green and empty of what depresses me.

Having said that, I try to avoid looking at Andy's hat.

It's tailgating but this isn't parking at the Firecracker 500 where all come to watch a left hand turn.

There is such beauty in seeing a man or woman on a horse.  Unlike most of traditions that are forgotten, the elegance of the pairing, I'm positive, will last forever.

I'll be dead forever but today I'm alive and I will suck all this in like a Partagas Lusitania.

It's a small crowd - Is that possible?  Off the radar where crowds come only to  promenade their Lilly P and get drunk while they selfie.

Pretentious free, it's all amazingly simple.  Granted, the ethnic diversity is limited but it's so soulful.

A windswept soul. I once asked a tax attorney, what business could  a man deduct everything and keep outta jail.  "Horses," he said.

He added it went back to the early 19th century when business had a lot to do with horses.

And the laws just never changed.  But people do.

Our horses are bits of plastic and steel but we can still fly a flag.

Still, can you ever look this good in a Toyota? Personally, I don't think so.

I love watching rich old white people.

Mostly because it beats watching poor white people.  They like watching a 500 mile left turn.

When I bring a camera, I try to shoot what no one else is shooting. In this case -- the race.

For me, I love the sound I first heard at Keeneland almost 20 years ago.  Hoof on turf and I know it sounds like it did 200 years ago -- 500 years ago -- 1,000 years ago.  A forever soundtrack.

Sometimes I just want to close my eyes and listen to the horses, the wind, the cheering...It is traveling back in time when there was so much elegance despite poor plumbing and dentistry.

Special thanks to the Main Line Sportsman for the invitation & inspiration of the Pennsylvania Hunt Cup

GQ's Ireland (1962)

GQ Magazine, April 1962

While GQ seemed to be the smaller and more intellectually challenged little brother of Esquire, and I've waded thru years and years of both….GQ, for a time, stood on firm turf in the early to mid '60s... both visually and in the writing.  This April issue celebrated Ireland and it has a moody and dark attitude.  I love it.

An GQ is not easy to find and this came from a bound volume so scanning was a challenge.  However, inspirational ideas, fashion jargon for 'stealing,' are everywhere despite the binding.  Not only in unique layout, photography and stories but in the apparel itself.  The nubby stripe shirt reminds me of nubby silk Rooster tie stripes -- A mitre madras shirt reminds me of…nothing. It's unlike anything I've ever seen and I'd kill to have one today.  A rain coat with hacking pockets and sleeve turn ups?  I'd buy that.  I'm even saving up for a Jill Gill - - the NYC artist of all those beautiful whiskeys.

I know fashion designers dig thru these old mags but do fashion editors?  I'm guessing most do not.  And for the very first time, during NY Fashion Week, my hunch was confirmed from widely divergent sources regarding what we'll call,  "Fashion editor illiteracy."   "He didn't know shawl from peak."  "Zip knowledge of apparel history."  "I had to explain canvas construction." "All he liked was black." You get the idea.

I sat in front of Nick Sullivan at Esquire and in a couple minutes he showed me a 1950's Mac hanging on the back of his office door and pointed out the construction suggesting it might even be my size.  We discussed the military influence of clothing and why stealing unit insignia was not only vulgar but unnecessary.  And sure, there was the 24 hour "shoe-cam" which was monitoring what he wore on his feet everyday…but the man was fashion literate.  That much you could not argue.

G. Bruce Boyer bemoaned the GQ of today doing a 20 page spread on jeans and t-shirts.  It's what they know, Bruce.    But I'm guessing there's an archive somewhere in that GQ office and I'd like to suggest it would be a lot more fun to go thru than the PR pitches.

"Gone is the romance that was so divine…"

The second you see it - It hits you.  I was last here for the Ivy exhibit but the space has grown up.  Men and women are in residence having nudged the college kids into storage.  The elegance of this space is simple.  I run into a young man whom I respect immensely and he tells me he thinks it, 'uncompleted.' I tell him it only gives way, as it should,  to the glorious respect of the cloth.   Beautifully cut... for men and women both.  It is damned near... other worldly and I don't think I'll ever forget it.

The Fashion Institute of Technology is not the kind of place you'd suspect has a museum --  Especially in New York City.  It stands at 27th and 7th Avenue looking more like a concrete federal office building than a fashion institute.  The museum entrance is on the south side of 27th, usually blocked off, adding to the federal feel of the place.  Inside, a flight of stairs down, is an exhibit area darker than the inside of a goat.  A quiet calm settled in as the 1930s stood, and sat, in front of me -- Men and women and the clothing they wore and, I like to think, took off each other.

Co-curated by the museum's, Patricia Mears and writer, G. Bruce Boyer, the clothing hails from the 1930s. It was a time of economic and political, 'shit hitting the fan'  but as Boyer has often written, it was, despite the uncertainty,  the golden decade for apparel.  I've always said that today's popularity of menswear has much to do with our own economic hard times.  When you're broke and out of a job,  there's something to be said for getting dressed up.

Bespoke is everywhere in the exhibit.  In that respect, it belongs in a museum's humidity controlled steel locker, wrapped in acid free paper and tucked far from the public's oily fingers.  Sorry, I once worked as a museum technician but as clothes mad as I am, I couldn't help but admire how interesting the women's clothing was... it's so alive.  Silk clings to a breast and falls off a nipple.  Shape forms around a tight waist and bottom while a hip is cocked and a long finger seems to point to my crotch.  Wasn't there a very bad '80s   movie about a mannequin coming to life?

Menswear saw both the Italian and British represented generously by loans from Rubinacci Napoli London House and Savile Row's Davies and Son.  Luca Rubinacci and I stand together admiring a trench coat from his grandfather's company which began in the early '30s.  I point to the gorge of the collar and Luca tells me a story about his father's obsession with collecting vintage London House for a family museum.

Handed down over three generations, his father acquires a Rubinacci white tie jacket made in the '30s and most recently owned by a circus clown who patched it with bandana cloth. Luca tells his father to restore it but his father refuses telling his son, "I don't want what it was --  I want what it became." So do I.

Elegance in an Age of Crisis:  Fashions of the 1930s
Fashion Institute of Technology
Exhibit runs from 7 February 2020 to 19 April 2020