#my favorite type of fictional man is evidently one who is very tall but still radiates sad wet cat energy

[leavingautumn13]

new bg3 character is of the "extremely tired parent" variety

[i have commissions open now]

[nomanwalksalone]

SEVEN AT ONE BLOW: FAMOUS FABULIST TAILORS OF FACT AND FICTION

by Réginald-Jérôme de Mans

1. The Brave Little Tailor: 

Ever since the Brothers Grimm’s Brave Little Tailor turned swatting seven flies away from his snack of jam into a tall tale of dispatching seven strong men, the profession of tailor has turned up its share of memorable misadventurers. This folktale tailor demonstrated cockiness, confidence, and quick-wittedness, along with a very grudging respect for the truth. News of his rumored exploits spreads the land through word of garrulous mouth, threatening to upset social distinctions (a hero tailor? A threat to the King, who sends him out to assassinate giants – making him the first tailor secret agent on record.) True to form, the tailor uses presence of mind rather than body, misdirection, getting others to do things for him (even kill each other instead of forcing him to kill them). Ultimately, and after several other successful impossible missions, the tailor ends up married to a princess and King himself. 

The Brave Little Tailor has become a surprising archetype: the man of unexpected and sometimes untrustworthy qualities, able to leap class boundaries as if he possessed the seven-league boots from another folktale, whose talents for verbal, rather than sartorial, embellishment are just as likely to get him into as extricate him from trouble.

2 & 3. The #Steez is Out There: George Spicer and Mario Zuccala

Despite the recent vogue for anything custom and supposedly crafted, tailors are still fighting feverishly to stand out and survive. Those that can emphasize their famous former customers or the styles they supposedly pioneered, or types of clothing they might have invented. Others will seize on any gimmick: for instance, the same entrepreneurial tailor has purchased the names of Anthony Sinclair (the Savile Row tailor who made Sean Connery’s suits in his first Bond movies) and Mr. Fish (the brand famous for psychedelic 1960s shirts and wide ties) in order to sell ready-to-wear clothing under those and other half-remembered labels. Nothing wrong with that, but I do wish someone would step into the spaces vacated by my two favorite parasteezologists, these tailors who had sittings with the supernatural.

In 1933, George Spicer of the Savile Row tailor Todhouse Reynard was driving around the Scottish lochs when he and his wife observed “an extraordinary-looking creature” rather like a gigantic snail “jerk” across the road ahead. A contemporary drawing based on their description  one of the earliest modern sightings of the Loch Ness Monster is tailor-made for revival as the logo of a resuscitated brand:

And why not? Todhouse Reynard was long ago taken over by what is now the tailors Norton & Sons, whose owner Patrick Grant reintroduced another of the names Norton owns, E. Tautz, as an expensive and trendy ready-to-wear brand with Tautz’s old fox logo. Nessie would have been so much more cool. 

A favorite of my bud @voxsartoria, Mario Zuccala was a Florentine tailor who took shortcuts, like many more recent tailors. However, in 1962 he took one of the third kind: cutting through the woods one evening, he encountered an object “like an inverted bowl” out of which a cylinder extended and two creatures emerged to carry him away. Upon his return, he described them to an investigator who created the shocking image below:

(Note the natural shoulders and the clean chest. No drape there. I feel like I understand the Florentine cut much better now. The headgear, though, is a bit 1960s Courrèges.) Zuccala reported the creatures had given him a message for humanity, although he forgot what it was. Probably something about when our alterations would be done. 

4 & 5. Douglas Hayward and The Tailor of Panama

The late Douglas Hayward was by all accounts a fantastic tailor and a charming man whose shop became something of a club for regular customers, many of whom hailed from the same rulebreaking, class-distorting 1960s crucible as Hayward had. Originally based near the offices of the BBC, Hayward moved to the West End as he prospered, deliberately choosing not to establish in Savile Row in order to avoid its establishment connotations. Instead, he set up in nearby Mount Street, which was still a quiet Mayfair neighborhood at the time. (Today, it houses outposts of Rubinacci as well as the luxury brand William & Son, although it’s still far prettier than Bond Street round the corner.) Hayward was a favorite of Michael Caine, who included him in The Italian Job in a scene as Charlie Croker’s tailor. Terence Stamp, Alec Guinness, Lord Lichfield, Alec Guinness and a host of other glitterati of a certain age could drop in at his shop as a sort of second home; it was a somewhat less showbizzy name, spy novelist John Le Carré, who used him as an inspiration in creating Harry Pendel, The Tailor of Panama. 

Hayward might have been a talkative and roguishly charming fellow who mixed classes to end up one of the first celebrity tailors. But he was a damned good tailor who stayed on the right side of the law and didn’t let his gift of gab get him in trouble with customers or the law. Le Carré’s Harry Pendel, on the other hand, was an East End chancer who constantly fabricated stories as well as garments – beginning with the completely invented history and heritage of his ersatz tailoring shop Pendel & Braithwaite of London and… Panama. These relatively harmless lies get him trapped in the gentle blackmail of disgraced MI6 agent Andy Osnard, for whom he then creates made-up political fabulisms that ensnare the world powers in a geopolitical wild goose chase. Pendel’s our latter-day Man in Havana, with bespoke suits more romantic than the vacuum cleaners of Graham Greene’s salesman. True to inspiration, however, Pendel is a lovable rogue, just a less law-abiding, slightly less lucky one than Hayward.

6. The Kingsman crew

So one-dimensional that pressed together they collectively account for one character, the tailors of Matthew Vaughn’s film are interesting in that they turn the Brave Little Tailor archetype on its head: mainly a group of upper-class snobs, they pretend to be tailors while acting as an elite espionage service. Their ur-British garments and accessories become their weapons and defenses, including a Brigg umbrella with bulletproof canopy and, more charmingly, a classic Conway Stewart that really is a poison pen. In one of those coincidences of life imitating what is entertainment, though definitely not art, today you will see the occasional upper-class surname like Sebag-Montefiore among the cutters of Savile Row, although to my knowledge “bulletproof tweeds” is still just an expression. Some of the canvases and interlining Kingsman’s tailoring inspiration Huntsman use, though, might turn back a .22. And like the Brave Little Tailor, Kingsman’s apprentice ends up in a princess’ bed, although it’s for the purposes of a crass sodomy joke set to Slave to Love. I bet Bryan Ferry approved.

7. Garak

“Plain, simple Garak, a tailor on the Promenade” of station Deep Space Nine is how he introduces himself. Like a good custom suit, much more meaning lies beneath the surface. Is he a reformed spy? A sleeper agent? The only thing everyone’s favorite Cardassian (after Kourtney) will admit to is that he’s a very good tailor. Did he really learn the safe passage codes to Cardassia Prime while “hemming trousers”? His scorn for the romanticized conventions of 20th century Earth spy fiction is evident: beholding the posh apartments, free-flowing liquor and buxom assistants of Holosuite-minted secret agent Julian Bashir, he dryly notes, “I think I joined the wrong intelligence service.” One that taught him to have no ego, nothing but professionalism… so when did he learn how to tailor? Not unlike some of the early Internet-famous tailors, he’s not above blowing it all up when things look dire – but Garak does so literally, in order to flush out an assassin. In short, he’s an interstellar man of mystery, humble, ebullient, and able to layer subterfuge upon subterfuge. My first custom tailor, Terran in origin, did the same. Garak’s many aphorisms usually refer to his cavalier relationship with the truth: “Never tell the truth when a lie will do.” Even after a near-death experience that elicited three separate, conflicting, near-deathbed confessions, he avows that everything he said was true. “Especially the lies.” Probably best not to second-guess whether Garak’s Clothiers really hand-pad-stitches its suit canvases and doesn’t rely on block patterns. The Brave Little Tailor traveled far, but did proud.