Here is my new addition, already a couple of months old, to my Classic Menswear library; and it's a tome called The Perfect Gentleman by James Sherwood.
Here it is under Fly's Fry's Ties... by the way Stephen Fry's Fry's Ties is also an amusing book on the subject of menswear, and specifically - ties, but amusing is about all it is - it's more or less interesting but nothing more really than that and not that well-written either; and Stephen Fry in my view is an amazingly poor writer for someone who made his career out of writing and then all he writes about is himself and much of it in the vein of How I Came Out Vol. XIII... as if anybody cares.
The fat man has already written four I-books aka autobiographies! And he's going to live quite some more! So expect more fat autobiographies from him.
But back to The Perfect Gentleman, and here He invariably is - the King of Style (If Of Nothing Much Else) and the Duke of Windsor!
A gentleman's pleasures... not all of them.
I am reading James Sherwood's book now at the time of this writing (no pun intended) and I am not yet half-way through but have already found some choicest quotes and a startling admission for a man's style book:
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The more attention a man pays to his appearance, the worse he invariably behaves.
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(and in context)
The title of this book (The Perfect Gentleman) is not to be taken literally. The men you will meet in these pages - the greatest patrons of London's luxury-goods houses in history - are rarely paragons of moral, intellectual or financial probity; quite the reverse, as it happens. The more attention a man pays to his appearance, the worse he invariably behaves. It is perhaps an unwritten rule of the dandy that, like Dr Faustus, his Mephistophelean pact allows him all the pleasures that sartorial London can provide on the understanding that he be prepared for bankruptcy, exile and an ignominious death.
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(from Chapter on Berry Bros. & Rudd)
Alcohol and the English aristocracy have a relationship that pre-dates the Magna Carta. Its effects on the ruling classes reached epidemic proportions in the early years of the Restoration, when the "Merry Gang" of disreputable courtiers such as saturnine poet the 2nd Earl of Rochester, playwright George Etherege, the Duke of Buckingham and future House of Commons Speaker Sir Charles Sedley made a spectacle out of their dissipation. Samuel Pepys's diary dated 1663 records an incident on the balcony of Oxford Kate's tavern in Covent Garden in which Sedley "showed his nakedness - acting all the postures of lust and buggery that could be imagined and abusing of scripture... that being done, he took a glass of wine and washed his p***k in it then drank it off; and then took another and drank the King's health".
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(from Chapter on Floris)
Even among the aristocracy, standards of hygiene in the 18th century ('s London) were at best squalid. The perfumer's role was to mask the stench of bodies rarely bathed and clothes infrequently laundered.
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(Edward VII's smoking habits)
By the time he sat down to breakfast he had already had two cigarettes and one cigar; and often by dinner time he had smoked twenty more cigarettes - exhaling the smoke slowly and contemplatively though his nose - as well as twelve vast and pungent Corona y Corona, Henry Clay's Tsar or Uppmanns' cigars.
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(from Chapter on Edwardian London, a bit of second-hand practical advice)
[...] but his advice is as prescient today as it was over a century ago. "It is cheaper and better to give clothing of all sorts as much rest as possible," he says. "Two pairs of trousers, worn on alternate days and kept rightly folded in the dark when not in use (being of course brushed when taken off) will wear longer than three pairs that are successively acquired and worn daily until they each can be worn no more."
Of made-up (aka pre-tied) ties, he writes, "In strictly fashionable quarters any kind is regarded as very, very bad form and while there will always exist a large popular demand for made-up bows, knots and Ascots, the highest-class public will have none of them."
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