Plaidfully yours

Market Week, when all menswear buyers descend on NY for a frenzied half week of trade fair and showroom visits, consists of five shows plus one – the plus one is The Haberdashery Group, which puts itself first in the calendar out of genteel disdain for competition and the wary realization that if it did compete with the other, giant shows for buyers’ attention, it could get clobbered.

Haberdashery is smaller and tweedier. Unlike the others, it’s in a hotel (The Warwick) where a rep can see buyers in his own suite. So in addition to the people who have tables in the various meeting rooms, the merch is scattered throughout the hotel.

This is the place to find the smaller, ‘men’s shop’ kinds of brands that were once stocked by one store in proximity to every university. Not the giant brands like Hickey Freeman, but the smaller ones, like Alan Paine, whose managing director who tried to explain to me what had happened to the brand since the glory days of the 60s and 70s. In the 90s it went through a series of private owners, but now it is his and he loves it.

These men love their clothing, but they show their love in different ways. When the US rep for John Smedley, Peter Scott and Inis Mean knitwear mentioned the town of “Hoick,” I had to say, what? A look of contempt passed across his face. The town, of course, has Hawick. The town I knew. Its name I had often read. I’d just never had a chance to speak it before (insert plaintive music here).

These were in the meeting rooms downstairs. Upstairs, on the third floor, in the suites where Nick Hilton, whose long lineage in the clothing business (he comes from Norman Hilton, and before that, Browning Fifth Avenue) is reflected in his yet unpublished memoir, which he would like me to read. Sure! Crit Rawlings, the man who, when head of Oxxford, outfitted George Bush for his first inauguration, now has a line of Chinese-made hand tailored suits that his reps said have gotten through the gate into Paul Stuart. I knocked on his door and stepped in to find him deep in conference with buyers. He has an archetypal Southern graciousness, but I still retreated as fast as I could.

Down the hall, there was a door marked Nardelli. I stepped in and faced a gauntlet of five hopeful Italian men. Nardelli is yet another tailoring concern founded in that great postwar wave (1951, in their case) and specializing in outerwear, but now broadening into sportcoats in neutral hues. These are as light as possible, unlined and lightly constructed with thin, but full, canvas. Nardelli is Neapolitan. I asked the design director if he himself was wearing the brand, but he said some of his luggage had gone missing; he, like his associates was wearing a coat made for him by a local tailor. I asked if I could try one on. One of the other guys offered his. Before he took it off I checked his look: a blue blazer, light blue shirt, gray trousers and black boots, but it’s all in the details: the snug flat front trousers with the no break and a thick cuff, the dark blue monogram dotting the bottom left rib like a sexy mole, and the coat, which I further appreciated when I wore it in the mirror. The canvas was soft and light, the front a three-roll-two, the shoulder softer than many American ‘natural’ shoulders, and the coat longer in front than in back. The finishing Neapolitan touch was the ‘spalla camicia’, which is a shoulder seam sewn like a shirt seam. It’s irregular and slightly rumpled looking. To the untrained eye, it looks like the tailor did not know what he was doing when in fact, he knows *everything*.

THIS was a piece of clothing. (The name of the tailor was Natale.) I was so happy. It didn’t even fit!

Down in the bar, of course, was the Lily Pulitzer show, with corduroy and flannel blazer linings so bright that they did not need any lights shining on them. In one corner at a banquette was a stack of books and a man signing them. I asked how much they were and the Pulitzer rep said they were free and there was co-author Jeffery Banks and would I like to have one signed?

Uh…why not?

Plaidfully yours, Jeffrey Banks. I’ve never met him before (though I’ve seen his picture on the Sartorialist, he is, after all, a famous menswear designer), so this inscription must be the default setting.

Now the giant book “Romancing the Plaid,” is on my tiny coffee table, which is barely larger. Sort of like the Queen Mary docking at the old Domino Sugar works here in south Williamsburg.

But it is still very nice. Thanks, Jeffrey!