Interview with Nicholas Storey

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August 5, 2013 by Ville Raivio

VR: Your age and occupation?
NS: I am fifty three years old. I graduated from UCL in 1981 and qualified as a lawyer. After that I worked in legal publishing, the government service, the city and private practice, before coming to live in a seafront house, in a fishing village in Estado do Rio de Janeiro, in 2006; where I write in various media and on a wide range of topics, from: colognes to Aston Martin and the James Bond connection, to loving cups, buttonhole flowers and snuff.

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Kiton, grey sports jacket, size 50EU
Ralph Lauren, Black Label suit, size 52EU

VR: Your educational background?
NS: I graduated from University College London and then Bar School. After that I undertook twelve months’ pupilage (practical training) at the Bar of England and Wales.

 Interview_with_Nicholas_Storey_at_Keikari_dot_comWith wife on the family verandah in 2012

VR: Have you any children or spouse (and how do they relate to your style enthusiasm)?

NS: I am married and have three sons (including one stepson) and one daughter. It was my wife who put the idea for my first book into my head. I am forever making lists – things to do or things to buy; even questions to ask someone and, one day, I was making a shopping list, at the computer, of clothes and things to buy. My wife was passing and noticed what I was doing. Maybe thinking that I should have been more profitably engaged, she said ”You should publish that!”. Around this time I was actually planning out a book about Beau Brummell – but Ian Kelly got there first. In the result I did plan out my first book around a phantasy shopping list and expedition, drawing on my knowledge of the makers and shops in what I called the gods’ quad, that is to say that quadrangle of Mayfair and St. James’s in which are found most of the famous London businesses centred on menswear.

My wife shares my conservatism in dress but, like me, since we live just about on a tropical beach, she dresses accordingly. My younger son and my stepson ask me for advice. My elder son is a complete rebel and his red hair is as long as his sister’s; if it weren’t for his beard, they could almost be twins – but give him time. My daughter dresses like the art student that she is but I think that she quietly approves of my dress.

VR: …and your parent’s and siblings’ reactions back in the days?

NS: I don’t recall it really being an issue. In my childhood and youth there was far less discussion about clothes than there is nowadays and the subject has, in some quarters, become far too close to an obsession.

VR: What other hobbies or passions do you have besides apparel?

NS: I don’t really regard my interest in clothes as a hobby or a passion. I think that clothes should be background to our daily activities and that they should be appropriate to those activities but clothes should never be an end in themselves. There is, somewhere on the internet, a photograph of some chap, in full evening dress (including a topper), in a plastic-furnished ice cream parlour. That’s just nuts. People should dress appropriately for the time, place and company; in the best clothes that they can find but wearing full evening dress for a visit to an ice cream parlour is just as inappropriate as wearing jeans to the opera or to a high-end casino – and a good deal more ludicrous.

I enjoy beach fishing, which I am sure that my fly-fishing friends back home would regard as highly suspect, if not infra dig.. There is little in the way of country sport, in terms of hunting and shooting here and, one of these days, we will take a trip down to Uruguay or Argentina, where these things are understood and practised. I am not sure that, after living in a climate where, except for five to ten days of winter (when the temperature drops to 15-18  degrees Celsius) nearly every day of the year is like a fine south European summer day, we could face the English winter again, when country sports are in full flight there.

VR: How did you first become interested in clothes, and when did you turn your eyes towards classic style? Why classics instead of fashion?

NS: I guess that I was influenced by my paternal grandfather, who was always well turned-out and old films played a part too. I have never been into current trends and fashions. I am not sure that there is any explanation for that, beyond personal preference.

VR: How have you gathered your knowledge of apparel — from books, in-house training, workshops or somewhere else?

NS: From the makers themselves, over a lengthy period of going to them. I explain below the influence of novels and contemporary illustrations.

VR: How would you describe your own dress? Do you have a particular style or cut philosophy?

NS: It is generally restrained and without exaggeration. My one small indulgence is gauntlet cuffs on lounge suit coats but I would never have them on, say, a dinner jacket.

VR: Which RTW makers and tailors do you favour?

NS: I have only one RTW suit, which is a tropical-weight suit from New & Lingwood. RTW shoes tended to be Tricker’s, including special orders on standard lasts. My favourite tailor was Davies & Son, when the cutter Mr Matthews was there (he retired in 1999) but Mr Craig (also now retired) at Connock & Lockie in Lamb’s Conduit Street was also a fine cutter and, at the time, the very best value in London. Sadly, his son who was his partner, died suddenly a few years ago and I believe that the business has now been sold on. The only circumstance in which I would order any new clothes in the foreseeable future would be for a child’s wedding and I would probably go to either Kent, Haste & Lachter or to Byrne & Burge, as they seem to have the kind of cut which is both distinguished and unexaggerated. I have always admired W S Foster’s and Henry Maxwell’s shoes but my bespoke shoes have been made by Poulsen Skone (at New & Lingwood) and John Lobb in St James’s Street. I know that not everyone agrees but I think that Budd is difficult to beat for shirts and ties, whether bespoke or RTW.

VR: I have no relatives in Blighty but I presume it’s not a commonplace thing for a Cornishman to begin anew in Brazil. Was this a long-time dream come true or something else entirely?

NS: I am a Cornishman and it used to be said (especially at the height of the mining booms in the nineteenth century), that Cornwall’s greatest export was Cornishmen, who took their mining skills all over the world and, indeed, although the Cornish mining industry is just about dead, the Camborne School of Mines is still regarded by many as the best mining school in the world.  I feel very privileged to be Cornish – both by birth and (although Storey is not a Cornish name), largely by descent too. Moreover, unlike for the Welsh, Scotch and Irish (who tend openly to despise the English as ‘Sassenachs’), there is nothing inconsistent in being both Cornish and English – and I regard it as a double whammy.  I have still spent the greatest part of my life in London and certainly enjoyed aspects of it: the friendships made there and favourite haunts – such as Crockford’s Club and the restaurants, shops and bars. However, overall, my favourite view of London has always been the view from a train, drawing westward, out of Paddington Station. London life also changed very much between my first year at University in 1978 and 2006, when we came to live in Brazil. Physical overcrowding of the streets, combined with appalling manners (or lack of them) made life very uncomfortable and attitudes and behaviour changed, largely for the worse.

Everyone these days seems to be in a scrum for more and more money and just about anything goes to get it. We just had enough of all that; enough of wrestling with pigs for the trough. That might sound high-handed and I suppose that it is but it is far better to be able to afford the comfort of being so grand than to remain in the rat race – because there isn’t really any end-tape or trophy and most people don’t know why they are racing anyway. We nearly moved to Sri Lanka  and even found a house but, before we could do anything about it, it was washed away in the Tsunami so we looked around the world and (somehow) stumbled upon the Region of the Lakes to the north of Rio de Janeiro, came to see it and decided that this were no bad place in which to live and write. We just sold up, packed up and came here. We keep in touch with family and friends by Skype, although we have become rather reclusive but that is presumably because it naturally suits us.

Interview_with_Nicholas_Storey_at_Keikari_dot_com2As best man at a friend’s wedding in 1986, morning glory by Davies&Son

VR: How would you describe the overall style in Brazil? I trust the country has its share of industrialists, lawyers and politicians who don the suit but have they heard of Solaro, Fresco and the like?

NS: We do not go to the cities very much and certainly not for business so my appreciation of how Brazilian professionals and businessmen dress is very limited. However, we know one Brazilian law and philosophy lecturer who
certainly knows his Solaro from his Fresco and has suits and shirts and shoes made bespoke in Rio de Janeiro.

VR: You’ve authored three books for Pen and Sword. How did the series begin and how have you been received so far?

NS: I have mentioned the genesis of the first three Pen & Sword books already. In fact there are four books but the fourth book is called Great British Adventurers and not linked to the first three. The first three all have the wrong main titles: although there is some history and anecdote in all of them, they are meant to be amusing, rather than learned. The sub-titles better describe the contents and every reader should approach these books with a pinch of salt and recognize that they were written with my tongue firmly in cheek. If one thing has irritated me about the experience of publishing these books it is the way some over-earnest fellows treat the titles as some kind of fraud. I did try to fight the publishers over the titles but they were insistent – and so they and I ended up forfeiting a big slice of the young market which flocks to books such as Roetzel’s
Gentleman – because the under-twenty fives will not want to buy a book with ‘History’ in the title.

VR: Please describe how you select the content and sources for your books.

NS: I have fairly recently been given Farid Chenoune’s monumental History of Men’s Fashion and Richard Walker’s wonderful Savile Row but I do not own any other books on clothes as such. Moreover, my approach and perspective is that of a customer, not of a maker and, although I think that it is useful to know how many people are engaged in making a pair of bespoke shoes, I am not sure that a detailed description of the full process, with photographs of benches and scraps of leather and tools, is of much interest to anyone except a complete geek. My main sources are really contemporary novels and illustrations, including the famous Spy cartoons as well as film stills. John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga is an incredible resource for descriptions of clothing over the period from the late nineteenth century up to the 1920s .

VR: Should my readers expect more publications any time soon?

NS: I am writing more and more for The Field magazine, which is the oldest continuously published monthly publication in the world and one of the world’s great magazines: founded by John Surtees who was a friend of Charles Dickens (who also wrote for The Field), in 1853. My publisher sent the magazine editors a copy of my second book, which they liked but, instead of reviewing it, they asked for my contact details and commissioned a feature from me (on colognes), which made me feel very pleased with myself indeed!  This year there have been three features, so far, and there is one more in the pipeline (on snuff) and I have a pitch for another one too on a Christmas theme. The best thing about writing for The Field is that the issues are numbered and the whole canon is virtually a matter of national record; certainly not tomorrow’s fish and chip wrapping.

History Today (another quite long-established publication) published, in the July  2013 edition, an article by me on the subject of Beau Brummell’s Dandies’ Ball, which was an event held two hundred years ago, in July 1813. So far as more books are concerned, I have been working on a crime thriller (set in 1970 in Cornwall and in St James’s Square) for a long time but it is nowhere near finished. However, it has an original theme (it’s got a couple of attempted murders in it but centres on a fraud that arises out of a very rare legal device) and I really should complete it, because they say that we should write about what we know, and it does have some pace to it as well. My first three books have been well-received, and Country Life magazine (the younger sibling of The Field) gave my first book a lead book review and was very complimentary; UK Esquire; Maxim and various internet forum owners also liked it. The press and forum reviews are all available to read on the Pen & Sword website.

VR: Who or what inspires you?

NS: The figures from the past that I most admire for their dress-sense are Beau Brummell; George, Lord Byron; Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch; Jack Buchanan; Rudolph Valentino; Ronald Colman; Clive Brook; Clark Gable; Noël Coward, and Ian Fleming.

VR: What is your definition of style?

NS: The best definition of the essence of  ‘style’, certainly is not from any original thinking by me and is certainly not confined to dress but, in my view, it is contained in an anecdote in a lecture given by Professor Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, when he was King Edward VII Professor of English, at Cambridge, in 1914.  The lecture On Style is printed in a collection of his lectures, called On the Art of Writing (Cambridge University Press) but the excerpt, on its own, of what he calls ‘the heart of the matter’ is set out in the Hats’ chapter of my first book. I won’t spoil the anecdote but he says that ‘the essence of style comes down to thinking with the heart as well as with the head’. What we appear to be to the outside world is manifest in what we say and what we do; how we are with our family and our friends; in what we stand for – or – more particularly, what we are prepared to stand-up for.

Interview_with_Nicholas_Storey_at_Keikari_dot_com3With 1998-made Davies&Son Astrakhan coat on the verandah

VR: Over the years you must have learned quite a bit about style. Is there something you wish more men would know about the topic? This is great opportunity to make a lasting influence on my younger readers. Most of us aren’t blessed with rakish relatives, which makes learning about style a challenge later in life. All tips and thoughts are valuable.

NS: Lord Byron (himself possessed of an excoriating wit), said that Brummell was one of the great men of the age; placing himself third; Napoleon second, and Brummell first. It has also been nicely observed that Bonaparte and Brummell ‘nearly fell together’. Leigh Hunt told Jesse that he recalled Byron saying about Brummell’s appearance that: ‘’there was nothing remarkable in his style of dress except a certain exquisite propriety’’. At the end of the day, Brummell is principally remembered for his character, his perfectionism, and as an icon of originality; of a determined defiance, and for the force of a solipsistic and seemingly disengaged personality; most famed for his amusing distraction in: the tie of his cravat; the fit of his coat; the polish of his boots; the ‘’nice conduct of a clouded cane’’; his indulgence in Georgian feasts and their deep potations; as well as a liking for ‘’the music of the dice box’’, and the (ultimately) doom-laden dealing of the cards on the baize, in a gaming ‘Hell’ in Jermyn Street; from which he emerged, broken, and went up to Watier’s club, exclaiming that he was: without a shilling to his name, in the world.

In the modern age, our leading politicians, professionals and higher executives increasingly see some populist advantage in schlepping around, in pursuit of votes and riches, in open-necked shirts and saying to total strangers: ‘’Call me Tim’’. However, occasionally, every modern man has the occasion to need to dress properly: a wedding; a baptism; a funeral; Royal Ascot, or for some event requiring white or black-tie evening dress. If he has any sense at all, when he finally looks at himself, he will see Brummell, ironic and knowing, staring back at him, from a fourth dimension within the looking glass; suggesting that ‘’your tie looks too carefully arranged.’’ The modern man of sense will take the hint and, quite deliberately, he will avoid the fault, by expending the extra effort needed, only just to spoil its perfect symmetry.

Pictures: © Nicholas Storey

http://www.pen-and-sword.co.uk/?search=nicholas+storey


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