Trickers
a sharp-dressed man London’s Jermyn Street
If you are wondering what to buy the man in your life, head straight to Jermyn Street, and, if possible, make sure that you’re there when darkness falls and the street sparkles. Tere is simply no better place in London for a man to seek out fine and beautiful items of apparel, from exquisite silk ties to beaver trilbies to glittering and/or comical cufflinks to the loveliest cotton shirts. Jermyn Street is the backbone of the so-
called ‘Golden Square Mile of Menswear,’ stretching from St James’s Palace to the fur- thest reaches of Savile Row. It has been dedicated to serving the needs of its elegant male clientele since the Restoration of Charles II in the 1660s, when St James’s
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was turned into a network of streets and all the news flowed through its popular coffee houses. Piccadilly Arcade and Jermyn Street cross paths, appropriately, at the statue of Beau Brummell (1778-1840) in tailcoat and trousers. Brummell is responsi- ble for causing all the gents of his day to wear dark sober coats, thus setting men around the world on a direct path toward today’s navy, black or grey suits. Jermyn Street was Brummell’s regular stomping ground, as he particularly liked to buy soaps and play cards at no. 89, Floris, the world’s oldest family-run perfumer and, founded in 1730, the street’s oldest shop. Jermyn Street has long been seen as the
best place in England for a man to buy a shirt. In the 1920s it became largely a street for shirt makers – especially after 1928, when the Prince of Wales wore a coloured, soft-collared shirt in public and so gave ambitious young men permission to put aside their stiff, detachable collars and don shirts “with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and laven- der and faint orange,” to quote Te Great Gatsby (1925). Gatsby’s ‘man in England’ may well have shopped at Turnbull & Asser, established 1885, whose premises contain a library of shirts that burst with stories of Churchill, James Bond and royal and Hollywood glamour.
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