ARCADIA
Miami Vice set it in the 1930s, it would have been perfect.
Since then, I have dedicated myself, and
consecrated a not inconsiderable chunk of my wardrobe, to the MPGA – Make Pink (on men) Great Again – cause. Selflessly I have allowed the great Terry Haste to make me a three-piece suit in rose corduroy, and a two- piece in lobster linen. He is hard at work on a pink denim sports coat. Mariano Rubinacci has made me a blush linen two-piece and a very enjoyable lightweight jacket in Pepto Bismol pink corduroy intended for shirts. But with Lorenzo, it was about more than being light in colour and spirit. It is lighter in weight than anything he has ever made be- fore. Indeed, he believes he has reached the hitherto unachievable goal of making a gar- ment that weights no more than the fabric, thread and buttons with which it is made. Usually, the fabric and trimmings of a gar- ment are just the beginning, as a jacket is built rather than made. The structure of a jacket (more properly known as a ‘coat’, of course) is achieved with interlinings of all manner of different types of fabric: body canvas for jacket fronts, horsehair canvas to build chest and shoulder, domette, which goes over the itchy horsehair to give soſt- ness, and collar canvas of stiff linen among them. All of which, like the foundations and framework of a building, is concealed be- tween the lining and the selected fabric. Lorenzo has taken a metaphorical wreck- ing ball to all that. Just as an ecurie prepar- ing a car for racing will strip out all unneces- sary parts, replace steel panels such as boot lid, bonnet and doors with carbon fibre, sub- stitute glass windows with polycarbonate, and drill out the pedals in an effort to shave off another precious gram or two, so Loren- zo has approached the challenge of weight saving with remarkable rigour. He has creat- ed a garment that is an incredible 40 per cent lighter than a conventional jacket. He also suggests using thin slivers of mother of pearl as buttons (he did not reveal how many grams this typically saves), enabling him to make his signature six-button double-breast- ed jackets that fasten with the bottom but- tons, rolling the upper two pairs. The result is astonishing. I almost feel that
I have heavier shirts in my wardrobe. Of course, there are already warm weath-
er solutions: half-canvassing, buggy backs and the like. But Lorenzo maintains that what he calls his ‘scarf jacket’ (don’t ask me
why) is no mere small step forward, but a gi- ant leap for male apparel. Not since Richard Mille made a watch for Rafael Nadal that even with strap weighed a barely perceptible 18.83g (the RM 27-01) has the world of luxury witnessed such a feat of feathery weightless- ness. It is the sort of advance in human de- velopment that makes one happy to be living in such advanced times.
faced an even stiffer challenge, for they had to rely upon memory to relay the stories. The repetition of passages and phrases offered modern scholars the first clue that the poems were first composed and passed down orally. Within the ‘Oral Tradition’, each bard who
CLASSICAL EDUCATION
SPEAKING VOLUMES
Daisy Dunn
‘HOW CAN MEN FIND their way to war but not find their way home?’ asks Penelope (Jul- iette Binoche) of Odysseus (Ralph Fiennes) in The Return. ‘For some,’ replies Odysseus, ‘war becomes home.’ Uberto Pasolini’s quietly intelligent 2024 film – which will be followed by Christopher Nolan’s new take on the same tale when The Odyssey hits multiplexes in 2026 – takes us back to a world in which the spoken word was everything. Penelope had been confident that Odysseus was alive – ru- mour had spread across the royal courts of Greece – but the reasons for his delay in re- turning to her from the Trojan War remained garbled and ambiguous. As a man of many epithets – ‘multi-skilled’
was just one – Odysseus had the power to make amends aſter 10 years of travelling and dallying with other women. For Homer’s first audiences (if not Penelope), it was only right that his eloquence should prevail, for eloquence was the quality upon which con- temporary society was built. Storytelling, as epitomised by Homer’s poems, brought peo- ple together, instilling the civil and martial values by which they lived. Without stories, there was no civilisation. In pre-Archaic Age Greece, prior to the in-
vention of long-form writing, poets per- formed the Homeric epics and other poems in public. It would have taken about three days to put on the Iliad or the Odyssey in full, so people must have attended in long sittings with breaks and sleep in between. If the au- dience required stamina, the performers
took up the works had some freedom to adapt and add to them as he sang, but the stories themselves had to remain recognisable. Many critics have expressed doubt over how closely one bard could imitate another, owing to the limitations of human memory. Was it truly possible to recall and replay 15,000 lines of verse? This is, on the face of it, a strange question to ask, given that oral performanc- es thrived even under the Roman Empire, long aſter the rise of literacy. It would appear that is rather our memories that are at fault. The human brain once possessed a great
aptitude for learning by rote and retaining information. The travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor gained an insight into the rarity of this in the 20th century while researching his book Roumeli. Rural inhabitants of the mountains of Crete, Leigh Fermor discov- ered, knew a long, early 17th-century poem by heart. The Erotókritos was of a similar length to the Odyssey. Much has been written in recent years
about the deleterious impact of the internet and micro forms of writing, such as those on social media channels including X, on our concentration spans. But with Homer’s works again back in fashion, it seems a good moment to ask whether we might yet redis- cover our ancient ability for memorising and listening. Might the explosion of podcasts and audiobooks, for example, provide some renewed hope for the future of the spoken word? By absorbing information with our ears, as opposed to relying predominantly upon the eyes, we could be said to be part- way towards reviving the ancient practice. There is speculation in publishing houses that the growth of the podcast has come at the expense of the physical book. There is apparently a large audience who prefer to get their information from listening, even passively, to actively reading. Rote-learning and the memorisation of texts, meanwhile, remain out of favour in schools and beyond. While this is certainly bad news for the tradi- tional writer (although the sale of audio- books is welcome), the listener might at least try to justify their preference by thinking of Homer and aspiring to the same levels of concentration and retention as the poet’s
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