Clothes Make the Man

Here are two short fashion articles I wrote for consecutive issues of The Project on two very different autumn looks:

The City Slicker

Men are looking more and more for classic items that will be fashionable for years, investment pieces that will age well and not fall apart after a season’s wear. The Harrington jacket, for example, has seen a huge boom recently.

Now summer is over though, outerwear needs to be able to weather wind and rain. The classic beige flyfronted mac is a perfect solution. Mackintosh do the original and best. Or a Burberry trenchcoat. For high street alternatives, Uniqlo have great trenchcoats, and Topman have a good range of peacoats as long as you avoid the overdesigned stuff. They also have a lovely velvet-collared crombie for a smarter look.

There are some great options around for button-down shirts. The classic Brutus shirts are back in action this year, although their options are as yet somewhat limited. Aertex have some great, slim fitting styles and they can procured from Philip Browne in the lanes.

Match these with loafers, penny or tassle. The classic are Bass Weejuns, which you’ll be lucky to find in store unless you make a special visit to J Simons in Covent Garden, but good alternatives are popping up everywhere on the high street. Or brogues: a good pair has at least 500 holes. Loake Royals for a city look or something chunkier by Alfred Sargent or Church’s. Always go for leather soles and have them resoled: they will last forever and improve with age.

Denim is thankfully being paid more attention on the high street recently, with Topman doing some great dry denim that won’t break the bank and Uniqlo selling real Japanese selvedge denim for a song. Or splash out on Nudies or Levi’s 511s.

The look is smart and classic but not uptight. The individuality is in combinations of colour and texture. Layering is key, and top it off with a pair of Ray Bans and a good scarf, or a trilby in inclement weather. Suited and booted.


The Rough Rambler

If last week we told you how to look suave about town, this week we’re offering a more rough and ready autumn look. Hardwearing but comfortable, the focus should be on warmth and versatility, on country practicality over city chic.

Flannel shirts are making their statement in shops all over, with a huge and varied range in my personal shop-of-the-moment, UniQlo. Denim and chambray work shirts and jackets are also strong this season, with designers such as Ralph Lauren pushing the theme and the high street thankfully cottoning on as well.

Chunky, chunky knitwear. Gap have the nicest shawl-collar cardigan I’ve seen since they started to really take off some months ago. Very Steve McQueen. H&M also have some good offerings. Great for layering between shirts and coats or for wearing at home in front of the fireplace after a hard day chopping wood. If you can bear the label, Jack Wills have some nice knits at the moment, and if you can’t but have the dosh, check out French minimalists APC.

Barbour coats are the classic casual country attire and can be found in Gallyons on Bedford Street. If you like the quilted look, Ralph Lauren have a lovely quilted hacking jacket at the moment. For updated classics in checks and tweeds, there are great jackets around by brands such as Engineered Garments and Woolrich Woolen Mills. Or keep checking Norwich’s charity shops for classic army parkas and shearling coats.

Chukka boots and desert boots, heavier brogues or even moccasin boots from someone like Quoddy or Red Wing would all look great with just about any of the things I’ve mentioned. Even a pair of beaten up old hiking boots. Worn leather will really complete the look, which shouldn’t be too polished.

Take My Breath Away

I spent yesterday morning exploring Southend-on-Sea. It was a blustery day on that grey bit of the coast but in my waxed jacket and with my headphones on I felt perfectly insulated from the gales and the occasional peppering of rain. Making my way along the neglected seafront I decided to take another step in my recently-undertaken mission to educate myself about techno, and Gui Boratto's second album, Take My Breath Away, is what accompanied me along that bleak coastal ramble.

The title track opens the album expertly, the rising notes of the melody warm and hopeful. It's a real builder, coming on in waves but not losing its insistent but understated rhythm. It drops off but resurges, more intense than before, creating an urgency that sets the tone for the rest of the album. No Turning Back, on which Boratto's wife sings, brings in guitar sounds and a pop aesthetic that may be anathaema to the serious techno fan but the vocals are spare enough not to be overly naff and the song feels consistent with Boratto's direction.

The brilliant Ballroom has a clubbier vibe, with warm, pulsating bass and a driving rhythm. Its echoey, reverberating sounds evoke balls ricocheting around a room and colliding with pipes and hard surfaces, creating a real impression of depth and space. Les Enfants exhibits a similar ludic industrial sound. If you ever played The Chaos Engine on the Sega Mega Drive and remember its brilliant soundtrack then you'll love this number. It's warm, rich and expansive but simultaneously mechanical and glitchridden, like an enormous steampunk factory running on burning coal but producing flying robots.

As someone who tends towards the darker end of the electronic music scale, this album is an unusually uplifting choice for me, with the poppiness of No Turning Back echoed elsewhere in the album, such as in the twinkly and reassuring Besides. But where it allows itself to be sweet and setimental, it rescues itself with a playful benevolence that gives a nod to Richard D. James Album, noticeable on tracks like Eggplant and Azzurra. And it doesn't lack punch. In fact, what marks this album is its tremendous balance. Its moods are various but there is real cohesion and polish to it, perhaps thanks to Boratto's impressive production résumé.

Take My Breath Away is an album that immediately appealed to me, thanks to great hooks supported by nuanced rhythms and structures. It may not be the hard core of techno, but there's enough going on to keep the listener interested and I can see minimal tracks Opus 17 and first single Atomic Soda providing just as fitting a soundtrack to a thudding night out in a noisy urban kaleidoscope as they did to a long walk along a grey stretch of cold estuary mud.

The Impoverished Technophile's New Toy

I've been a Mac user for years, and my trusty 40GB clickwheel iPod has been my bosom buddy since 2004. I have been frustrated by some of its features though, especially the gaps it creates when playing back albums that should be seamless. Since the new generation of iPods was released, iTunes has been teasing me with a tickbox for each of my tracks that allows them to be listed as gapless, and as I have been using my iPod as my primary way of listening to music through my home sound system—often mixed compilations such as the FabricLive albums—my inability to play them as gapless has played increasingly on my mind and in my ears. Those little skips, like a dripping tap in the night, almost ignorable until I knew I could no longer resist getting my arse out of bed and down to the Apple shop to ease my mind.

Enter my new toy, the 16GB iPod touch. Alright, so I might be a little late in catching up with the cool kids, but I've just got ahold of this baby and I love it. Gapless playback is everything I wanted and more, reinvigorating those DJ compilations that have been subtly annoying me to an extent I hadn't even fully acknowledged. More important than that, though, is the touch screen GUI, which is so smooth that to use it feels like swimming around in a pool of all my favourite music. It really does make such a difference to be able to see the album art and to scroll through the beauty of my music collection in the blissfully rendered, fluidly animated cover flow mode. Rather than scrolling quickly through endless lines of grey artist and album names in one boring, pixellated font, I now stop on the image of each album and really weigh up whether it's what I want to listen to. Alright, so I sometimes whizz through them with a flick of my index finger for the sheer joy of speeding through a frankly magnificent collection, but by and large this new way of seeing what I have in the palm of my hand has made me stop and reconsider some of the things I have glossed over for months. I am falling in love again with so much music.

I'm also falling in love for the first time with radio. I have always been aware that there are great programmes on Radio 4, but every time I tune in I seem to catch a bad radio play, the tail end of a debate that I can't quite catch up with, or The Archers. Thanks to the BBC iPlayer on my iPod, though, I can now select anything from the past week to listen to, from Just a Minute to Stephen Fry's English Delights. I find myself laughing while brushing my teeth as Paul Merton follows me around the house. I could continue to rhapsodise about the new and exciting things I'm doing my with my new toy, and all the nifty applications that I've downloaded from the seemingly endless App Store.

The biggest drawback is that flash is not supported. This means that most websites that play videos, animations and web games don't work. Youtube, of course, does, and has its own application as standard on iPod Touches and iPhones. There have been a couple of occasions when Quicktime videos won't load properly either, but refreshing usually sorts that out. Most frustratingly, on two occasions my laptop has been unable to detect my iPod when it has been connected, and this has required completely wiping and reinstalling my iPod software, which takes a couple of hours plus the time it takes to upload all of my music again. In fact, as I write this article I'm undergoing this process. But even this isn't enough to diminish the deep affection I have developed in a very short time for my pocketsized new cohort.

This may be a honeymoon period, but if I keep finding new reasons to love it at a fraction of the rate I am currently, I'm going to keep on loving this gadget for years.