Yet Another Collaboration: Fashion + Writing

Thomas Pink has commissioned writer William Boyd to pen a 700-word essay on Jermyn Street for inclusion in their Fall 2008 look book. In it Boyd talks about how he wrote the line, "But I have to buy some shirts in Jermyn Street!" to get Uncle Theodore, one of the characters in the film version of Evelyn Waugh's Scoop into London. Of course, Thomas Pink wasn't on Jermyn Street in Waugh's day -- it didn't get there until 1989. But never mind that. Most of the Pink customers probably don't know that either, so successful was the brand under Irish founders James, Peter and John Mullen at establishing itself as so very old and so very English when it launched in 1984. The brothers sold the company to LVMH in 2001 and I don't think the Pink managers there could be more happy with the fantasy in Boyd's closing image.

Its vivacity and diversity bring back an older London to me, London between the wars, and it seems more to cater for men, with its barbers (still offering cut-throat hot shaves), its tailors and bootmakers and its famous gentleman's clubs close by in St James's and Pall Mall. On my last visit, I had a coffee in Fortnum & Mason, bought some cheese in Paxton and Whitfield, and paused to look at the hats in Bates's window. They are all gratifyingly named: the Burlington, the peach bloom Trilby, the leather Gatsby, the Fedora, the Grafton, the Sandown and, to my astonishment, the Jermyn. There's a hat called a Jermyn -- I had no idea -- but it's clearly the hat to wear as you stroll along Jermyn Street, looking around you and thinking, like Uncle Theodore, about the shirts you're going to buy in Thomas Pink.