Keeping your cigar close to your heart
Subtle and stylish, the Mogul from Pink has a breast pocket designed for a gentleman’s favourite accessory
According to Rudyard Kipling, ‘A woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke.’ That’s as may be. But here’s a question for Rudy: what’s a shirt when, contained within its finely stitched folds, you potentially find both a woman and a cigar? The correct answer is the new Mogul shirt from Pink, the first shirt to boast a breast pocket designed to store a gentleman’s favourite accessory, his cigar. Admittedly you won’t often find a woman in a Mogul shirt, given that it has been designed for men, but then, who’s to say you might not find your own lovely lady in your Mogul shirt of a Sunday morning?
Like all great British inventions, the Mogul shirt is subtle, stylish and idiosyncratic. And like so many inventions, it will undoubtedly become a welcome addition to our lives. The British have always had a sense of style when coming up with designs to make life that little bit better. It should come as no surprise, then, that Pink have applied their usual exacting standards to the Mogul shirt, a traditional formal shirt tailored from Pink’s classic Black Label block. It is soft, silky and luxurious, and boasts distinctive Pink touches such as a split yoke across the shoulders and their signature butterfly gusset.
For generations, one of the great sartorial conundrums faced by a gentleman has been where to store his smoke when out and about. Furthermore, conditions for storing cigars need to be precisely maintained to ensure maximum freshness. While they decided not to incorporate an actual humidor in the breast pocket of the Mogul shirt, the dimensions of the pocket have been precisely measured to hold your cigar snugly inside. The ‘walls’ of fine material, which comes in a choice of pink or white, will encase your Cuban missile and hold it proudly in place with the protection and care that such a finely crafted accoutrement deserves.
Pink’s tailoring is of course second to none; their tailors have years of experience — in the art of creating the very best shirts in the world, that is.
It is natural that, of all the places on a gentleman’s person, the breast is where his precious portable treasure should be stored.
Achilles, Ajax, Agamemnon — all the great mythical heroes kept their treasure here, their magnificent breastplates, coveted pieces of finely crafted metalwork. The grander the breastplate, the greater the man; and it was this part of the armour that any victor in battle would seize first when plundering the spoils of war. Today a gentleman’s attire is no less important as a statement of status, and a Pink Mogul shirt is to the cigar-smoking gentleman what an intricately detailed breastplate was to his classical forebears — something to be proud of. By keeping a cigar close to his heart, the travelling smoker is assured that no damage can possibly endanger his long-awaited smoke. Indeed, nothing but the finest Pink Egyptian cotton, with an extra-fine 140 yarn count, will — literally — come between him and his cigar. That should be enough to put even the most neurotic cigar-lover’s mind at rest.
Alongside the long rectangular slot that runs north-south down the breast of the Mogul shirt is another pocket, in which a lighter or cigar cutter may be kept. Thus equipped, with cigar, lighter and cutter and a shirt in which to store them all — a cigar man has pretty much everything he needs for a near perfect day. Eccentric maybe, quirky definitely, excellent undoubtedly. But as the lyrics to the George Gershwin song go: ‘They all laughed at Christopher Columbus/ When he said the world was round/ They all laughed when Edison recorded sound/ But ho ho ho!/ Who’s got the last laugh now?’
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