Shirt-tails of the city
Joseph Connolly buys the best English shirt in Paris OK, so falling down the stairs in one of the smartest, not to say the very oldest English shop in the whole of Paris was perhaps not the demonstration of nonchalance and urbanity that I was truly pitching for, but at least it got me noticed. I was in no time surrounded by a clutch of caring Gauls, anxious to assure themselves that the idiot Englishman had come to no more lasting damage than was already inherent in him, as evidenced by the loony grin, the general air of derangement. I apologised furiously to everyone in sight for having so gaudily hurt myself, and having said, ‘No really, honestly, I’m quite all right,’ about 100 times and ever more loudly so that they’d understand, I was finally left to drool over and paw what I can now unhesitatingly pronounce to be the Very Best Shirts in the World, courtesy of Hilditch & Key.
All men have been wearing shirts for most of their lives on earth, but how many can lay claim to having spent a fair share of said life in researching them? Well I have. I’ve worn shirts by every manufacturer you’ve ever heard of, and many more you haven’t — though I can easily understand how a chap can fall into the ‘a shirt is a shirt is a shirt’ manner of thinking because all of them, admittedly, in their rigorous cellophane packaging do look much of a muchness. But wear them, look at the sit of the tie in the collar space — a collar which will never curl, and nor are you doomed to tug on it compulsively — wallow in the roominess and more than decent tails, launder the things for years and years, it is then you come to know that a Hilditch shirt is the real bee’s knees.
The two shops in Jermyn Street, founded in 1899, are comfortingly traditional and very understated — unlike some of their flashier neighbours, not to say the recent rash of unashamed parvenus — and so it is quite a surprise to learn that the secret of their excellence is known to not just the businessmen and politicians you might reasonably have expected (the Michaels Portillo and Howard, remember them?) but also by a good rich slice of rockocracy — Eric Clapton, Ray Davies and half the Rolling Stones (clue: not Ron Wood, and we don’t even for a moment think it’s Keef now, do we?) Bespoke, of course, is truly the way to go, and although the London shops will happily cater to your pickiest whim, I have long known that the Paris branch is simply the coolest of cool, and so it is there I became determined to air my connoisseurship and create a suitably lasting impression. Yes, well.
The shop is the very first on the Rue de Rivoli, hard by the Place de la Concorde where all those aristocrats, come the Revolution, were summarily guillotined, no doubt messing up their lovely shirts (this no more, really, than a fanciful digression). They opened on the very same site exactly 100 years ago, and here bespoke really does mean bespoke — you can have just anything, no matter how singular or even frankly lunatic your inclination. Kaiser Karl Lagerfeld, well, you’ve seen the pictures. Those extraordinary high-collared creations with stocks and dozens of teensy but DAVID MONTGOMERY tons, billowy sleeves and Cadillac cuffs reminiscent of a swashbuckling Douglas Fairbanks? All made from his rapid-fire sketches by the small old ladies in the Hilditch & Key atelier, mutely going blind over near-invisible stitching. And talking of Douglas Fairbanks, he was a customer, as was a gorgeous stew of glamour from an era when the difference was easily grasped: Cole Porter, the Duke of Windsor, Monsieur Guerlain, Robert Mitchum, Jean Cocteau, Scott Fitzgerald (and, by implication, the Great Gatsby himself) — even Garbo and Dietrich, for God’s sake. The H&K shirt was also much adored by a litany of folk who were happily and famously turning out clothes of their own: Dior, Worth, Chanel, Lacoste, Givenchy. Even P.G. Wodehouse, who cared nothing for style, cared enough to go to Hilditch & Key. Upstairs, near the atelier which I swear hasn’t altered in the 100 years it’s been there, there are endless archives of brown paper templates of all of the above, and thousands more besides (just you be careful on the way back down again).
And say what you like about Sarkozy (and people in France, they do, they really do), but he’s a well-turned-out little fellow, don’t you think? Apart from the inordinate length of his trousers, that is (can he be so deluded as to imagine he will one day grow into them?). But all the shirts and ties: H&K. And for La Bruni, he recently ordered a batch of, oh God — men’s shirts, a thought that provokes me, in all frankness, to go and have a brief lie-down. But never mind Carla — it is for Hilditch & Key I have fallen.
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