Look I Likey

I like this look - very much. The Club Collar is definitely back. Boardwalk Empire and The Sartorialist brought it back - that and the fact that there is a real 20's push going on at the moment. Everywhere you look.  I knew there was something about that period which was appealing - which is why I had called my bar the 'Shh Speakeasy' (and you had a 4 digit pin code you had to enter into the door up a dirty laneway, to allow you access).

Anyway, back to Club collars, they were a natural progression with the ground swell of nostalgia that had swept up with people reminiscing over the era of early Fitzgerald, Hemingway, the Jazz Age, prohibition and the 'Lost Generation' (most of which I best liked described in Hemingway's 'A Moveable Feast').

If you ask me, and noone is, I think Gatsby is one of the hardest books to turn into a movie, mostly because nothing really happens in the book. Nick goes for lunch at the Buchanans, he goes into town with Tom and meets the mistress, he goes to a couple of parties at Gatsby's, he gets asked by Gatsby to introduce him to Daisy, they re-kindle. They all spill into cars to go to New York to have mint juleps at The Plaza Hotel, they have a fight, then they head back and Myrtle gets run-over and Wilson shoots Gatsby. The real magic in the book is Fitzgerald and the life he brings to the characters. That's the secret to Gatsby, to really understand the characters. I think this is where Coppola went wrong. He cast Robert Redford who was well into his forties (if you analyse the book you can assume the age of Tom is roughly 29 and that Gatsby is the same age - so this is a story of really young money, the arrogance of Tom assuming airs of his family money and the johnny-come-lately-bootlegger Gatsby);  and Coppola had a Tom Buchanan that was weak rather than brutal. And, if you assume the Fitzgerald description of Tom in the first chapter, a man who had achieved such an "acute limited excellence at twenty that everything afterwards savours of anti-climax". Fitzgerald even goes to the extent of describing his physical 'hulking' appearance beneath his polo top and the rippled muscles. He does this to show the power of the status quo in my opinion. Enough of that for the time being, I need to sleep.

Afterthought: I wore a club collar last night and I can assure you, it is the easiest shirt to wear a bow tie with. I don't know why, as I would have thought a strict collar would give the best structure for a bow - but it isn't the case. On the club collar there was no dimpling of the fabric on either side. It seemed to spread with knot of the bow. Also, at LNP we have just perfected the pin holes and can now do Club collars for pins too. www.lenoeudpapillon.com