BUTTONED-UP by FANTASTIC MAN (2013)

When worn without a tie, should the top shirt button be done up or left undone? It’s a sartorial choice – the simple act of opening or closing a single button – which can transform a look.

Gert Jonkers and Jop van Bennekom - editors of fashion magazine Fantastic Man - have given it plenty of thought and Buttoned-Up explores and celebrates the practice of buttoning-up one’s shirt. It forms part of a series of Penguin paperbacks marking 150 years of the London Underground, each book using a different tube line as its inspiration. This one is for the recently extended East London Line which now takes in a new station, Shoreditch High Street, a hotspot, the authors claim, for the capital’s buttoned-up gentlemen. And it’s true. I live in the area and the last time I saw a shirt unbuttoned at the neck was in 2006; around the last time I witnessed a chap without tattoos, glasses and a beard.

I’m a fairly recent convert to (sometimes) buttoning-up shirts (Smedleys and polos should always be done up) but it does depend on the whole outfit: what is worn and how. One thing I will say is the very act of buttoning-up always displays a deliberate choice, an obvious awareness and consideration of a look rather than a possible haphazard thoughtlessness. It’s possible living in Shoreditch/Brick Lane/Broadway Market territory has subconsciously influenced my decision making as previously I thought it far too 80s, conjuring visions of wedge-haired pop groups playing big guitars too close to their chins or of Rik Mayall in The Young Ones.

There’s both an 80s slant and a Mod angle within the book’s six short essays. Neil Tennant talks about a gay club, Benjys, in Bethnal Green where the entire crowd were Mod’s arch foes at the time: casuals (although I’m amazed the interviewer, a fashion editor, didn’t know what a cagoule was). Even as a staunch proponent of buttoning-up Tennant admits it gives a rather repressed look and he would’ve reconsidered if cursed with a fat neck.

Gert Jonkers thinks Ray Davies “kind of invented the look” and Simon Reynolds is the latest writer to ruminate on Mod. He claims Mod’s propensity to violence was also inherent in their style, “the neurotic fastidiousness of dress and grooming was a sort of voluntarily worn straightjacket, a near-masochistic set of constraints and rules” and a rejection of the class system. “Mods displaced and exceeded this by an invented and freely chosen class system based on style: one that allowed for even greater snobbery, a superiority complex founded on esoteric knowledge and the masterly of subtle stylistic rules that changed by the week.”  I can dig that.

Whether you read Buttoned-Up sitting on the tube or at home it’ll make you think twice the next time you pull a shirt from the wardrobe. 

Buttoned-Up by Fantastic Man is published by Penguin, priced £4.99.

J. D. SALINGER - HE DEAD

Writer, piss drinker and recluse, J. D. Salinger, died yesterday aged 91.

I've read The Catcher In The Rye so many times the pages practically turn themselves. That's my copy above. No way was that Penguin going on the fire.

For a proper obituary, check the New York Times

BILLY CHILDISH - PENGUIN BOOK BURNING

The movers and shakers from the underground writing scene were out in force on Thursday for Billy Childish’s reading and book burning (see last Sunday’s post). Was good to meet the likes of Joseph Ridgwell, Jenni Fagan and Vic Templar, and reassuring they all appeared to have wandered straight from the pages of their books.

Billy was in charismatically jovial mood, wondering between poems what 19 year old Paul Weller would think of a 52 year old Paul Weller, what 19 year old Billy Childish would think of Billy Childish now, whether Charles Bukowski was a softie for moaning about working at the post office, and tales of fake moustaches and being the only punk in shorts.

Micheal from L-13 had chosen the pieces from Selected Poems for Billy to read, which meant a few different ones to those Billy usually picks. I’d had a few beers but I think he read: your golden hair, a sad donky and a fat man smiling, where the tiger prowls stripped and unseen, monkys in space, only poets piss in sinks, a mad noise like birds, fat nature, the snow, the bitter cup, hear i stand, the billy childish.

Then came the burning. L-13 did a fantastic job in making Selected Poems look totally like an authentic Penguin classic (managed to rescue one) so was sad to see them wasted. Penguin should have been proud to be associated with Billy’s work. But then, where’s the fun in that?