Gloves in gloves: another suggestion

There’s a lot of oversized, monastically simple grey coats, skinny trousers and buttoned-up shirts going round London at the moment. It’s a nice, subtle outfit and one that’s easy to do, difficult to master. The upgrades come in how you accessorise.

One guy around Oxford Street today had used a striking pair of gloves to add  on- a pair of grey knitted, underneath tan leather fingerless driving gloves. They grey fingers show through the tan leather, creating an unexpectedly boxer-ish effect that gave a toughness to the ensemble.

Raf Simons dropped this idea with his Autumn/Winter ’09 gloves, an astonishing double pair of full and fingerless gloves that fitted into each other to create a colour-blocked, glorious effect. They sold out pretty much instantly, but who knew it was so easy (and so effective) to get the look? Fingerless leather gloves have suddenly risen right to the top of my wishlist.

Carpet bags: a quick suggestion

Actually, a suggestion and a dilemma. Are they acceptable? I uhmmed and aahed last week whilst on a charity shop reconnaissance mission. Balham- uncharted territory, adorable cafes, rumours of vast swathes of charity shop nirvana tucked away in the forgotten corner of Clapham Common. At the lonelier end of an empty-handed day that hadn’t yielded much, the last shop I wheeled into boasted a sign that makes all charity-shoppers light up with glee: BAGS £1. A quid! And at the top, the bag equivalent of a McDonald’s, i.e. everything that a man’s bag shouldn’t be. Pleather, patterned, floral, beaten-up to within an inch of it’s life and a POUND. A carpet bag worthy of M&S in the seventies, a carpet bag from the lonelier end of the carpet bag spectrum. Plastic lining, faded tapestry and loose white stitching.

I left the store, shaking my head and thinking of all those Monocle-approved chambray shopper totes and Japanese-made leather backpacks- the menswear equivalent of Borough Market basically. Wholesome, sourced, sustainable and subtly masculine- and walked back in and bought the thing. On the bag weight-per-pound scale, you’d be an idiot not to.

I’m a sucker for patterns and textures and the carpet bag has both, with a nod towards old person cool. The best is really a Kilim weave bag, the kind of thing you’ll find in a Moroccan souk. They’re harder to get hold of here in Blighty but certain websites do these wholesale, and eBay is always a good resource. There’s a neatly-titled place called Bohemia that sells nice leather ones, a lot cheaper for the quality than any of those silly chambray tote shoppers.

Today listening to: Laurie Anderson- Big Science, from Talk Normal: The Laurie Anderson Anthology (opens in Spotify)