What are the components of a quality overcoat?
Journalist searches for the justification to charge $50,000 for handmade garment
Had Socrates been more of a sartorialist, his axiom might have been that an unexamined closet is not worth wearing.
Alas, the philosopher lacked the necessary Byronic fastidiousness, and his wardrobe was limited to easy-care draped togas.
It thus falls to The Coat Route, by journalist Meg Lukens Noonan, to pick up the mantle and, like Jason, go in search of the golden fleece. In this case, it is a rare vintage vicuña fleece used to make a $50,000 bespoke overcoat.
The premise reminded me of a moment in Sunset Boulevard. Gloria Swanson’s bygone film star character Norma Desmond takes William Holden’s Joe Gillis shopping for a new wardrobe and asks to be shown fabric for a topcoat.
“Here’s some camel’s hair,” the opportunistic salesman obligingly proffers, “but I’d like you just to feel this — it’s vicuña. Of course it’s a little more expensive …” Sensing a sale, he whispers to Holden, “Well, as long as the lady’s paying for it, why not take the vicuña?”
Indeed, why not? Noonan posits, or rather, why — then goes in search of justification to the price of the constituent parts.
“It takes time to make quality,” Paul Holt, the director of Spectrum Yarns (one of the U.K.’s last remaining wool spinners), tells the author. “Anyone can make the rubbish.”
And in addition to its environmental toll, “the fast fashion model has helped obscure from view the path that clothing takes from raw material to finished goods,” Noonan writes.
In the decade that I’ve been on the Canadian design and apparel beat, I’ve often wondered why the view remains obscured, particularly when there are entire cable specialty
“It takes time to make quality. Anyone can make the rubbish.”
PAUL HOLT, SPECTRUM YARNS
channels dedicated to shows that trace the ingredients and manufacturing process of food and drink back to their source, all with the same sense of discovery and wonder that Noonan brings to this book.
The Coat Route would certainly make a lively globe-trotting original series.
The opening episode could begin as Noonan’s quest does: in front of a closet and with the self-interrogation familiar to recent books in this where-does-clothing-come-from vein. The author confronts her own “the new normal” shopping pattern, the many thoughtless cheapand-repeat visits that have resulted in an overabundance of clothes.
“Almost no financial or emotional investment was needed to walk out of a store buzzing with the pleasure of having made a purchase,” she writes.
That research takes Noonan from a Savile Row beleaguered by massmarket encroachment and Florentine silk artisan Stefano Ricci to a vicuña herd in the Peruvian Andes and a stalwart button factory in the West Midlands.
And to John Cutler, cited by Forbes as one of the finest tailors in the world, a fourth-generation Sydney cutter and designer of the overcoat in question.
Along the way, she weaves in fabric history — from John Kay’s flying shuttle through other textile industry innovations, including the chemistry of petroleum and synthetics such as acrylic and various “subspecies of polyester.” Sportex, a breathable, crease resistant Scottish tweed, was launched in 1922 and its current owner, Dormeuil (also the supplier of the vintage vicuña), supplied lengths of the cloth to costume designer Catherine Martin for The Great Gatsby.
In the world of luxury menswear, such exquisite fabric is not without its weight in marketing gold, and Noonan dutifully pets Dormeuil’s top of the line Vanquish II cloth; made with 10 per cent musk ox, it sells for $5,000 a yard. Scabal and other makers also weave or process fabrics with gold thread, diamond fragments or gemstones.
Thanks to her experience as a journalist, Noonan cuts through the pulls of marketing and nostalgia, and with experience as a travel writer, she also has an eye for detail and telling observation that makes for engaging and evocative armchair travel. In one workshop glimpse of the process, Noonan explains how Cutler marks the precious fabric with tailor’s chalk in such a way that you can practically inhale the waxy chalk off the page.
Australian wine executive Keith Lambert is the client who commissioned the fabled bespoke navy vicuña coat with the printed blue silk lining, to ward off the chill of Canadian winter. Finally, Noonan visits the coat where it lives and finds it, “draped over the back of a dark brown rattan sofa” in Lambert’s Vancouver penthouse.
“Have you ever heard of Isotta Fraschini?” Swanson had asked Holden in an earlier scene from Sunset Boulevard. They’re looking at the dusty car in her garage. “All handmade. Cost me $28,000,” her character adds airily, after explaining that it isn’t, “one of those cheap new things made of chromium and spit.”