Getting Dressed: John Ogden
John Ogden, army officer turned adman-novelist, has ageless style
My brother-in-law, John Ogden, is the best dressed man I know.
Ever since I started this column, I have been trying to persuade him to appear in it but only now has he agreed. That’s because The Oldie mentioned his novel Antique Drum in last month’s Old Un’s Notes. The last of a trilogy, the book is based on his experiences in the army in the 1950s and involves a thrilling murder mystery in Kenya.
Ogden was married to my sister, Moira, a brilliant Woman’s Editor of the Times until she died in 1972. They had two sons. The younger one, William, recently became a therapist and the older one, Perry, is a famous fashion photographer (he took the main picture of his dad here). A documentary feature film about Perry, Skin + Soul, premièred at the Dublin International Film Festival in March.
Father and son dress very differently. Ogden junior goes for black jeans and black T-shirts or sweaters, ‘a very modern way of dressing which I don’t really understand’, says his father. ‘He carries a bag – I wear a coat so I can put things in the pockets.’
Ogden, 86, is of the old school in which men wear ‘coats’, not jackets, with their trousers, and women wear ‘coats and skirts’.
Ogden junior says, ‘I wear a shoulder bag just because I don’t like putting things in my pockets. My father dresses traditionally but with an edge, a twist. He is a sharp dresser.’
Ogden senior was called up to do national service at 18. He liked it so much that he stayed on in the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry. ‘You had to have your uniform made for you in the army; so almost automatically you had your clothes made as well. In fact, my father always had his suits made. He lived in Paris at one period and I found a receipt from a French tailor dated 14th June 1920, for Monsieur Ogden’s ‘ veston gilet pantalon, francs 700’ – about £11. My first suit came from Savile Row and cost £40. I gave the tailor a banker’s order of £5 per month, so I could buy things regularly. My cutter was Mr Peacock; I still have some of his clothes. ‘I also used a cheaper tailor, who had a very red face. Once he made me a pair of trousers with one leg longer than the other. When I showed him, he said, “Oh dear. I cut those after lunch.” Savile Row became too expensive for me: £4,000 or more for a two-piece suit now! That is 100 times more than my first one, over twice the rate of inflation.’ Ogden left the army when he was 30 and joined an advertising agency, J Walter Thompson, mostly because he had just read David Ogilvy’s book
Confessions of an Advertising Man. He later worked for Ogilvy himself – ‘the closest person to a genius I ever met’. At JWT, the executives were known as the ‘suits’ because that is what they all wore, all the time. Then when the agency was pitching for the Levi account, some bright spark bought jeans for the team to wear. They didn’t get the job. Ogden found the jeans so uncomfortable that he took them off as soon as he could. Ogden has back problems and can’t wear anything tight round the waist – which
means he always wears braces rather than belts and carries a stick.
‘My stick is older than me. It comes from Patrick Howard Antiques in Dublin, where they have a wonderful collection. This one is made of cow horn and partridge wood from the Caribbean.’
He watches his weight: ‘The secret is vegetable soup; I make it myself. Vegetable soup means I now weigh 12 stone instead of 13. That, and no second helpings.’
Ogden has his hair cut at Ara’s Barber Shop, in Kensington, where, like all Oriental hairdressers, they insist on eyebrows as well: ‘Not ears, though, as I have hearing aids in them,’ he grins.
He uses Trumper pomades to control his fine hair and buys Ecco rubber-soled shoes because of his back.
In our picture, Ogden wears a grey flannel suit by his tailor, Sims & Macdonald in Holborn, and a shirt made by Budd shirtmakers in Piccadilly Arcade. His Afghan hat was bought in Portobello Market. In summer, he wears a Panama; so named, he tells me, because they were first made in Ecuador for those building the Panama Canal.
Ogden’s tie was designed by him as the regimental tie of the fictitious regiment in his books, the Prince Regent’s Light Infantry. ‘I took the design from my Peter Jones dressing gown.’ If you order all three books in his trilogy (available at a-military-education. co.uk), the tie comes free.