Valet Issue 5 will delve into what is perhaps the Valet team’s favourite pastime: indulging our genius for leisure, loafing, and bone idleness.
We warm to our theme over the course over the usual twenty-something original long-form articles, spread over almost 300 pages.
We celebrate one of the most stylish coves doing the rounds on the London tailoring scene, Sam Sleath of Paul Smith Bespoke, and have a longish chat in the pub with his shirt maker and American bespoke tailor Matthew Gonzalez (the only American tailor on Savile Row), about his signature Anglo-American house style, military overcoats and British class, and various apparent contradictions such as structured softness, traditional informality, and fitted comfort.
We run a months-long experiment comparing different trouser widths, from the Savile-Row standard 17 inches to the truly baroque 40 inches. Our model and contributor Isaac Timberlake strutted around St. James’s fielding compliments and forward passes from all and sundry, and we eventually arrived at something of a definitive conclusion.
We follow a lost chap around Soho to illustrate a wonderful short story about time and record shops, trace Maupassant’s footsteps and explore catacombs near Palermo for traces of lives of the dead, and celebrate Summertime with Fabio Trombini.
The incorrigible, the inimitable, and Valet’s man in Rome Andrea Strafile furnishes us with an ode to oysters, the food of the gods, in the prose and photographic equivalent of an orgasm, before taking us on a tour of one of Rome’s best vintage shops.
Our second chapter houses enough essays and stories to get you through even the most trying commutes and family holidays, including a 7,000-word paean to leisure, the Siren’s gift to man by one of Valet’s favourite-ever authors, Norman Douglas, a piece by Isaac Timberlake looking at the finer points of what ’bespoke’ means, given the term’s recent cheapening, a short story about getting to know a new city and wearing many hats, and a somewhat insalubrious visit to a massage parlour...
