Select Your Products Well

[alden]

A decade or so ago I had the great good fortune to take private cooking lessons from a young French chef who went on to found a very successful restaurant in Paris. I ‘ll never forget the first lesson. It took place at my outdoor market on the Avenue President Wilson. For five hours my teacher and I walked up and down the market from fishmonger to butcher, from fresh vegetables to fresh oysters, as my teacher showed me how to select the very best products. “No sense even stepping into the kitchen, if you do not have the very best products to work with”, he said. So I learned to pry open Wild Bass gills to inspect their color, how to tickle Scallops so they would open and say Bonjour etc. But one of the things he taught me that really stuck was this: “Never go to the market with a recipe in mind, you may not find the right ingredients, those of appropriate quality to justify your time, effort or your money. Instead, wait to see what the market offers you. Create your recipe in the moment as the best products present themselves to you. “ Of course this is great advice. But it may not apply to your gastronomic experience if you don’t have a great outdoor market to select your goods. Modern supermarkets are just abysmal, and if you had to wait for great products to present themselves, you would likely die of starvation in the meantime. But the essential lesson is a good one.

And this lesson is one I have tried to develop for years on the LL, applying its wisdom to bespoke tailoring, the way bespeakers can plan and develop their projects. “No sense stepping into the tailors shop, if you do not have the very best products to work with, the ingredients of an appropriate quality to justify you and your tailor’s investment and time.” If you go to the tailors and select from the books, you are shopping at the great sartorial Supermarket chain because there is almost nothing in the books anymore worth a dime of time. So go into the marketplace and find the very best prime materials that you can. You may have to search and rummage a bit, but they are still out there. I speak from experience. I rummaged and wandered every merchant, tailor, and mill I could find in the process of building a collection of cloth that at one time was well over 400m. And I made the clothing for my central wardrobe from all these exceptional pieces I had collected.

Creating the LL Cloth Club helped me greatly because, for the first time, I could make the old time qualities, the inspirations of which came from the historic fabrics of Reid &Taylor, Moorbrook, the old H. Lesser, Smith Woollens and many others’ very best products. Having access to the Cloth Club I was able to dress myself and others in the finest. It was one source for me but not the only one. I have always kept an eye our for “real” vintage goods, though the supply is greatly diminished these days.

When I hear young men planning a trip to the tailors to pick a suit from the desiccated wholesalers’ books I cringe for them. “Wait, wait until you find a fabric that merits your $5K investment. What is the hurry? You’re not starving or naked. Are you?”

Cheers