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About fifteen years ago, some friends and I took a train to go shopping in San Francisco. One of my friends had just been invited to a wedding, and while we were all graduate students at the time and had very little money, she was determined to buy something beautiful for the occasion. So we headed downtown to Barneys.

Until then, I had never been to Barneys. I remember walking into the building and feeling overwhelmed by the store’s expansiveness and glossy emporium feel. There are six main floors for men’s and women’s collections. Each floor is neatly arranged but also packed with the kind of clothes, bags, and perfumes that most people have only heard of through magazines. Menswear is on the two top-most floors: there’s one for designer and another for tailoring. Here, you’ll find racks of Italian sport coats made from plush cashmere-blend hopsacks and silky windowpane patterns. There are dolefully constructed Rick Owens leather jackets and Thom Browne sweatsuits that are so expensive, they suggest you loot your own country. Near the rows of crystal-weave Charvet ties are the European-made leather bags, which I imagine are sold to men who jet around the world. The whole store felt very glamorous.

Two weeks ago, Barneys filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. They announced that they’ll be closing all but five of their 22 locations — the San Francisco store being one of the few that will be spared, along with their Madison Avenue flagship and the Chelsea store that opened three years ago around the block from their original location. If Barneys shutters, it will be the highest-profile victim of the current retail downturn. Some blame the company’s woes on online competition and skyrocketing rents (their Madison Avenue store’s rent nearly doubled to $30 million in January, which the company cited as a significant reason for their bankruptcy). But I can’t help but wonder this isn’t a sign that the once blinding and wonderous shine of glamour is starting to dull.

A couple of years ago, after having no success trying to find raw silk jacketing, I organized a custom-run of linen-silk fabric modeled after Taka’s jacket pictured above. The cloth mimics the slubby texture of raw silk jacketings from yesteryear — which are impossible to find today outside of vintage fabric vaults — but it wears cooler and is readily available. I call it summer’s tweed.

I never anticipated it would be such a hit. Since running the fabric, it’s appeared in GQ, The Sartorialist, and Permanent Style. Bespoke shoemaker Nicholas Templeman wore it in a Last Magazine feature. Dionisio D'Alise, the head cutter at Sartoria Formosa, sometimes wears it at fittings. Anderson & Sheppard trained coatmaker Lee Oxley says he loves the cloth. For clients of custom tailors, finding an interesting spring/ summer fabric can be tough. They typically don’t have the same textures or patterns that make fall/ winter clothes so appealing. This one, however, has the visual texture of your favorite tweeds, but is airy enough for spring/ summer weather. 

It’s also a favorite of readers. After having organized multiple custom fabric runs at this point, I’ve received more emails about this one than any other. Those who pre-ordered the fabric have written in to say how much they like their resulting garments. Those who missed out have asked if the cloth will be offered again. So, I’m doing one more run of summer tweed — this time with a special collaboration with Spier & Mackay.

In The New York Times last month, writer Megan Nolan asked the simple question: why do we all have to be beautiful? As a young girl growing up in Ireland, Nolan wanted to be beautiful so badly, she could taste it (“it tasted like blood”). She didn’t want to be cute or pretty. She didn’t want to be more desirable to men. She wanted to be beautiful because it’s harder to make beautiful people look foolish. Their lives are always well-ordered and they never feel embarrassed. And like all teens, Nolan often felt embarrassed.

Nolan’s hard, painful desire to look beautiful has stayed with her most of her life, but she asks at the end of her essay whether today’s inclusive message of beauty — where we’re told everyone is, in fact, beautiful — does more harm than good. “I tried to love myself as I got older, tried to look with clear eyes at my physical flaws and not just accept but admire them. I tried to believe that, actually, I was beautiful, because everyone was, not just the chosen few,” she writes. “I tried forcing myself to concede this, through a fake smile and gritted teeth. I’ve said it aloud, as advised by body-confidence self-help gurus, while looking at myself naked. It’s always felt absurd. […] Wouldn’t it be freeing to admit that most people are not beautiful? What if we stopped prioritizing pleasing aesthetics above so much else? I wonder what it would be like to grow up in a world where being beautiful is not seen as a necessity, but instead a nice thing some people are born with and some people aren’t, like a talent for swimming, or playing the piano. Everyone is beautiful, we’re told. But why should we have to be?”

Men don’t face nearly the same pressures as women to look attractive. We have other ways of climbing up the social ladder — humor, wealth, and even a reputation for violence. This masculine advantage is well-captured in Biggie’s “One More Chance,” where he raps: “Heartthrob never, black and ugly as ever/ However, I stay Coogi down to the socks/ Rings and watch filled with rocks/ And my jam knocks.” As Ta-Nehisi Coates writes in The Atlantic, the word “however” has never been used to greater effect. “There was no ‘however’ for a girl deemed ‘black and ugly,” he writes. “There were no female analogues to Biggie. ‘However’ was a bright line dividing the limited social rights of women from the relatively expansive social rights of men.”

John Lobb’s shoemaking workshop on St. James of London looks like an old university office. Harsh florescent bulbs hang overhead, casting light upon leather armchairs, glass showcases, and dusty objects left untouched. The shop feels fusty and cluttered. Thick, ancient ledgers stretch across the shelves that run high and around the back offices. Racks are covered deep with wooden lasts, which are arranged in no apparent order. In a BBC documentary, Brian Dobbs, who wrote a book on the firm’s history fifty years ago, climbs a stepladder to retrieve one of Lobb’s archives. “Well the shelves weren’t arranged for historians, that’s for sure,” he says wryly. “This is less archaeology and more mountaineering.” As he tries to take the book down, a bundle of wood tumbles off the shelf below, clanking onto the floor.

John Lobb’s building is much larger that one might imagine for a shoemaking firm that produces 500 pairs of bespoke shoes per year. Before the 1950s, this space housed a Rolls Royce dealership. Towards the back, a lift carried fancy cars up and down between the floors for visitors in the showroom. The Lobb family moved in after their old premises were destroyed during the Second World War. Today, lastmakers on the ground floor carve made-to-measure lasts from roughly turned blocks, and three flights down lead to additional workrooms. The shop is big and somewhat quiet, animating Thomas Caryle’s observation that “a man cannot make a pair of shoes rightly unless he does it in a devout manner.”

If you walk down those stairs today, you’ll be flanked by stacks of shoeboxes, each containing a pair of handmade shoes. Some of those are customers’ orders ready to be collected; others are apprentice projects; and others still are forgotten shoes left unclaimed. For whatever reason, whether sudden death or unforeseen poverty or simple forgetfulness, many people fail to claim their shoes after ordering. On the upside, if you can make it to John Lobb’s workshop in London, that means you can purchase bespoke shoes – made to someone else’s measurements – at half price. Nicholas Templeman, who worked as a lastmaker at John Lobb for seven years before starting his own bespoke shoemaking firm, used to fetch those shoes for people hoping to test their fortunes. “To be honest, it rarely works out,” he says. “It’s not like pulling a pair of ready-to-wear shoes off a shelf and trying a size 8. These are all made for someone, so all their idiosyncrasies are built into their last. Every now and again, however, someone gets lucky.”

In August of 1942, not long after Germany took over Paris, Samuel Beckett and his companion (later wife) Suzanne Deschevaux fled their apartment in the French capital. The pair had been working in a Resistance cell known as Gloria, where they translated Axis documents and relayed information about troop movements for Allied powers. The info was coded into microfilm, hidden in candy boxes and slipped into toothpaste tubes, and then passed along through a chain of Gloria members, with each person reporting to the next in line, until the message reached Allied headquarters in London. 

That year, however, Gloria was betrayed by Robert Alesch, a Catholic priest and double agent who sold out hundreds of Resistance agents for his own financial gain. As a result, the Gestapo went around the Paris rounding up Gloria members and other anti-Nazi agents. One of the people arrested was Alfred Péron, a Jewish writer and Beckett’s closest French friend. He was interrogated and eventually deported to one of the most notorious concentration camps, Mauthausen on the Danube River. All categories of prisoners here, from Jews to gays to political opponents, were starved, beaten, used for medical experiments, and subjected to slave labor in the local stone quarries. Péron survived until the end of the war, but tragically died two days after the camp’s liberation in 1945.

In researching for Beckett’s biography, James Knowlson interviewed the extraordinary Germaine Tillion, one of the first Gloria members to be betrayed by Alesch. She was involved with one of the earliest underground organizations of the French Resistance, the Musée de l’Homme, and many of her friends had been executed by Nazis. Knowlson writes of the interview at The Independent:

Before nostalgia was considered sweet sentimentality, it was thought of as a mental disorder similar to paranoia. In the late-17th century, a medical student named Johannes Hofer coined the term to describe a set of peculiar anxieties he observed in Swiss mercenaries fighting abroad. Symptoms included melancholy, loss of appetite, and an intense longing for bygone times. Initially, nostalgia – from the Greek nostos, meaning homecoming, and algos, meaning pain – was mostly associated with soldiers. The Swiss military even forbade the playing of a particular milking song, Khue-Reyen, for fear that it would lead to desertion or suicide. But soon doctors found other people afflicted with the mania: newly arrived immigrants, children sent off to the countryside for nursing, and women who were forced into domestic servitude. 

Until the turn of the 20th century, the Western medical community came up with all sorts of strange remedial measures for nostalgia. Among the many dubious cures were using leeches, purging stomachs, and even shaming the condition out of patients. During the American Civil War, a military doctor named Theodore Calhoun thought nostalgia was a symptom of the weak-willed and unmanly. In a paper titled “Nostalgia as a Disease of Field Service,” which was read before a medical society, he maintained that “battle is to be considered the great curative agent of nostalgia in the field,” for men would find themselves with a clearer mind after having survived an onslaught. In her book Homesickness: An American History, Susan J. Matt recalls this passage from Calhoun’s stunning lecture, where he recommends public ridicule as a cure:

Any influence that will tend to render the patient more manly will exercise a curative power. In boarding schools, as perhaps many of us remember, ridicule is wholly relied upon and will often be found effective in camp. Unless the disease affects a number of the same organization, as in the case narrated above [Dr. Calhoun is referring to a case in which there is something of an epidemic of nostalgia in a particular regiment – where “nearly all who died were farmers” – before he came to its rescue], the patient can often be laughed out of it by his comrades, or reasoned out of it by appeals to his manhood.

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