POP ART
Having just graduated from high school, I found myself in London on my first trip abroad with $300 in travellers’ cheques, which was to last me the summer. It was June 1964. My travelling companion was my Martin D28 guitar. Bob Dylan was my hero, and I took him to the parks and streets busking for extra ‘dough’ to make a dream come true. The three hundred bucks was a graduation gift from my father, or Pop, as I called him.
He was a man of impeccable style, taste and elegance; Pop redolent with the transporting exotic fragrances of vetiver, oud and patchouli from Paris, London, Rome and the Middle East. His suits and the smells were synonymous, as if the tailors and perfumers had collaborated and merged the olfactory with the tactile. His suits hung on Italian handmade hangers! After all, these were special suits, and for all their variety they shared one thing in common: they had no visible labels. Having grown up with Brooks Brothers school uniforms, to me, Pop’s suits were exotic and mysterious… discrete. Pop said if I wanted to see a label in his suits I had to look in the inside breast pocket, and so I did, and there it was: a hand-stitched label. His name with ESQ after it, a date, the tailor’s name, and the moniker of the magic kingdom: SAVILE ROW. ‘Some day!’ I thought to myself. ‘Some day!’
