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Saturday 22 November 2008

Shirt-tails of the city

Joseph Connolly buys the best English shirt in Paris

OK, so falling down the stairs in one of the smartest, not to say the very oldest English shop in the whole of Paris was perhaps not the demonstration of nonchalance and urbanity that I was truly pitching for, but at least it got me noticed. I was in no time surrounded by a clutch of caring Gauls, anxious to assure themselves that the idiot Englishman had come to no more lasting damage than was already inherent in him, as evidenced by the loony grin, the general air of derangement. I apologised furiously to everyone in sight for having so gaudily hurt myself, and having said, ‘No really, honestly, I’m quite all right,’ about 100 times and ever more loudly so that they’d understand, I was finally left to drool over and paw what I can now unhesitatingly pronounce to be the Very Best Shirts in the World, courtesy of Hilditch & Key.

All men have been wearing shirts for most of their lives on earth, but how many can lay claim to having spent a fair share of said life in researching them? Well I have. I’ve worn shirts by every manufacturer you’ve ever heard of, and many more you haven’t — though I can easily understand how a chap can fall into the ‘a shirt is a shirt is a shirt’ manner of thinking because all of them, admittedly, in their rigorous cellophane packaging do look much of a muchness. But wear them, look at the sit of the tie in the collar space — a collar which will never curl, and nor are you doomed to tug on it compulsively — wallow in the roominess and more than decent tails, launder the things for years and years, it is then you come to know that a Hilditch shirt is the real bee’s knees.

The two shops in Jermyn Street, founded in 1899, are comfortingly traditional and very understated — unlike some of their flashier neighbours, not to say the recent rash of unashamed parvenus — and so it is quite a surprise to learn that the secret of their excellence is known to not just the businessmen and politicians you might reasonably have expected (the Michaels Portillo and Howard, remember them?) but also by a good rich slice of rockocracy — Eric Clapton, Ray Davies and half the Rolling Stones (clue: not Ron Wood, and we don’t even for a moment think it’s Keef now, do we?)

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