Ben Schott

Diary – 10 December 2015

Plus: surgeon's cuffs and souls in transit

Flying home to New York, I noticed a disturbing innovation in pre-flight cabin announcements. After the welcomes, exhortations, and promotions the purser itemised the number of passengers (205) and crew (12) on board. Presumably, this is for the ‘black box’ recorder — so the correct complement of dental charts can be assembled should gravity win. But the broadcast concluded in a startlingly metaphysical manner. ‘So,’ she said cheerfully, ‘that’s 217 souls on board.’ Taxiing for takeoff is a disconcerting moment to contemplate the existence of souls, let alone enumerate them. (Do they count pets in the hold? Children in utero? Makers of Faustian pacts?) And it reminded me of William Gibson’s crisply cool novel Pattern Recognition, where he defines jet lag as the time it takes for the soul to catch up with the body: ‘Souls can’t move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.’

In my luggage, thankfully not lost, was a new $90 jacket from the Japanese mega-brand Uniqlo. I was delighted to discover this garment had a ‘surgeon’s cuff’ where the sleeve buttons are sewn into functioning buttonholes so the cuffs can be rolled back. (Cheaper sleeves, for non-surgeons, are stitched permanently closed.) Traditionally, this labour-intensive ‘working cuff’ was a hallmark of the bespoke suit (along with trouser side-adjusters, louche linings, and idiosyncratic ticket pockets). Indeed, flâneurs have long flaunted their bespokery by ostentatiously unbuttoning their cuffs — like the old maître d’ at Odette’s in Primrose Hill, whose suit sleeves flapped like fabric bats. My curiosity piqued, I did some research. A $2,500 Ralph Lauren tuxedo had no working cuff, nor did a $4,200 Brunello Cucinelli suit. Indeed, the suits I bespake some years ago from a tailor in Soho have four-button cuffs, only half of which ‘work’.

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