Derek Guy runs the “Die Workwear” platform and always has thoughtful, historical articles about men’s dress. Here is a good one on men’s clothes this fall. In particular, the demise of blazer buttons:
In the genus of tailored clothing, which is already on its way to extinction, authentic blazers have gone the way of the dodo. While searching for gilt buttons die-stamped with the crest of my alma mater, I discovered The Connecticut Store recently closed. They were the best online source for buttons made by the Waterbury Button Company, America’s last and most storied blazer button manufacturer. Before their closure, they carried Waterbury’s entire catalog (almost), which meant you could get buttons for nearly any school or trade organization. Apparently, Waterbury’s parent company felt the licensing fees for each university became unworkable, particularly as the demand for these buttons declined, so now they only make them upon a university’s request. Ben Silver also recently exited the blazer button business entirely. “Not enough people were buying them,” a sales rep told me. If you want blazer buttons nowadays, you’re mostly limited to ones featuring a fashion brand’s logo or some faux aristocratic crest.
DIe Workear, Excited to Wear This Fall
Ben Silver (in Charleston) was always a favorite, especially for cufflinks.
Thanksgiving Sources for Reflection
I journal and scribble in notebooks all the time, but the “gratitude” movement has gotten out of hand, as the Wall Street Journal points out: The Case For Being Ungrateful. On the other hand hand, there is never a time to not write notes and letters, but the Thanksgiving, Advent, and Christmas seasons call us to reflect and to write. As I noted a couple of years ago:
From a life pockmarked with error, one notable one is that I discovered letter-writing relatively late in life. The pandemic wrought many changes, not the least of which were the confluence of isolation and time. As with gin and vermouth, only two items are required to produce the best traditional products.
Why the current attention to notes and letters, and why should you and I write them?
First, the effect of a letter on the recipient—or at least, on most recipients—ranges from pleased bafflement to head’s-up emotion. Finding a note or letter in the mailbox—an actual piece of paper, folded and placed in an envelope, with a stamp on it—is akin to Cortez gazing upon the Pacific. Much claptrap is written about “being seen,” but letters are perhaps the cure. In our performance culture of digital danse macabre, perhaps the best way to make someone feel “seen,” to verify their existence for them, is to receive a letter from you.
Second, a note or letter influences the writer. I can dictate the first draft of this post, and enter corrections through a keyboard, but neither voice nor tap is as deliberate as moving pen across paper. (Even a typewritten letter, to which I often resort because of my poor penmanship, is a construction project compared to text, snap, or email). To write a letter, one must slow down, pause, restart, and finish.
Third, letters act in unexpected ways and result in unintended consequences, most of them good. The Library of Congress presumably collects tweets, posts, and emails, but such are written on water and lack the stickiness of letters. My mother died when she was 93. In her effects, I found letters that I and others had sent her from decades earlier. When I picked up a postcard from a German museum I posted to her from a backpacking European grand tour in the 1980s, I saw a figure of myself, a young man somewhat recognizable but, in the end, distant as a classmate at a high school reunion. Napoleon supposedly said that to understand a man one must look to the world when he was twenty. Letters have this marvelous retrospective quality that does not suffer from the digital fade of emails or tweets.
White Collar Wire, “Letter Writing,” 24 November 2022
Our preferred Thanksgiving pre-meal drink is a French 75—see here and here—but CBS Sunday Morning and Robert Simonson have a Thanksgiving take on the martini:
Drinks I Have Been Drinking
The “Rye Witch.” Strega, an Italian liqueur, has been hard to come by in Birmingham lately. When I came upon a bottle at LeNell’s, she gave me a recipe for this Sazerac build:
Fill a double-old fashioned glass with ice and set aside.
Add 1 sugar cube to a mixing glass.
Add 2 dashes of orange bitters, one dash each of Fee's Orange Bitters and Regan's Orange Bitters.
Muddle the sugar cube to a paste in the mixing glass.
Add 2 ounces of high-quality rye (Rittenhouse or Whistlepig work well).
Add .25 ounces of Strega and .25 ounces of a pale dry sherry.
Fil the mixing glass with ice and stir for 30 seconds.
Dump the ice out of the old-fashioned glass that you've been chilling and strain the drink into the chilled glass.
Twist an orange peel over the surface of the drink, rub the peel around the rim, and then discard the peel.
“Soul Kiss” (originally in the Savoy Cocktail Book, later from the New York Times.)
The “Soul Kiss” originally appears in two versions in Harry Craddock’s seminal Savoy Cocktail Book, first published in 1930. Craddock’s “No. 1” combined orange juice, Dubonnet, “French Vermouth,” and “Italian Vermouth.” His “Soul Kiss No. 2” swaps “Canadian Club Whisky” for the Italian vermouth. The Times version combines the two and uses blood oranges:
1 oz. Rittenhouse
.5 oz. Dubonnet Rouge [I substituted Lillet Rouge]
.5 oz. dry vermouth
.5 oz. sweet vermouth
.5 oz freshly squeezed blood orange juice (or any fresh orange juice)
Orange twist, for garnish
In a mixing glass, stir the ingredients (except the twist) over ice for 30 seconds, then strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with the twist.
Rob Roy
The Rob Roy, essentially a Manhattan made with Scotch, is a traditional drink. As David Wondrich notes about the cocktail for its entry in the Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails:
As usual in these matters, there are several claims to its creation, the most credible of which comes from a 1941 letter to G. Selmer Fougner’s Along The Wine Trail column in the New York Sun, describing how the writer’s brother was tending bar at the popular Duke’s House, across from the New York ferry in Hoboken, New Jersey, when a representative of the newly introduced Usher’s blended scotch whiskey came inn. . . . The representative wanted a cocktail, but with his whiskey. Since at the time scotch was not generally used in cocktails, Henry August Orphal, the bartender, was forced to invent something, which the appreciative salesman and his friends christened the Rob Roy (most likely after the popular Broadway show of the time. According to his brother, Orphal won $10 from the Police Gazette for his cocktail; this has not been confirmed, but Orphal’s employment in the area as a bartender is well-attested, and other circumstances check out. In any case, the cocktail was in circulation by the end of 1895 and in bar books from the turn of the century.
David Wondrich, “The Rob Roy,” in the Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails at 593.
