Wardrobe confessions of a travelling man, 1965

Anyone who travels has a clothes and packing problem. TOD DRAZ, an internationally busy American fashion artist, draws and describes his own workmanlike solutions.

I am going to outline a two-costume wardrobe. That is to say, one on my back, the other in the bag, the things that go with them, and how it all works. This is the “least common denominator” wardrobe and one I have found works even for longer-than-planned stays. Certainly you are going to have times, as I do, when you want to have more in your bag than one suit, and extensions can be made according to your taste and needs, but when I take more I make sure that the extra clothes really do go with the same shoes. shirts and so on.

My jacket  is a two-button Shetland tweed in a black and white diagonal weave. I find it more elegant than wildly “sport”, and I can wear it and wear it without tiring of it. I like lots of shirt showing at the front and cuff, because I think it gives freshness to dark clothes—especially in this outfit where everything is based mainly on black and dark greys. I never wear Waistcoats. I find them hot and uncomfortable.

Four plain poplin shirts. You have to have at least one white shirt for those times when it’s the only one that will do. I take one pincheck-blue cotton, and one where the check is less pin. Then there is one drip-dry emergency shirt: blue on white Tattersall which wears like iron, dries in a jiffy and has much to recommend it, but I still prefer trafficking with laundry services for my plain poplin ones. If I’m going to have a long day on the train I choose one of the two checked shirts, for there’s no doubt they stay fresh-looking longer than the plain ones.

If you are travelling in cities and staying in reasonably decent hotels you are not going to be washing your shirts out in the bathroom. My emergency shirt usually goes out to the laundry with the others and my experience in general with European laundry services is that they pose little problem and are generally fast, particularly in the sunny countries. If the place you are going to is Roman Catholic and you don’t know their holidays, it’s not a bad idea to check up beforehand so that you don’t arrive in need of services you can’t get.

The dark grey suit. I wear it whenever and wherever I feel I won’t be properly dressed in jacket and trousers—usually for dinners or business luncheons. Being an artist I can get away with a bit of murder in the way of casual dress. Sometimes I wear a black cashmere sleeveless pullover with the dark grey suit when it’s just cool enough to want a bit more weight.

Two pairs of flannel trousers, both dark—one very dark, the other less so. Neither needs a belt, therefore the only belt I need carry is one of good black calf to wear with my dark suit.

Wearing the check shirt with the grey suit dresses it down, the plain ones do the reverse. 

My all-time favourite tie is the black knit—l have them in silk and wool—and will certainly take both with me and probably wear them nine times out of ten. Basic necktie number two is a rather snappy black and white woven check in silk, a classic in London; my socks are all ribbed cotton or thin ribbed wool and eliminate the need for suspenders. Nylon socks are marvellous for travel and if you’re willing to rinse them out daily you can really get along with as few as two pairs.

Handkerchiefs. Plain white ones of course for most purposes. Breast pocket handkerchiefs can add that bit of bravura which lifts our look and spirits. My big black cotton one goes with the tweed jacket and anything I might wear with it. Fine for long dirty train travel as it absolutely refuses to become grubby looking. In hot weather you can actually mop your brow, and this handkerchief will take it and go back into the pocket looking quite decent. 

Another favourite black handkerchief, bought in Rome, has two-inch-wide border bands of a good Italian red and shows a flash or two of that second colour when it’s in the pocket. 

My two polo shirts are long sleeved and are in finely knitted wool. There’s no doubt that synthetics need less care and are thus easier for travel. But I prefer wool. My basic one is black and the second one grey.

I always have two pairs of shoes with me. One pair on the feet, the other in the bag. Both are perfectly plain two-eyelet ties with leather soles. Brown suedes are for travelling, the blacks for wear with the dark suit. When my trip is sure to long and the weather had, I include a third pair in my plan. The brown suédes then go in the bag and the on-feet pair are my rust brown reverse calf chukka boots with thick-looking crépe soles—ankle warmers for damp European climates—and they give more grip, less slip when you’re dashing for that plane, train or bus. 

Pardon a seeming immodesty, but my trench coat is a knockout. Bought in Rome, it. is that palest of beiges, very belted and buckled with a dashing foreign agent look. I love it. I like the pale colour which keeps me from feeling rain clad, and seems best with dark clothes.

Likely extensions of the two-suit wardrobe would probably be a lightweight grey flannel suit and a navy blazer. Both can be worn with just about anything that is already in the bags. These tend towards milder weather and would probably come along in spring or autumn.

My basic luggage consists of three pieces. One good-sized valise which is big enough but not too big, a smaller valise and a hand case. For convenience let’s call them A, B, C.

Bag A is the main one, twenty-three inches long, nineteen inches high, six inches deep and has a hard frame but soft sides of considerable elasticity. (See sketches for packing technique.) Beware of the big bag. The nuisance of handling it will mean extra tipping. You will always have one broken arm instead of two lame ones and will probably walk with a list for weeks after you get home. 

If at all possible never take more luggage than you can somehow manage to handle yourself—for there are times when you will have to. This is when you will learn the importance of balance of weight. Two medium-sized bags, plus two smaller ones, or one medium-sized bag and two smaller ones can be readily weight-distributed between two arms. The only satisfactory way to carry a huge bag is on your head.

Bag B accepts with glee two pairs of my size 10 D shoes and lots of extras. Bag A is synthetic, B leather, both were bought at the same time and seem to be standing up equally well to the frequent and indifferent handling they get. Bag B has a hard round W frame and soft, bulgy sides. 3 Both these sides have U shape or 'drop seat' zipper closings and a sort of floating divider or fabric floor which moves up with the packing.

I like trees for my shoes, and have found in Paris, featherweight, folding aluminium ones which are hollow and still leave certain stash room in the shoes if things ever get that tight. Also essential are shoe bags—to protect other things rather than the shoes. The ones I use are cheap plastic found in London.

Bag C never leaves my arm. It holds everything of value not in my pockets and everything of immediate need during travel. It’s made of leather reinforced cotton tweed.

It would be an easy rule to say: “pack as you dress.” I don’t quite do it that way, but almost. Start in the bathroom. Anywhere you are, those basic toilet needs are going to be about the same. So I shave, wash and do a general morning pull-together. As it proceeds I chuck the articles used in this performance into my toiletries kit, and by the time I’m through, that packing is almost done. Remember that most European hotels do not supply soap and even when they do their wafer-style cakes are not worth struggling with.

This might be the moment to say a word or two about night things. Take two sets of pyjamas if you use them. You won’t need more as, unlike shirts, you don’t change them every day. While one is in the bed, the other is in the wash. Don’t take a heavy dressing gown as it needs an enormous amount of room. My winter one is a thin navy and red striped wool— durable but not depressing. 

In summer I take a thin cotton one that washes like a handkerchief. For slippers I prefer leather scuffs that shove into each than the travel planned ones, they give me comfort and no more packing problems. The travel outfit of Shetland tweed and flannel is soft and comfortable and will, I think, resist wrinkling as much as anything laced into a tourist class seat for several hours or more. 

Usually I wear my black polo shirt when travelling—n0 tie loosening nonsense—and if I do take 0ff my jacket I don’t feel I’m in shirt sleeves or get that wrinkled, riding-up-out-of-trousers look. 

My shirt, suit and tie are sufficiently comfortable that I can bear them happily without trying to turn my plane seat into a beach chair. On long night jumps, like trans-oceanic ones, almost anything goes; but that seat, despite anything the airlines say, is not a bed and if you try to make one out of it you’re going be the miserable, messy loser.

Copyright 1965. Tod Draz. Reproduced from Men's Journal, 1965.

A Man And His Shoes

Lately I've been collecting a pocket-sized English magazine called Men Only, which I'll write about in more detail later. The name is still used by a soft porn title, but that publication has nothing in common with the periodical which ran from the 1930's through to its takeover in the late 60's.

Men Only gives a fascinating insight into social mores of the day, not least of which concern clothing. I've reproduced some of the adverts which ran in M.O., but here I record in full an article that I found of some interest, called 'A Man And His Shoes'.

Stories concerning so-called 'classics' tend to be reproduced again and again, making it hard to separate fact from fiction. One such legend surrounds the Desert Boot, that ubiquitous piece of soft suede footwear said to have its origin in Nathan Clark's observation of what Monty's 8th Army 'Desert Rats' were buying in the bazaars of Egypt. Clark went on to form the Clarks shoe company and the rest is history.

Though I've often read that story, I've never come across either attribution or corroboration. Equally, I've never seen any archive photographs of soldiers from the eastern theatres wearing said shoes; they appear to have hard leather boots on in every shot I've seen.

For those reasons, I was fascinated to read this piece by Peter Bingham in the January 1948 issue of Men Only. I know nothing more about Bingham than his name. Men Only weren't big on accreditation. They often didn't even bother with a contents list. In it he makes explicit reference to the shoe stalls of Port Said making suede boots up for the soldiers. Alas, there were no pictures accompanying the original piece, but I've included here some archive Clarks advertisements.

SOME men never outgrow a schoolboy craze for model trains. Others prefer to collect first editions, theatre programmes, birds’ eggs, butterflies, stamps, sea-shells, even wives.

My friend, however, collects shoes. He is, as you may guess, a bachelor. Wherever he goes, there also, well polished, well treed, numbered, labelled, and wrapped in layers of tissue-paper, go a contingent of shoes—a whole trunkful. It is more than a hobby with him, more than a craze. He lavishes upon them the care and pride other men bestow on their bow-ties, their suits, their guns: and women bestow on children or lapdogs, They are emotionally part of him. Without at least some of them constantly in the offing he is cantankerous, short-tempered, never at ease.

Of course, the idea of Charles entering a shop, any shop, and buying a pair at random is not to be entertained. His shoes are made for him by a skilled craftsman of St. James’s. St. James’s we know as the world of men, the inviolate and close preserve of the well appointed, the nicely groomed, the quietly but exquisitely dressed, the last domain of the autocrat of distinction. There slumber the clubs to whose inner sanctums no woman has ever penetrated, where the only sound that discreetly disturbs a primaeval peace is the subdued, rhythmic murmur of post-prandial respiration and the rustle of The Times as it slides gently from inert hands to a deep-carpeted floor. Even the snoring is discriminate.

But in St. James’s are also to be found the most exclusive of everything, barring woman, that can please the heart and minister to the needs of man. There you may find walking-sticks that come nicely to the most critical hand, sporting guns that will be worth double their price a hundred years from now (tailored to your requirements for £250 a pair),  fishing-rods on which the most fastidious of fish might well be proud to be hooked, and in St. James’s, too, the gourmet may make the acquaintance of the subtlest shell-fish in the world

The proprietors of one shop we know have been hatting fathers and sons, sons and fathers, for three centuries. So you will not be surprised that it is these purlieus that my friend goes for his shoes. They are marshalled in rows on the floor of a special room kept for them alone—some sixty pairs in all. This is not as extravagant as it might seem, for a new pair is bought at least every year and the same pair is never worn two days running, so that some are many, many years old. There are shoes for all occasions: riding boots; plain black shoes for town wear, brogues for the country, half-brogues for semi-casual occasions, and suede shoes for the informal moment. Every kind of leather is displayed, and carefully preserved by trees moulded to the original lasts. Truly no mean array.

No minion ever applies brush or cloth to Charles’s beloved shoes. He polishes two pairs himself nearly every evening, working through them in strict rotation. He finds it a wonderful relaxation, an ambrosia sweeter than nectar and almost as effective as Scotch. When he gets the sack from the Foreign Office, he’s going to be a boots and write slim volumes on leather as a sideline.

There are different treatments, of course, for different styles of shoe: dark tan for military shoes, paler shades for less formal creations, plain liquid cream for others. The polish must be worked well into the leather, allowed to stand and ooze into the pores, and then the hard, supple surface shine gradually boned up, finishing off with a soft cloth.

Some of Charles’s shoes have been round the world with him. There is one pair which is as a child to him — a pair of half-brogues, one of twenty pairs made in Switzerland for a Maharaja, each in a different style. This noble princelet presented all but five pairs to the Army and Navy Stores in Bombay with instructions that they should be sold only to British officers and not to Indians, the proceeds to go to NAAFI. The uppers are smooth and supple and exquisitely stitched: the soles as hard as iron.

Suede shoes, however, are Charles’s abiding passion. The desire for these came upon him one night in the Red Sea going out to the Far East in 1944. At Port Said a whole crowd of chaps embarked who had just spent two years in Iraq. They were shod to a man in vintage bootees of a delicate fawn-ginger colour made pale by the blazing sun. This was too much for Charles, and it was all he could do to keep his hands off them. Whenever a pair descended a companion-way or advanced at the shuffle along the deck, Charles’s gaze followed them, his eyes caressing them covetously.

The moment everyone disembarked at Colombo, off he went the Petta, ordering five pairs of suéde boots in different shops. As he had progressed down the street, each wily, brown-skinned proprietor seemed to have more beautiful shades of suéde to offer, and thicker, scrunchier crépe for the bottoms.

Charles was fascinated too by their workshops. A generation’s trimmings, and bits of old shoes, old lasts, threads, waxes, and nails covered the earthen floor. The head man squatted in the midst of this indescribable pile of debris, shaping, peeling, thinning leather, occasionally aiming a well-directed stream of scarlet betel juice through the door at some friend in the street. The rest of the family variously sewed the uppers and trimmed off the final product.

The price was twenty chips (about thirty bob), although thirty was originally asked. If the poor man didn’t produce the goods in three days—he always worked three weeks behind schedule—five chips were knocked off for every day overdue. They were invariably ready that afternoon. . . . One of these shoemakers created a new fashion by making the uppers out of bush hats which everyone had been issued with but had never worn.

Charles still has many of these delightful Eastern bootees, and wears them negligently with white socks for afternoon tea. He says it gives just that travelled touch, because no one west of Cairo can make Suéde shoes like them. Deep bottle green, light ginger, chestnut brown . . .

But, oh, delight of delights, the palest, sandy, faded fawn.

Copyright 1948. Peter Bingham. Reproduced from Men Only magazine, January 1948.

Do not to be confused with...

It’s a celluloid jungle out there. We’ve all of us at one point got our wires crossed and settled down for a night in front of the box with Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant in Hitchcock’s peerless spy caper Notorious only to be confronted with workaday Biggie Smalls biopic… Notorious. Even the most diligent film fan can often find it tricky to differentiate between the deluge of similarly titled claptrap out there, but here are a few that you most definitely don’t want to mix and match…

The Proposition/The Proposal

True story: Stylo was on a plane recently, coming home from its holidays (read: a grim and barren sex-tour of the Benelux Countries). Everything was proceeding with its usual despicable monotony, until, from deep within the swirling cocktail of gin-shivers, flop sweat and past-its-best testosterone that was coursing through our body, we mistook the scheduled in-flight movie to be John Hillcoat’s grisly Ocker revenge Western, The Proposition. We were not in the mood. Luckily, icky Sandra Bullock/Ryan Reynolds rom-com The Proposal – despite making Failure to Launch look like Brecht on toast – made it all better. Stylo doesn't know much about Reynolds, but the looks of disorientation, acute discomfort and near-tearful resignation that played across his face throughout the entire film made us feel that we weren’t alone. Not… so terribly… alone

Shoah/Showgirls

Too Soon? Yes..? No..? Have the scars still not healed? Stylo was given to understand it had become a cult classic that’s all the rage within the ‘camp’ community, who regularly clan together for theme evenings that include dressing up as their favourite characters and joyously singing along with the catchy tunes. The other, of course, is an unremittingly bleak and emotionally exhausting Paul Verhoeven atrocity that many still find too harrowing to sit through.

Knight and Day/Day For Night

 

A film within a film about the making of James Mangold’s Cameron/Cruise howler might have made for a revealing insight as to how the modern blockbuster is shunted together out of a flyblown clusterfuck of bargain-bucket ideas, shameless product placement, green-screen effrontery and sheer bloody mindedness. As it is we have to content ourselves with Truffaut’s romantic hymn to the production process, which – to be honest – would have benefited greatly from a few 4X4s flipping over lengthwise and a couple of exploding taco stands.

Feds/Reds

Sometimes the tiniest grain of sand can trip you up: in Terry Gilliam’s sparkling clockpunk bureaucratopia Brazil, a minuscule typographic error sets off a chain reaction that explodes into mayhem, madness and state-sponsored murder. In the real world, one wrong keystroke into your Lovefilm account and your Friday night no longer consists of a five-hour lecture on blow-dried Bolshevism, but a slapdash eighty-minute cackfest starring TV-Movie parolee Rebecca DeMornay. Enjoy.

Cinema Paradiso/Guest House Paradiso

Oh, the magic! Oh, the emotion! Oh, the pure joy of cinema! The laughter, the tears, the misty-eyed nostalgia for a wholly imagined pastoral Arcadia! Oh, the Vesuvian vomit! Oh, the pan-fighting! Oh, the red rubber mankinis! If one, both or neither the Italian mini-masterpiece nor Rik and Ade’s hopeless fistic folly reduces you to a puddle of salty tears, then you’re not plumbed in right.

 

Tootsie/Tsotsi

Don’t eff this one up, as a Sunday afternoon under the duvet with a box of Maltesers, a Skol Superstrength spritzer and some mild – but not completely unwelcome – sexual disorientation watching a frocked-up Dustin Hoffman teetering through the pastel thrum of Eighties Broadway is a very different prospect than one spent quivering and cowering amid the diesel fumes, gang violence and squalor of Soweto slumland. Come to think of it, both are pretty high on the Yikes!-o-meter…

The Thin Red Line/The Thin Blue Line

Pretty gloomy either way, but at least Errol Morris’s groundbreaking crime doc doesn’t entirely consist of sweaty pretty-boys with $100 buzzcuts staring at ferns. Your call on this one.

Babe/Babel

One is a critical smash and box-office behemoth that suggested that we’re not all that different under the skin; that our hopes, fears, dreams are all crystalline droplets from the same communal wellspring of shared experience that will all eventually flow together to join the great river of life. The other – that’s right we’re pulling the same shit twice – is about Brad Pitt’s abortive Moroccan gap-year. We know which one we’re watching!

Holiday Inn/Hostel

We all love to fly by the seat of our pants now and again, but sometimes it really pays to check the guide books – although, for some, being tortured with a power-drill is infinitely preferable to witnessing Fred Astaire and Bing Crosby mercilessly ba-ba-ba boom their way through an entire calendar of public holiday-infested showtunes with the likes of ‘White Christmas’, adenoidal valentine ‘Be Careful, It’s My Heart’ and the frankly staggering blackface turn ‘Abraham’ they put on to celebrate – and you’ll like this! – Lincoln’s birthday.

Monster’s Ball/Monsters Inc.

Want to keep the anklebiters quiet while you sleep off one of your special ‘Saturday Morning Headaches’? Well, plonk them in front of either of these little beauties and it’s unlikely you’ll hear a peep put of them until ‘Football Focus’ starts…

Do Not To Be Also Not Confused With…

84 Charing Cross Road/10 Rillington Place

Runaway/The Runaways

The Aviator/The Navigator

Lenny/Kenny

The Road/The Road (to Morocco)

Silent Running/Cool Runnings

Leon/Leon The Pig Farmer

Any more for any more...?

Copyright 2012 Adam Lee Davies. Reproduced from http://exrenthell.blogspot.co.uk with permission.

 

Meet the new boss...

MARINETTI: The past is inferior to the future. How could we acknowledge any merit in our most dangerous enemy: the past, gloomy prevaricator, execrable tutor?

In his new book Constellation of Genius, Kevin Jackson tells us that in 1922 Ezra Pound announced a new age. Henceforth, he would date his letters "p s U" – post scriptum Ulysses. For Pound, Ulysses marked a new age; the modern world began in 1922.

Was modernism a rejection of formalism, or just a reformulation of it? At first the former seems more likely. The Futurists positively revelled in their execration of the old, and Dadaists cavorted in geometric costumes to symbolise their rejection of bourgeois values. Yet at the same time other modernists were sporting three-piece tweed suits and pipes. One thing is reasonably certain though: modernism’s validation and valourisation of mass production changed attitudes to mass production, from clothing to furniture, and helped dispel the stigma of the 'readymade' item.

DADA: Costumes by Sonia Delaunay for Tristan Tzara's 1923 play, 'La coeur à gaz'

It’s interesting that most uses of the word ‘formalism’ are pejorative, suggesting an inflexible adherence to rules. Modernism in many stripes was about abandoning such rules; witness Joyce’s aforementioned Ulysses or Virginia Woolf’s experimentation. But conversely the other side of modernism was that of systematising. Much of the story of 20th century design and architecture was about rationalising the creative act into as near to science as possible. Not for nothing did Massimo Vignelli’s Unimark design team dress themselves in lab coats.

SHOCK OF THE NEW: Bauhaus teaching staff, 1920s

Despite this, the writing was on the wall for the modernist top-down model of cultural transmission. By the mid 20th century, the democratising forces of fiscal security and social mobility meant authority of all kinds was challenged. By the 1990s the web's exponential growth turned a trend into a consensus. The expert is now extinct, and the wisdom of the crowd is all; what’s below the line is as at least as important as what’s above it. 

DESIGNER AS TECHNICIAN: The Unimark team in labcoats, 1970's

Modernism remains, though for the most part it's a gelded shadow of its former self. Divorced from a guiding ethos it is left wan and austere; a line or two of Helvetica Neue hitched to whichever big company wants a lick of Swiss cool this week, as if a stern Puritan minister were forced to sell trinkets from a market stall. 

From this perspective, Modernist Formalism is truly indefensible: like a prisoner doggedly observing the lights-out curfew, when the gates have been opened and everybody else has left the building.

City limits

GATEWAY TO THE NORTH: Euston Station's lost Doric Arch

Facebook, the ne plus ultra of the modern social butterfly, has become home to a group with rather different concerns in the last few months. This group is focussed on one single issue: the restoration of the fabled Euston arch to London's beleagured mainline station. The arch, a 70ft tall gateway to the first capital-city terminus in the world, was destroyed along with the original building in 1962 by a cabal of self-interested parties who triumphed over the nascent conservation societies lined up against them. Despite assurances that it would be labelled and carefully dismantled, the 125 year old Doric propylaeum was smashed to pieces and sold to British Waterways, who used it to plug a hole in the River Lea. There the story would have ended, were it not for the fact that historian Dan Cruikshank identified the lost pieces and verified their condition was sound. When news arrived that the 1962 Euston Station was itself due for demolition a unique opportunity arose: resurrect the lost arch to take its place in front of the new 21st century building.

TENSION AND HARMONY: I M Pei's 1989 glass and steel Louvre extension

This is not such a fanciful idea as it sounds. Projects like I M Pei's glass Louvre pyramid have demonstrated the harmony that can be achieved through a sensitive juxtaposition of the the classical and the modern, and there is undeniably a mood in the air for experimentation. In fact the British, once famously hostile to change, are now at least as broad-minded about matters of art and architecture as their european cousins. The populace which once exhaled a unanimous harrumph at the Tate's purchase of Carl Andre's 'Pile of Bricks' and jeered Prince Charles's 'monstrous carbuncles' now crowd the Tate Modern, attend venues like Lord Foster's curvaceous Sage centre in Gateshead, or shop in buildings like the chainmail-clad Selfridges designed by Future Systems for Birmingham.

INFAMOUS: Carl Andre's celebrated 'Pile Of Bricks'. Copyright The Tate.

These landmark constructions, when taken alongside the success of the Saatchi Gallery and sell-out exhibitions such as Sensation and Apocalypse point to a deep and irrevocable change of attitudes. It seems that, eighty years after its gestation, the British public finally 'gets' modernism. The irony is that, just as this most egalitarian of movements finds its justification, it ceases to be of any relevance. 20th century modernism was a noble attempt to replace destructive rivalries with a new internationalism founded on rationality and democracy. Yet it's a perversion of precisely this motivating spirit which blights our towns and cities to this day — the dispiriting blank-faced canyons of 'High Street, Anytown' are a stark reminder of what happens when you jettison all vestiges of localism in favour of the international. What once represented thrusting municipal brio now symbolises the tawdry anonymity of emasculated industrial towns, where the sedentary attractions of mall and multiplex have replaced factory and furnace. In a world where the internet and environmental concerns have brought about a renewed sense of community, long subsumed regional characteristics are resurgent, making the modernist ethic suddenly appear distastefully monolithic.

UNINSPIRED: Welcome to High Street, Anytown

If the central tenets of modernism are no longer relevant, what do we call the showpiece buildings transforming our post-industrial spaces? One is tempted to invoke the ghost of 'post modernism', but that would be to summon up a whole new set of arguments. In any case it doesn't matter. What is important is that the construction industry as a whole is shaken from its slumber. Housing in Britain is dominated by a backward-looking conservatism which scars our hinterlands with 'Tudorbethan' boxes, while commerce favours bastardized modernism purely because it is the cheapest and fastest way to build. What we desperately need is more control over our built environments, we need government that understands the street is as important a landscape as the valley, and most of all, we need to rediscover those most neglected of qualities: harmony and elegance.

The art of noise

INSPIRED: Claude Shannon, author of 'A Mathematical Theory Of Communication'

In 1948 a young mathematician of rare genius named Claude Shannon published a paper for the Bell Telephone Company entitled "A Mathematical Theory of Communication".  In its pages he tackled the knotty problem of information transmission.

For the good burghers of Bell this was timely advice. Shannon used the new science of probability theory to lay the groundwork for digital telephony and eventually, the internet. One of the breakthroughs of this new 'information theory' was Shannon's realisation that the uncertainty, or entropy contained within a message could be quantified, and so controlled.

SCARCE: First editions of 'A Mathematical Theory Of Communication' are hard to find

Entropy is the irreversible process of useful energy becoming useless. The heat coming from your car exhaust is cooler and considerably less useful than the heat inside your engine, and that process is irreversible.

Now, as all good audio engineers know, noise is irreversible too. Once it's there in your recording, you can't get it back out. All you can do is disguise it, as everybody who ever had a Dolby Noise Reduction button on their stereo in the eighties will recall.

This is where Shannon found something surprising: The formula he developed to represent noise in an information system turned out to be identical to the formula for expressing entropy in thermodynamics.

GOT THAT? Shannon's communication theory in diagrammatic form

In both cases, noise never improves a signal. In fact noise always destroys information. It never creates.

And yet there appears to be a paradox here: when you add noise to a signal, you also add information — the signal actually contains more data, not less. So are there any instances where noise can be productive — is there in fact such a thing as the art of noise?

Well let's consider evolution. Mutation is the engine room of natural selection. It's the imperfect copying of gene strings — in effect the introduction of noise — which makes possible the whole panoply of life on earth. Noise can be creative after all.

And what applies to biological evolution goes for cultural evolution too. Memes were first coined in the early '70s by biologist Richard Dawkins, but only in the age of the web have they found their fullest expression. They began life as a philosophical game; a theoretical exercise to help us grasp the sometimes counterintuitive world of gene theory. In a wired world though, the concept of self-replicating units of culture seems scarcely more novel than that of zombie nets and web crawlers.

Styles are memes. Borne of the imperfect transmission of ideas through time and space, noise is their very lifeblood. Choose what examples you will; throughout the ages the story is the same. Ideas filtered, misinterpreted, and ultimately reborn as a new style.

Witness tartan, simple twill patterns codified by the Dress Act of 1742, exported to India during the Raj and mutating into Madras Check, as local weavers conceived their own imitations with local material.

CHECK MATES: Scottish tartan evolved into Madras print by way of India

Or perhaps Soul music: Plantation choirs of enslaved workers copying the Hebridean hymns and spirituals they heard in the churches, and coming up with something startlingly, beautifully different.

In fact the very idea of style is unthinkable without the concept of noise. Without muddle, without misunderstanding, without the Chinese Whispers of the creative process, style ossifies. So here then, is the Stylo Information Theory Of Style, or The Art Of Noise:

Repetition + Transmission + Noise = Style