John Simons Online (2013)

While your faithful editor spends the week back in Boston, our man in London, Jimmy Mellor, reports in with and exciting development for us Ivy enthusiasts who don't make it across the Atlantic nearly as often as we would like to...

Last month saw the launch of the long-awaited John Simons online shop: a brave new venture for John and his son Paul, as they have built their reputation on personal service and a personal relationship with their customers. You pop in for a shirt, a conversation develops, before you know it you are invited for a drink! The personal touch has always been the hallmark of shopping at  'John's' in each of his many shops over the years and so translating that same level of attention to detail has been the challenge in setting up the new online shop. Hence it being long awaited. Unless it could be done really well the feeling was why let down the customer with anything less?

The new website is still in development and growing daily - probably that will always be the case as there will always be new stock to showcase, new designs from John to debut, an dnew additions to the nature of the shop. Last time I was in, John showed me some vintage thermos flasks he'd acquired purely for the perfection of their design.
 

Being an independent retailer the London shop is a one-off and that has been the main reason for the move into online. Unless you could visit the shop or were happy to mail order over the telephone (a service John has always supplied) then the frustration for many was in wanting to see and get their hands on the clothes that kept on being discussed. Facebook helped to an extent in spreading the ethos and culture of the shop and Twitter provided updates on the latest, but in the computer-centric world we now all live in (for good or ill) the move to adding an online shop to what John has been doing since 1955 had to come.

And I think it's been well worth the wait. What I would have given for a service like this when I first started out as a 13 year old kid in 1978 with an instant obsession for the clothes I'd seen on my Uncle's old Modern Jazz LP sleeves. In England, unless you knew about John Simons (and I didn't back then), you simply could not get the clothes. You'd get something that came kind of close if you really hunted around but it never would be quite right. Trust me, before encountering John Simons I spent 8 years and wasted a lot of money on trying to get The Look. Now it's all there at the click of a mouse.

Already online from John you can equip yourself with an Ivy League wardrobe from head to toe. Especially of interest is the John Simons Apparel company range of John's own designs informed by his encyclopedic knowledge of menswear. All unique products that you just won't find anywhere else. The shirts due to their production runs have already attracted a 'stamp collector' mentality with John's earlier designs now changing hands for the sort of prices rare records attract. Again, trust me on this as I am putting together a John Simons archive of items from his earlier shops to date. Beyond the very generous donations from long time loyal customers there can be much haggling over all the rest - which is all great good natured fun.
 

Amongst the various rarities I've collected so far from The Ivy Shop, The Squire Shop, The Village Gate, J. Simons, and now John Simons Est.1955 (all the brain child of John), a Lion of Troy buttondown from The Ivy Shop purchased in 1969 by Mr. Ian Hingle especially stands out as he also enclosed a photograph of himself wearing the very same shirt from that year. So timeless is the style that it could have been taken yesterday. Ultimately the collection will be offered to the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

For Ivy style fans in England things have rarely been so accessible and now also for the world due to the Internet. Which is just how the style should be.

- Jimmy Frost Mellor, Ivy League Menswear Consultant and Archivist

Editor's Note: all of the items pictured are from John's current online inventory. Be sure to follow one of the links to see the full online selection. 

Bags & Trane (1978)

I think it's high-time for another guest weblog from that stalwart of natural shoulder style, 'Talk Ivy's Jimmy Frost Mellor, don't you? Well then, take it away, Jimmy...

Bags & Trane, Milt Jackson & John Coltrane, Atlantic 1368, released 1961 (recorded 1959), cover photo by Lee Friedlander

19 years after his conception in New York City and 17 years after his birth, I first encountered a new friend. One that I've had by my elbow for the last 35 years now. Some records are just records, but this one was an instant Mate.

It was 1978 and I was 13, kicking my heels a long way from home and keeping myself busy by giving myself an education sorting through two bookcases filled with old vinyl: my Uncle's record collection, the treasure trove that was to change my life in every respect.

I'd already fallen in love with Hard Bop drumming and images of American Ivy League clothes from those LP sleeves at least two-days ago at this point and was by now very happily hooked on both, creating a daily routine for myself of listening to as much as I could, reading all the sleeve notes and checking out all the visual clues I could get of the style of the genius musicians I'd suddenly stumbled across by accident. I still have my old notebook diaries of tracks, dates and an ever growing series of shopping lists.

I couldn't separate the music from the clothes and from the style of their presentation on those old LP sleeves back then. They were a total sensory experience combining skills from many disciplines all brought together to produce perfect artworks to me. The music, the clothes, the styling, the photography, the typography, the sleeve notes , the smell of the cardboard, the texture of the paper liner, the weight of the thick black vinyl inside.

I tried to talk to my Uncle about all this and he just nodded. "Gesamtkunstwerk", he replied. "Bless you", I said and fetched him a handkerchief...

I'm writing this with my late Uncle's copy of Bags and Trane (Atlantic, 1961) in front of me and it is still a perfect thing to me. A part of the soundtrack of my last 35 years and one of the milestones which marked the start of my real life, after my previous 13 years of moving slowly towards who I was meant to be.

So who was I meant to be? With this LP and others I could tell you about another time I felt I'd found a home at last. A stylish place with nice neighbours who you never minded if they made a noise because the noises they made were so good.

And there were also new clothes to go with it all too! Different clothes. Familiar/Unfamiliar items which captured my imagination just as much as the brilliance of the pairing of Bags and Trane themselves.

I've described what I was up to as me giving myself an education back then, so what did I learn?

1) I needed a haircut ASAP. Something cropped and serious, but a world away from anything 'Skinhead'. My floppy 'Huge Grant' (Did he even have hair like that back then?) style had to go.

2) There can be a hardness in softness/ Checking out the cover shot on the LP the shirt collars and jacket shoulder lines were soft, unstructured and relaxed. But from two of the most disciplined musicians I'd heard so far? Trane especially came across to me as really tough, or maybe that's just what I wanted to project on to him? I liked the idea of 'sloppy' clothes (By regimented English standards) and a razor sharp creative brain at work. I liked the contrast. Later I was to learn that that was actually a very commonplace combination, but what did I know at 13? Before I went to live with my Uncle I only knew City of London Accountants and those in the Legal trade who were all as uniformed as the little lead soldiers in my toy fort.

3) A shirt, a tie and a suit needn't be a shirt, a tie and a suit ! These Ivy League clothes can be wonderfully subversive. Not to most Americans, I agree - who consider them Conservative - but their Conservatism is nothing compared to that of the English... I just fell in love with the idea that a haircut, a shave, a suit, and a shirt and tie could be done on the sly so that it all looked straight from a distance but was really saying something else. That seemed to reflect a part of me that went very deep: to be myself and to get away with it!

And so I went shopping for my first Blue buttondown and slim Dark knitted tie...a story for another day!

- Jimmy Frost Mellor