There are hours in life—hallowed and hushed—when the world seems not so much to change as to reveal its inner rhyme. One might be strolling through a gallery, the din of the outside world muffled as though by velvet curtains, when suddenly the eye is arrested by a scene of pasture or storm, rendered not in words but in hues. And later still—perhaps days hence—one catches, in the satin lining of a jacket or the tender gradation of a tie, a note of the very same colour-music. Such moments do not thunder into our minds like sermons but arrive quietly, like angels who speak only in silence.

Not long ago, I found myself ensnared in such a moment. I had been contemplating the work of John Constable and J. M. W. Turner—those twin sentinels of the British landscape—when I beheld, in a wholly different cathedral of artistry, the splendid garments of Sir Paul Smith. I was not prepared for the resonance. Indeed, what commerce might the tempestuous Turner have with the tailleur’s tape measure? What pact could exist between the whispering wheatfields of Dedham Vale and a dapper man in Mayfair? But once the connection had arisen in my thoughts, I could not unsee it. It was not fanciful; it was faithful to some deep and hidden truth.

Let us, for a moment, step back and observe what these men have offered. Constable, that patient recorder of skies, gave us the England of the soul—its repose, its melancholy, its hush before rain. Turner, by contrast, flung his soul upon the canvas like a man possessed—his seas roared with judgement, his suns bled with glory. But in each, colour was no mere adornment. It was the very syntax of spirit, the alphabet of mood. Sage and oat and pearl in Constable; flame, rust, and sulphur in Turner.

And then—Paul Smith. With his famed subversion of the predictable, his linings that sing where the suit speaks softly, his stripes which dance without ever leaping into vulgarity—he is not, as some might think, a mere designer of garments. He is a curator of feeling, a composer of cloth, a poet of the palette. In his tailoring, one finds the restraint of Constable’s meadows and the boldness of Turner’s suns, held together by an English wit which refuses to take solemnity too seriously.

Of course, it will be said—rightly—that art and fashion reside in different dominions. The one is meant to endure, the other to evolve. Paintings are entombed in time; suits are lived in, worn, and worn through. But I should like to suggest that the difference is not so wide as it seems. For both painting and dressing arise from the same human impulse: the longing to render the inward visible. Whether one spreads pigment across canvas or stitches silk to wool, one is trying to answer a single question—how shall I show what I feel?

There is, in the best of both disciplines, a refusal to succumb to the ordinary. They elevate it. They baptise it. A Turner sky is not just the weather; it is a theatre for the soul’s ache. A Paul Smith jacket is not merely something to wear; it is something to be. To inhabit his designs is to carry a secret—a flash of coral in a sea of grey, a whisper of rebellion against the tyranny of the drab.

 

It would be mistaken to call this vanity. The peacock and the prophet may both wear colour, but only one uses it to speak truth. Smith, like Turner, is not showing off, but showing forth. His stripes are not ornaments; they are arguments—for joy, for memory, for selfhood in a world increasingly clothed in conformity.

 

And so we come, in the end, to a quiet but vital thought: that colour is not trivial. It is, in fact, theological. In Genesis, God does not merely make the world; He sees that it is good. That act of seeing is not separate from the making. It completes it. In the same way, when we see a well-cut coat in lavender and rose and think, “Ah, Turner,” or “Ah, Constable,” we are not engaging in shallow aestheticism. We are joining a deeper liturgy—the liturgy of recognition, of resonance, of revelation.

 

Let the world keep its boundaries, if it must, between gallery and haberdashery. But let us remember that beauty is no respecter of categories. It slips from oil to silk, from landscape to lapel, asking only that we have eyes to see—and hearts to feel—that even in a jacket, as in a sky, there is room enough for the sublime.

 

 

Fashion is more than attires.
It is not seams sewed up for warmth or whimsy.
It is the skin we choose when ours won’t speak.
It is warpaint. A psalm. A weapon. A whisper.
And anyone who says it’s shallow has never bled
in shoes they could not afford,
or worn a suit to scream in silence.

Dior knew this—Christian stitched revolution
into the New Look,
not just cinched waists and flared hips,
but post-war resurrection in silk and satin.
Women in bombed-out Britain wore knock-offs
with ration coupons,
not for glamour—
but to claw back dignity from the ashes.

Chanel binned the corset
not out of kindness,
but defiance.
Gabrielle knew liberty was best dressed in jersey.
She freed the female form not for fashion’s sake
but to say:
I am here. I move. I will.

And if you think a handbag cannot be political,
try carrying a Birkin in a world that counts
your worth by the weight of your wrist.

We are all mannequins of the mind,
wearing our fears and triumphs.
A Burberry trench is not a coat,
it’s British grit woven into gabardine,
rain-slick with the residue of Empire,
of WW1 trenches and windblown stoicism,
of aristocracy caught in modern floodlight.

Even the bare-knuckled Hackett finery,
double-breasted and stiff-lipped,
carries the chill of class systems—
a Savile Row sneer with specific stride.
And Dunhill’s quiet luxury?
A gentleman’s moan,
cuffed and collared by bashfulness.

Then comes Brioni, with Rome in every hem,
a sigh of la dolce vita pressed in wool,
the tailoring of emperors disguised as executives.

Berluti—where leather isn’t leather,
but autobiography, patinaed in ambition.
Even the soles speak of intention,
of arrival.

Loro Piana?
That’s not fabric,
that’s weather, bottled—
clouds tamed into coats
for men who conquer climates
before conversation.

And Ferragamo? 

That’s not footwear, 

it’s architecture for the soul— 

shoes that walked between function and film, 

that gave feet the right to be art, 

that turned arches into elegance.

Then Paul Smith arrives— 

styling with a wink, 

a British eccentric in pinstripes and pandemonium, 

a reminder that individuality is joy, 

and bravura need not murmur to be wise.

John Lobb, meanwhile, does not shout— 

it purls perfection in calfskin, 

precision shaped for stillness. 

Gieves & Hawkes? 

That’s the kingdom’s ghost— 

a military spine monogrammed in Mayfair, 

officers turned into outlines. 

Ralph Lauren rides in on nostalgia, 

a dream of America galloping across denim, 

where culture is costume, and aspiration has stitching. 

Hugo Boss?

That’s power, packaged— 

sharper than conscience, 

made for boardrooms and battlefields. 

Zegna strands restraint into lavishness, 

breathing wealth rather than declaring it. 

Tod’s gives the Italian foot permission to fly, 

suede like a second shell, 

speed tempered by design.

There’s philosophy in respective fibre.
Heidegger penned of “being-in-the-world”—
what better way to be
than clad in choices we’ve made?

Hermès doesn’t just make scarves;
they sculpt personality from silk.
Even Bottega’s woven leather
is a language: silent, sensual, specific.

Luca Faloni wraps leisure in linen, 

an elegy to Mediterranean tranquillity. 

And in the breast pocket? 

A sun-warmed reticence, folded.

A Montblanc ink pen— 

a sacred instrument of heritage, 

weight balanced in will. 

Poised not simply to write, but to inscribe self into time, 

every stroke an avowal, fluid with focus. 

Mindsets donned in midnight ink, 

where spirit glides in cursive, 

and status isn’t skreiched, but impressed— 

gently, irrevocably—into script.

Smythson leather cradles the intellect— 

not barely a diary, but a vault of selfhood,

where intimate thoughts lie veiled in vellum, 

protected, private, papyrus-bound confessions.

While Tanner Krolle bags convey lineage, 

magnificence with memory stamped into grain. 

Each scuff a footnote, each suture a signature, 

stories laced with unspoken legacy, 

handles sported by patrimony. 

Not plain accessory, but heirloom in motion— 

time you can transport, refinement that remembers.

Henry Poole & Co.

the origin, 

crafted the first verse of the contemporary clothing— 

a silhouette that never needed rewriting.

The psychologists got it too—
enclothed cognition,
they christen it.
Dress like a leader, think like one.
Wear despair, and you’ll think in grey.
So we wear hope. We wear dissent.
We wear ourselves, in disguise.

Cartier’s panther isn’t an animal.
It’s an idea: sleek, untamed, eternal.
Tiffany’s diamonds aren’t just carbon—
they are declarations.
They say: I’ve survived.
I am rare. I shine in ways you can’t bury.

Encircling the gilding joint: an axiom of time rendered tangible.
Breguet—horological diplomacy,
an arcadian coup d’état in gold and guilloché,
the Enlightenment beating beneath sapphire crystal,
antiquity not told, but adorned—encased in meticulous memory.

Longines—elongated elegance,
a sonnet of exactness drawn in classical numerals,
its pedigree traced like a calligrapher’s pen,
marking not hours, but endowment.

Jaquet Droz—a metronome of metaphysics,
where automatons dance like forgotten gods,
and every beat is a stanza, every dial a canvas,
inhaling and exhaling with the ardour of atelier-born dreams.

Audemars Piguet—where prudence is sculpted into eminence,
a paradox on the pulse: flamboyance without vanity,
sequentiality that mumbles louder than proclamation,
an opus of understatement on an open stage.

And Patek Philippe—
no mere mechanism, but existential enquiry.
Time decreed moral, inherited like ideology.
Not a wristwatch, but a benefaction ticking:
what, of all this, endures when you are gone?

Look to art—
Frida Kahlo wore Tehuana dresses
not for trend but to reclaim her body,
her pain. Her roots. Her voice.

Warhol painted Marilyn not as woman
but as surface, sheen—
proof that fashion is identity
reflected, refracted, commodified.

In cinema, too, it roars.
Think of Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia,
desert whites flowing like myth.
Or Audrey’s little black Givenchy dress—
not a garment, a gospel.
Bond’s tuxedo is armour,
while Joker’s purple ensemble sneers,
“I am chaos, tailored.”

Even in poetry—
Sylvia Plath’s bell jar was lined with lace,
Woolf wrote clothes as “nothing less than souls.”
The Brontës? Weather-beaten shawls and wind-tossed hair,
as if nature itself draped them in mood.

History wears its own wardrobe—
Marie Antoinette’s gowns gushed rebellion.
Churchill’s homburg, rigid with resolve.
The Black Panthers’ leather jackets—
uniforms of unapologetic rage.

Fashion is the flag you fly when no one asks your name.
It’s how the whist declare,
how the loud dominate,
how the lost try to be found.

It is not thread, not texture.
It is flesh, borrowed or built.

So scoff if you will,
call it frivolous,
but next time you put on your regalia—
be it robes of mourning or punk-studded recalcitrance—
Ask yourself:

Who am I, in this?

And who do I want them to think I am?

For when words fail,
we wear ourselves.
And sometimes,
that is the loudest truth of all.

Picture: Salvatore Ferragamo