Style

If you listen vary carefully you are about to hear a name drop. Natalie Portman.

Yes, she is living in Sydney, Australia whilst her husband directs films and I believe she is also filming her Marvel movie franchise of Thor at the same time.

Yes, I was always a fan. In fact, as a young man I thought I'd meet her but did not know how or why.

In fact, I can distinctly recall reading that she was off to Harvard to study psychology and I found that very impressive.

Well, it took 12 years of making bow ties and other menswear items for that to transpire because it was a chance encounter where she was seated at the cafe next door and I walked in and gave her two sets of eye shades and walked out.

I did not expect to hear from her again but then a call came through one day, a crackly call, an American voice, and I was quite dismissive because I was busy. 

Finally she said "can you hear me now?" and I said "yes" and she said "you gave me some eye shades a few weeks back" , the penny dropped, I was much more amiable after "oh I thought I'd never hear from you". She was up ten minutes later to get her husband some gifts for the festive season.

I believe she does not take her husband's last name and her name is a stage name, so I will continue to refer to her as Natalie Portman because I don't know if she is Mrs. Millepied or Ms Portman or Ms Hershlag etc etc. 

Ten minutes later Natalie Portman, internationally acclaimed actress, activist, vegan, mother of two and Oscar winner for best actress, was inside my Studio and she seemed to like the space, I think she said as much. 

She had wanted to buy her husband a dressing robe in printed velvet that at the time was in the window. However, I convinced her it would take a long time to produce and wasn't the easiest thing to transport back to the United States. 

In the end I think she chose beautifully and I am glad to now count her as one of our patrons but as luck would have it our paths have not crossed since. However, a few weeks later she was photographed wearing a t shirt I gave her as a present, a t shirt I designed for my little boxing gym that I run out of my garage in Vaucluse Sydney.

Anyway, I am super proud to have her a customer and I look forward to seeing her husbands version of Carmen and hopefully my daughter and I can watch Thor together some time next year.

My tailor was short of work over Christmas so I said to him whilst it was quiet in January to knock out a jacket for the window display in 2021. I wanted something thought provoking but also it wasn't quite so, there was another bit to it. There was a last piece of a cashmere wool from an English loom that my friend Aman had in his warehouse in England. He was selling me some wool for a bespoke customer, a navy hospack, and he just happened to have it on file but there wasn't enough to make a full jacket, just enough for trousers. 

I did not need trousers, and certainly not in white, but its such a rare thing to fund a good cashmere and merino wool in optical white, so I took it. 

It took a little time to gestate but there was a piece of fabric from what I call my 'celebration' pile, fabrics which are usually used for bow ties for events and for peacocking. This one particular fabric I had which was never going to be used up as bow ties, owing to the fact that I had bought for metreage than I needed because of minimum quantities, but could be used as material for an evening jacket. Only to do an evening jacket in that one material would be way too over the top. The material, and I don't know exactly why, reminded me of Klimt's backgrounds in his paintings and then also, and again, I have no idea how my mind works, of Martin Sharp Nimrod posters from the early 1980's and the jazz mural theme of the institutional restaurant in Woollahra, The Bistro Moncur.

I put it all together as a schism of sorts, a little like my gemini star sign, we are not one thing. In this jacket was the calm purity of the white, and then the frenetic patterns that one might see in jazz music, lofty, wild, mercurial, in the other fabric. And we did it in a wide notched lapel with patch pockets, a segue from traditional cuts for dinner jackets. The only thing I regret is that we used white buttons. For some reason they detract from the finish of it all, so I will now search for something a little more contemporary. 

Overall, together the contrasts worked and it was marvelled at in the window for the weeks that followed. We can of course make you a jacket in the same manner, only it won't be in the same fabrics as we used up the last of both. For custom orders please call +61413140994