I’M NOT JOINING THE MAFIA

A piece of clothing that I am breathing new life into now that summer is turning into fall and we want to renew our wardrobe.

There’s a shop I seem to keep walking past at the moment. No matter where I go or what mode of transport I use, it’s always there, somewhere between X and Y, a constant nuisance to my senses, not because I don’t like the shop or what it sells, but because I do. I won’t describe its exact location, partly because I’m not sure myself, and partly because I don’t want other people to know it exists. If everyone knows, it’ll lose its appeal. Enough that it’s in London, near New Bond Street.

Generally speaking, it is a shop you recognize at once. A gentlemen’s outfitters, as they used to be called – although of course no one considers himself a gentleman these days, or subscribes to the idea of ​​being well-equipped – expensive Mediterranean, the kind that is always named after a famous Italian composer, Puccini, Verdi, Mascagni, Monteverdi, Donizetti, Morricone, although you suspect that the owner, like the majority of his clientele, actually comes from the Levant.

The clothes, whoever buys and sells them, are definitely Italian. Southern Italian, that’s how I see them. From Naples or Bari or Taranto. Or even further south – Sicily, say. Mafia clothes, that’s what I mean. Clothes to meet other mafia members in. That’s probably why I’m drawn to that place, why I keep seeing it from the top of a bus, or from the window of a speeding taxi, or out of the corner of my eye as I run to the chemist’s before it closes. There’s a part of me that is forever Cosa Nostra. Nothing to do with violence or extortion. I wouldn’t hurt a fly or take money from it. It’s an aesthetic thing, that’s all. It’s about clothes. I long to dress like a Sicilian-born mafia boss.

I once sat next to a Mafia man in a New York swing club. He was tall for an Italian, with a long, pale face and beautifully tapered fingers. He wore a triple-breasted gray silk suit, laced with platinum filaments, and the softest of soft white shirts, with long pointed collars and cuffs lined with swan down. I admired the way he sat at the head of the table, distributing favors, buying the most expensive Armagnacs, selecting cigars for everyone, including the women, and with a slow bow of the head permitting those who wanted to get up and dance to do so. He was, of course, above the dancing itself. Personal dancing is not what you do when you are a Mafia man.

The other thing I liked about him was the way he kept smiling at me. It’s possible he was as keen on my clothes as I was on his. A blue, fluffy jacket over a button-up Viyella Tory shirt, yellow corduroys and Chelsea boots. After all, there weren’t many other people dressed like me that night. But what I think he really saw in me was mafia material. Someone who might have been useful to him in other circumstances, maybe his bag-carrier, maybe his mate, who knows – maybe even his godfather. When my father was a taxi driver in Manchester, they called him The Godfather. So it’s in my genes.

Part

A few days ago, anyway, I finally stood, with half an hour to go, outside the window I’d been speeding past for weeks. Pavarotti, I think it was called. Or Lanza. I can’t remember. What I do remember, and quite vividly, was a powder-blue ensemble—powder-blue blouse with navy leather elbow patches, powder-blue pants with navy leather piping around the pockets, and powder-blue canvas yacht shoes strung with dyed rope of the deepest indigo. All well and good, but what shirt do you wear with it?

Then I saw it, high up in the collar, two buttons at the throat, the collars tastefully finished with steel, the cuffs sawn diagonally away, so that you could show your diamond watch at the same time as your diamond links, and the color – and this is the best part – a peacock blue that seemed to change color depending on the angle from which you looked at it, now azure, now violet, now as crimson as spilled blood. So it would be a good idea to buy such a shirt, because it would go with everything in your wardrobe.

Did I mention that the shop was also one of those where you had to ring the doorbell and say “Luigi sent me” before they would let you in? They looked at me through the grille a few times, and then probably saw what the mafioso in New York saw, and opened the lock. I wasn’t there long. Just long enough to notice that the incarnation of the pygmy buffalo belt for the trousers alone cost £850. “Nice,” I said, without showing any panic. “But I was looking for something a bit more flashy.”

I don’t like not being able to afford things. Silly, I know, but I think not being able to afford things is a sign of personal failure. If I had organized my life better, become the surgeon my grandmother wanted me to be, or better yet, a footballer, I could have bought 10 powder blue blouses with navy leather trim with my earnings from one missed penalty.

That is undoubtedly who Pavarotti’s outfits are adorned with – footballers with the aesthetics of the mafia. But who am I to disapprove? I studied English literature with FR Leavis and can barely calm the mafia in my soul. What right have I to expect more from men with CSEs in the three Rs of rapping, raping and roasting? Give any of us too much money and prestige and we behave like fools.

My only consolation as I leave Resphigi’s empty-handed: Thank God I belong to a profession that keeps me too poor to at least Look an acorn.