–A recent issue of the Financial Times carries a story of the impact of Evelyn Waugh and his contemporaries on the latest mens fashions. Here’s an excerpt:
This season, menswear has embraced the gimlet-tinged mood of Cecil Beatonâs diaries, the roman Ă clefs of Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford, and the posturing of their 1920s peers. You can see it in the lace and exaggerated puffed sleeves at Simone Rocha, the Genet-like Marseille sailors at SS Daley and the flamboyant tailoring at McQueen and Peter Do. Most of Dries Van Notenâs collections feature pyjama silks that Beatonâs subjects would have loved. …
Designer and photographer Cecil Beaton has frequently revisited the 1920s and the so-called Bright Young Things, as documented by Beaton, Mitford, Waugh, and the tabloids of the day. âThose androgynous, luxurious and often queer-coded self-representations resonate with todayâs menswear designers,â says Jay McCauley Bowstead, lecturer in cultural and historical studies at the London College of Fashion, and author of Menswear Revolution: The Transformation of Contemporary Menâs Fashion. âThe famous Cecil Beaton photograph from 1927 of Stephen Tennant, Rex Whistler and the Jungman sisters dressed in a joyous simulacrum of 18th-century dress in Tennantâs garden in Wiltshire comes to mind.â…
The story by Mark O’Flaherty is entitled “How fashion got stuck in the Waugh zone” and is headed by a copy of the painting of the 26-year old Waugh by Henry Lamb. It also contains several photos illustrating his point. Here’s a link.
–Writer Jonathan Raban’s final book entitled Father and Son has been published and is reviewed by Carl Hoffman in the Washington Post. Although Raban (a distant relative of Evelyn Waugh) didn’t like to be labelled a “travel writer”, he wrote several of his best books about his travels:
…The greats of travel literature were products of one very small island that ruled for centuries over an empire upon which the sun never set, and out from which a tiny population of erudite, upper-class White men embarked. The conceit of Raban in Arabia and all those men he was emulating â from Robert Byron to Peter Fleming, V.S. Pritchett to Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, who infamously traveled âwhen the going was goodâ â was civilized man among the savages. They werenât all British or even men, of course. âI had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills,â is one of the most iconic lines in travel literature, but âOut of Africa,â by Isak Dinesen, is what it is: a lyrical, romantic homage to colonialism by a rich baroness in which the indigenous Kikuyu â âmy Natives,â as she calls them â are childlike and her 6,000-acre farm wasnât land appropriated from them by force…
Raban’s book intersperses memories of his father, whom Raban first encountered at age three due to his father’s war service, with his own last days in which he suffered from debilitating health problems.
–Rupert Murdoch’s recent announcement of his retirement has elicited from the press reminders of a Waugh character. For example, an article by Adrian Wooldridge on the Bloomberg news service has appeared in several papers. Here’s an excerpt from the Washington Post:
…Murdoch is the only contemporary figure who can be spoken of in the same breath as the great press barons of yesteryear: Alfred Harmsworth, the Napoleon of Fleet Street who invented the tabloid; William Randolph Hearst, who perfected the arts of sensationalism, salaciousness and war-mongering; and Lord Beaverbrook, who competed with Hearst in his enthusiasm for blurring the line between reporting the news and making it. If Hearst gave the world Orson Wellsâ Citizen Kane, and Beaverbrook Evelyn Waughâs Lord Copper, Murdoch gave it Logan Roy, the foul-mouthed master of family dysfunction. …
And this appeared in the Boston Herald, a paper Murdoch had rescued from failure:
…In the late 1980âs, as he began expanding into TV, Murdoch would fly into Boston just before Christmas and host a fancy dinner at a nice steakhouse for the top people at the Herald. I remember one year he told us not to worry about all these stories that he was losing interest in print. âThe backbone of any media company is content,â he said. âAnd print people are the only ones who can produce the proper content. So this corporation will always be based in print.â We believed him â up to a point, to use the expression Lord Copperâs minions would use to agree with, sort of, their media mogul bossâ disassembling in Evelyn Waughâs classic Fleet Street novel, Scoop. …