Rubato Roper

Play Roger Eno’s ‘A place we once walked’. The piano build up is repetitive, dum, dum dum, with muffled right hand notes tickling above.

Then the strings.

And four minutes and 10 seconds in, a kick to the chest, like a plane slightly dropping, then soaring before levelling off with puffed-up clouds below 

What does it have to do with shirts? Well what does anything have to do with anything else? Just a slight connection. A feeling. 

It is a cold beauty which warms and softens as does this Rubato ‘Roper’ Western shirt’, a crisp, snow bright, white denim palate cleanser.

Worn with thrashed jeans, perfect suede boots, a white t-shirt and tucked. 

Or like today, sat, in the garden, lawn just mown in early spring sunshine, paint splattered fatigues, dog chewed cap and short brewed green tea.

A 3x1 fabric of conviviality, to be worn around many but also six and a half ounces of happy to be solitary cloth, leaning on fence post, watching the sky. 

Recently I reread Harriet Vyner’s “Groovy Bob ‘the life and times of Robert Fraser’”, and kept thinking about a certain London elegance, to most lost but to some it’s there, still fighting. I can see it in the work of Tom Arena, but also in Carl and Oliver of Rubato and particularly this shirt; Swedish designed; American influenced; Japanese made. To my mind that sense of mixing and melding is the very essence of what makes us on this wet isle, well us. 

A palate cleanser? Yes.

That essential, the white shirt flipped? Uh huh and a vibe.

Townes Van Zandt “High, Low and in Between”; George Harrison on holiday, maybe Sicily, hair up; or in the truck, next season of Taylor Sheridan’s Landman on my mind, man made it, away from the grime, sat up high, shinning unaffected, as your tires float above the murk.

The high rim, high shine snaps, echo my desire for homemade lemon sorbet (anyone want recipe? Please let me know… ) eaten with cold David Mellor stainless steel, and as I walk the light shifts and bounces and pushes me to try different exposures on my camera, Austin, Texas, via Three Horseshoes.  

It’s all quite optimistic, not just because wearing is a sign you are unbothered by the obvious dangers of life marking it quickly, although given how life feels at present, a touch of the old “clean living in difficult circumstances” feels needed.

Optimistic really because it’s an attitude shifter. Simply it lifts and sharpens your mood. There I was on a dark winters morning for a gathering, something smart, saintly in appearance, slight wink of devilish intention. Hopeful, ready and present for action good or bad.

And as the weather turns I keep looking at it, running cloth through my fingers, thinking of the excitement that is the promise of spring, long days, light mornings and life blossoming before me.

Breakfast, lunch and supper all outside, life lived out, collar turned up, cuffs rolled. Nature next to you. A feeling, a connection.