GQ -- Kabul Edition Kabul, 29 March -- Ive had aspirations, and some have come true. Many haven’t: I’m not secretary of state, nor been published in The New Yorker (I actually thought my modest proposal for controlling the cell-phone plague on trains would make it. It predated The Hunger Games by decades. On the other hand, I didn’t expect The New Yorker to print my letter satirizing the grotesquely lachrymose and self-promoting suck-up competition between Clive James and Tina Brown following the death of Princess Diana. Ms. Brown’s sense of humor doesn’t seem to extend to herself.) One thing to which I never aspired was influencing fashion in Kabul. Oddly, it seems to have happened. I have my own taste, and sometimes I notice when others seem well dressed, uncomfortably dressed, badly dressed, or just look like jackasses. Often I don’t notice, and I usually don’t care, and it never occurred to me to encourage others to dress like me. Beyond teaching my kid how to tie a Windsor knot, I generally haven’t concerned myself with others’ haberdashery. Mobin, the tailor at the adjoining ISAF base, had some light grey wool with pale blue stripes I thought would make a good double-breasted suit. Walking back with the finished product, I was about halfway to my office when I notice the coat had a center vent, rather than side vents, and the buttons were plastic, instead of the buffalo-horn buttons I’d provided. Yet, these details had been right during fitting, so it wasn’t simply the tailor’s error. Apparently, someone had seen the suit and requested one just like it – or sort of like it – and I’d accidentally been given the imitation. Then was the double-breasted vest. I didn’t invent double-breasted waistcoats, but I can’t remember the last time I saw anyone wear one – until after Mobin made one for me. Since then, I’ve seen at least two others. Maybe the suit and the vests were coincidences, but now there is the curious incident of the Norfolk jacket. Nobody wears Norfolk jackets any more, unless, maybe, he’s appearing in a shooting scene in Downton Abbey, but I like them, and I thought one would be the equivalent of formal wear for Land Rover use. Wearing a suit in the ex-Royal Army, dust-caked and battered Rover would be like Theodore Roosevelt’s famous white-linen-clad appearance in the cab of a steam shovel. In any case, I ordered one, and this time, the news was official. At a fitting, a beaming Mobin told me he was already making two others for guys who’d seen my half-finished jacket hanging in the shop. I might have been the only man in Afghanistan with a Norfolk jacket, now I’m part of a trio. John Kerry is secure in his job. Even with the departure of Tina Brown, The New Yorker might never find room for me, and I’ve pretty much abandoned hope of ever impressing Scarlett Johansson. Yet, there’s this unlooked for – and extremely dubious -- distinction: on some tiny scale, I’ve become the Embassy-Kabul equivalent of a petronian arbiter elegantiarum -- for this week, anyway. I don’t think I’ll ask to have it carved on my gravestone.
Posted on: Sat, 29 Mar 2014 08:10:38 +0000
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