Fans of classic film noir of the 1940s are in for a treat with Motherless Brooklyn. Production designer Beth Mickle has restyled New York as a gritty, chiaroscuro city where everyone casts long shadows and on every street corner there’s a cool jazz joint full of sharply dressed hep cats. Willem Dafoe’s character Paul Randolph, … Keep Reading
For some of the loved ones in our lives, and also some of those ‘difficult’ members of our families, for whom the attempted purchase of some clothing item is a complete no-no due to the particular nature of their sartorial requisites, it is difficult to imagine a more suitable gift than an annual subscription to … Keep Reading
Issue 102 of The Chap celebrates the mad, the eccentric and the maverick artiste, commencing with a surreal conversation between actor Tony Pitts and comedian Vic Reeves. We also meet Dexys frontman Kevin Rowland, who discusses his long musical career and allows us a glimpse into his immense personal wardrobe. Maverick icons featured include Marilyn … Keep Reading
For 20 years, satirical gentlemen’s quarterly The Chap has been providing chaps all over the world with crucial advice on sartorial rectitude and anarcho-dandyist etiquette. Best of The Chap brings together in one volume all the features from the last 100 issues that have defined the publication’s manifesto. Best of The Chap includes features from … Keep Reading
A sumptuous offering in a lavish gift box containing all four elements of The Chap's Flaneur men's grooming range. At the heart of the set is Flâneur eau de cologne, the gentlemen’s fragrance based on classic men’s scents of the early 20th century. On a masculine base of amber, patchouli, vetiver and vanilla come … Keep Reading
2019 marked the 70th anniversary of the original release of Ealing classic Kind Hearts and Coronets. StudioCanal have lovingly restored the film for this special anniversary re-release, with every scene cleaned up and restored to its former cinematic glory. Dennis Price stars as the vengeful Louis Mazzini, who murders all those who stand in his … Keep Reading
The vinyl edition of the official Peaky Blinders soundtrack has six pages of sartorial sleevenotes by The Chap. While the costume styling of the series is rooted in sartorial accuracy for the period, immediately after the First World War, the music on this triple album abandons all temptation to stay in that era. The songs, … Keep Reading
The official Peaky Blinders soundtrack has sartorial sleevenotes by The Chap. While the costume styling of the series is rooted in sartorial accuracy for the period, immediately after the First World War, the music abandons all temptation to stay in that era. The songs, chosen purely for their reflection of the dark, brooding menace of … Keep Reading
Kentucky is regarded as the first of the Southern states, sitting south of the Ohio River on the eastern side of the United States. It is a green and pleasant land, literally. There are miles of gently rolling hills, clean air and plentiful amounts of fine pure mineral water. All these elements play a large … Keep Reading
One of the fourteen countries that straddle the Equator, Ecuador took its name from that imaginary line and offers an engaging place for the traveller to explore with much historical interest, museums and art galleries but, more significantly, it’s the best place in the world to buy a Panama hat. I took a trip out … Keep Reading
Why am I writing about Disneyland in The Chap, you ask? Because, for the past four years, Disneyland in Anaheim California been the epicentre (not Epcot Center – that one’s in Florida,) of Dapper Day, and Rose Callahan and I had been invited by the event’s organizer to give a presentation about our book I … Keep Reading
Borough Market came to everyone’s attention in the 1990s, when Jamie Oliver pointed out that British food is actually rather good, as long as you spend vast amounts of cash on each ingredient. The market continues to thrive, anachronistically at odds with the vast developments that have taken place around it in Southwark. The change to the market itself is the proliferation of cafes, bars and restaurants in the area immediately surrounding the market, replacing the greasy spoon cafes and sawdust-floor pubs that would have been there originally. A more recent development is the addition of restaurants above the market,…
I still find the Eurostar really rather wonderful. You get on a train at St. Pancras and alight some two hours later at Le Gare Du Nord into a different world, where the attitudes, tastes, smells, people and culture are as different from London as sand is to salt. Undeniably, it is quite an anomalous experience – one that usually only a plane journey can really prepare us for – stepping off a train into this alien environment that’s both Paris and, due to French colonisation, Gambian, Moroccan, Tunisian, Sudanese and Algerian. It’s in all respects downright foreign. I have…
Wherever you look in pop culture, you will see signs of our beloved Chap Fashion. Whether you are looking into a far-flung cyberpunk future or back to the romanticised past of fantasy worlds, there are clues and signposts all over the place to the classic influences that brought us here. Why have a few very specific time periods had such a large influence on our huge entertainment industry? Take my hand, oh dapper one, and let us go on a journey of discovery through the history of pop culture to find out. As a young person, I’m pretty sure that…
From the eleventh floor balcony of a hotel overlooking the Pacific Ocean, the horizon flashing with lightning, brassy wisps of Mariachi music wafting up from somewhere through the heat of the night, was the sense that we were definitely in Mexico. It had taken nearly 20 hours to reach this moment of Mexican awareness, though our sense of time had been hurled out of the window on the journey; it was either tomorrow or yesterday in England, the confusion of jetlag and 6-hour time difference loosening the mind from the shackles of the clock. Puerto Vallarta is a sprawling series…
