Wacky Wednesday: Sartorial Inspiration for the Day

Being, as it is, a Wednesday, it raised a wry smile on Bristol’s local tailor’s moustached lip when I read the title of this morning’s Dr. Seuss book to my excitable daughter: ‘Wacky Wednesday’?!

Being a creature of habit – I hear you sniggering at the back! – I was slightly perturbed to learn that Wacky Wednesday is not illustrated by Dr. Suess’s more well known illustrator, Jason Peltz, but instead, by George Booth – though Grace Blake was more concerned with crocodiles in prams, and skateboards under the school teachers feet – actually they were rollerskates, but skateboards take precedent in the Darby Minns household!

But what Booth lacks in the blissfully off-the-wall illustrations of Peltz, he more than makes up for in his capturing of the style of a bygone era, and, one of my favourites to boot; the 1960’s!

Albeit published in 1974, the style of dress is still very much 1960’s with gents wearing well tailored suits and trilby hats and carrying umbrellas with cane handles – think Mad Men. The women, or possibly nanny’s, all pushing vintage looking prams and also wearing hats – think Breakfast at Tiffany’s – such a great look I’ve always thought. The policemen, referred to as ‘patrolman’, carrying truncheons and wearing peaked caps – think Chief O’Hara in Adam West’s Batman – look so smart with their melton cloth blousons and tapered trousers, and the shoes, which appear on the ceiling, on the wall, as plant pots and, most wacky of all, floating on clouds in the sky, are beautifully illustrated brogues.

And as for my Wacky Wednesday, aside learning that one of my favourite local breweries, Exmoor, has started producing a tomato and ale chutney, it’s been fairly ordinary thus far. Oh, apart from the fact that today marks Brown in Town’s 2nd (week) anniversary, no less!

I bid you a good Wacky Wednes-day..