Jay Fielden

Twenty-fifth anniversary, one year late. Where else but The French Laundry? Worth the wait.

Yeah, yeah, this year’s Golden Globes was a showcase for a fairly traditional approach to black tie, if you ignore the soigné 70’s cuts, gold lame shirting, and wackadoodle accessorizing. What jumped out to me, though, wasn’t the tuxedos but the fairly ubiquitous choice of peekaboo shades as a finishing touch, a look that’s been building steam of late. I went through a light-tint phase myself a few years ago, when I fell under the spell of those old gents of intrigue and mystery who stroll around Milan behind antique shades of magnification. “Now we see through a glass darkly,” Saint Paul wrote, as if he were wearing a pair himself. Many a lesser legend has: Gary Cooper, Nicholson, Onassis, Delon, Hemingway, Mastroianni. Modern-day adopters from this past Sunday: Hawke, Keery (glasses in hand), Jordan, Glen Powell, Frankenstein, Adam Brody. These guys generally held their end up pretty high in the circus of red-carpet taste. I, myself, prefer a classic bow tie, though if I had to choose between a traditional necktie and a bolo tie, I’d go with the choice of my fellow Texan: bolo. // Meanwhile, mulling further thoughts: to cummerbund or not to cummerbund. I feel an incoming Instastory.

I got this Mackinaw jacket in 1989. It’s Polo. I first saw it in an ad. I thought, there’s no way, I’ll never find it. But I did. Of all the things I have, it’s somehow maintained the magic of that special emotion you get when you first get something you love. There’s just something about it that never gets old.

Always a special night when WM Brown brings the party to 867, as some of us call the RL flagship on Madison Avenue. I know, I know, drop the eight and there it is: 6-7. 🎄

A world of images and words that will take you places, including Japan, with bylines that include: @tommyorange , @rae.delbianco , #nickpaumgarten, @michael_hainey , @shannonadducci , @mrchampale , @eric_twardzik , a cameo from @whirlinglog_and_arrow , and Ralph! @poloralphlauren // #RLMag // soundtrack @elizafieldenn (Buck Owens)

Veni, vidi, vici. #brunellofilm

The West Coast outpost.

Issue No. 3–Mountain Living—is out, 48-pages of paper and ink: ranch-dining al fresco; on-point style insight; a Ralph wish list; an ode to barns by Mark Rozzo; essays by Rae Del Bianco (mustangs!), Michael Hainey (road-trip out West!), Nick Paumgarten (an Alpine Brigadoon!), David Coggins (is this Montana?); and a profile of a master Native American silversmith who also builds choppers by novelist Tommy Orange. Copies on hand at RL stores and coffee shops everywhere, Aspen to Tokyo. Supplies limited. #pologazette #RLmag.com

Airport instructional: you can travel in comfort without assaulting the idea that life in public should aim for some reasonable standard of aesthetic effort. We are more than what we wear, but what we wear is as a culture who we are.

When I was younger, and felt I didn’t have much for shoulders, I eschewed the raglan sleeve of the Balmacaan—that single-breasted, loose-fitting topcoat with angled pockets and ample collar that’s almost always made of tweed (and named after a plot of Scottish land near the even more fantastically named village, Drumnadrochit). It would have been a mistake not to reconsider the useful advantages and style of this cut—and there are many. For one, the shape fits the returning mood of looser, more comfortable tailoring (away with you, suits of shrink-wrapped sleeves and jeggings for pants). Over a sweatshirt or a sweater, the Balmacaan is a statement of unstudied ease, made for layering. And you can throw it on over that heavy tweed blazer with the high armhole and Cifonelli shoulder without getting an attack of claustrophobia. Some come with a self-belt, others have an inverted pleat between the shoulders. Details like these aren’t mere design affectations: they give the coat adaptability—weekday or weekend, cool or cold, chore jacket or smoking jacket—and full range when it comes to movement. I first found one I liked in London about five years ago, and I’ve since picked up others, including this vintage one from Polo, circa 1988.

Unpublished poem by Robert Frost recently discovered as an inscription in an early edition of “North of Boston.” (1916). This is the only copy of the poem that exists, and it will be auctioned at Christie’s tomorrow ($20,000-$30,000). Judging by the way it appears to have been carefully copied out and signed, I would say Frost considered it a finished poem. Yet the fact that he never published it makes me think he ultimately felt it wasn’t very good—or good enough. But is it? Frost is often read with the idea that his poems are the angst-free word carvings of a New England gentleman farmer. “Nothing New”—it sounds so breezy, so unfretfully resigned to life and the passing of time, of growing old, of turning to dust. But as a phrase it aligns itself with Ecclesiastes—also the personal poetic record of an old man but one who has seen and done everything and found it all worth nothing. Frost was only 44 in 1918 when he wrote the poem, but he is, perhaps, the very incarnation of the term “old soul.” And that is what I see in the imagery here—a man who even as a boy at play had “winter dreams” and was as sad then as he is currently. It’s a strange thing to confess, and I don’t think the poem resolves whether this is necessarily good, a sad thing to be sad or merely a true reality of life for someone who doesn’t deny the temporal predicament we’re all in. One last point—“though I am further upon my way.” It’s hard not to hear the phrasing of Frost’s most famous poem here, “The Road Not Taken,” which is not only the first poem in “North of Boston,” but contains the line—“Yet knowing how way leads on to way.” Ways, to Frost, have a—pun coming—way of leading the speaker in his poems away from a given moment of conviction. I’ll take the road less traveled by! Really? Maybe that’s the way it looks in hindsight. But the title of the poem is actually called “The Road NOT Taken”—which gives it a darker meaning. As an editor, I would tinker with the last line of “Nothing New”—and lean toward the thought that cutting it would help clarify the poem’s ambiguity at the same time that it maintains it. But, who am I, Ezra Pound?

In 2017, when I was editing Esquire, we had a chance to interview Robert Redford and put him on the cover. Michael Hainey had the honor, and did a deep, wide-ranging Q&A: “I’ve been very fortunate in that I’ve had wonderful relationships with people I’ve worked with,” the actor and director said at one point. “But nothing has sustained like Paul Newman. Nothing has sustained like our connection. It went into movie friendship, into personal friendship. It cut very deep. He changed my life: He agreed to have me in the movie [Butch Cassidy] that I shouldn’t have been in. He was that generous. The studio wanted Steve McQueen, they wanted Marlon Brando, they wanted big-name people. And I was not that.” It’s almost impossible not to see Redford as the giant he became, the star who, as James Salter put it, gave the impression that he “was able to choose his life” by glancing at a menu. The truth was far from it: “I grew up in a situation where you were either gonna drown in it or you were gonna swim out of it,” Redford explained. A swimmer must swim, for he is, by definition, always in the water. It’s something I try to remember as much as I can.