Design
Every second year or so, the muezzins of the fashion world proclaim some other colour "the new black". I understand that chocolate brown was so honoured most recently. (In the alternate years, black is black, as usual.) But the first "new black" was navy blue.
Navy blue is just the most versatile element of nautical symbolism borrowed by landlubbers. It was first thought chic for young boys to be dressed in sailor suits in the 19th century, women in the early part of the 20th. From there, fashion's usual trickle-down theory applies. Coco Chanel's 1920 bell-bottomed "yachting pants" led on to Ralph Lauren; now there are "deck shoes" in Marks and Spencer.
As readers of this magazine are surely aware, Cowes week is upon us once more. At the beginning of August every year, this shabby Isle of Wight town provides the setting for this fashion style to return to its source - a meeting of a kind that never happens in the case of street styles inspired by the ghetto or army camouflage. Nautical style aspires to a very different world, as was clearly signalled in the days when the royal "yacht" Britannia would grace the Solent with its presence for the week. (It is remarkable how little Cowes week has done in all its years for the town itself, which has been depressed by the decline of its defence-based industry and cannot make one week of lightening wealthy incomers' wallets stretch to year-round comfort.)
A ship with the conceit to call itself a yacht, Britannia neatly reveals the two main sources of inspiration for nautical style: the luxury ocean liner and the modern racing yacht. Sir Terence Conran, who once opened a Design Museum exhibition (on sardine tin labels, I kid you not) wearing full oilskins and a sou'wester, evokes the former in some of his restaurants. So does Olga Polizzi's swanky new Cornish hotel, Tresanton, to the admiration of the style press.
But the more recent and widespread tendency has been to borrow yacht fittings in order to create a more practical aesthetic. Teak gratings in the bottom of the shower come from the cockpit. "Decks" are all the rage on the gardening programmes. Yachts inspire more ambitious structures, too, not least because many of the architects and their engineers are weekend sailors. Richard Horden designed a house constructed from sections of aluminium mast, while his new spectators' stand at Epsom race course inexplicably resembles a gin palace, adrift from its natural harbour in Monte Carlo.
There is a tenuous justification for some of this look in the principles of naval architecture, which prize extreme lightness of weight and the effective use of confined spaces. But in truth these admirable virtues are generally ignored in favour of the more obvious bunting. To be fair, the architects are at least drawn to the contemporary technology; fashion designers, for their part, apparently still think that rope is made of hemp and sails of canvas, which seems a pity, as there is much in the sport in the way of novel materials and design that could be exploited more. So railings made of stainless steel wire, brought into tension using bottle screws, are now ubiquitous. Tensioned expanses of fabric provide sheltered porches and courtyards, done in a way that owes more to sails drawing in the wind than to the saggy canvas of Carry on Camping. Sailmakers and manufacturers of spars and rigging now advertise in architects' trade magazines. (None of this is as fatuous as British architects' latest affectation - the brise-soleil, a projecting ledge of fins in metal or concrete, originally adopted to screen the sunlight striking the shallow facades of modern buildings in Mediterranean climates, which has suddenly become de rigueur in Sheffield and Manchester.)
It is tempting to explain these phenomena away as the mannerisms of a maritime nation where landlocked pubs are given the names of ships and naval battles. But the style is seen everywhere. Deck shoes, now so popular here, come - like so many sports-connected developments, from trainers to mountain bikes - from America. Our domestic forerunner was surely the humble plimsoll, whose name also hints at a nautical origin, but which somehow failed to make the grade as cult footwear.
The appeal of the style comes undoubtedly from the life it represents. This is clearest in the advertising of the cigarette companies, which have long been prominent in sponsoring water-borne leisure, including Cowes week. Their photographs extol the active, open-air life, with bright sails swelling in ozone breezes - the very opposite, naturally, of the ash-grey, nicotine-yellow, wheezy truth.
But a deeper urge is tapped as well. Some of those who step aboard a boat at Cowes this week will find themselves wishing it did not pitch and yaw so. But many of those who remain safely ashore cherish a more distant dream of our nomadic ancestors, of weighing anchor and sailing away. That is the meaning of buildings that look like ships.
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