From glam macs to Mission: Impossible, America loves London fog
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Version 0 of 1. In 1923 a 16-year-old called Israel Myers set up a raincoat company in Baltimore. He called it Londontown. The firm jogged along profitably enough, supplying the US navy and becoming popular in Philadelphia on account of its special patented liners. In 1954, they had a rethink. Myers changed the name to London Fog. Suddenly, the anoraks flew off the hangers at Saks. “Every once in a while,” wrote the New York Times at the time, “a name comes along for a product that is exactly right. It describes the product exactly and does a selling job that even the legendary 10,000 words cannot do. Such a one is London Fog.” London Fog now sells round the world and is one of the leading high-end waterproof manufacturers. Christina Hendricks acted as brand ambassador, then Nicole Scherzinger, then Eva Longoria. At the moment it’s Neil Patrick Harris and his husband, David Burtka. These glam macs must be at least partly to blame for the apparently unquenchable American appetite for English pollution. The Clean Air Act 1956 has meant that Londoners have actually spent half a century not groping about in airborne industrial waste, our noses now clogged only by particles we can’t see. But people overseas seem to cling to the notion – the hope, even – that we’re still wreathed in refuse. As Christine Corton reports in a new book about London fog published this winter by Harvard, it’s not completely their fault. In 1973, the chair of the London tourist board admitted that he was partly urging people to come to the capital in winter as that’s when the chances of the fog they so hungered after were at their highest. Homegrown film and TV has helped fuel this heady brew of falsehood. Want to summon Victorian London quick and cheap? Wheel on the dry-ice machine and get pumping. Peaky Blinders and Sherlock frequently appear to paper over modern street furniture – as well as cook up a sense of foreboding - with a few squirts of the swirly stuff. Fog, then, has become as much a tourist staple as Buckingham Palace and a pigeon. The new Mission: Impossible movie – itself a bit of an armchair tourist experience - involves a tense alley scamper through what is technically mist. “It’s a city that I love,” explains Tom Cruise in the movie’s production notes, “and we get to create a bit of a love letter to London in this chase: you get the cobblestone streets, the fog, the Tower of London.” And even Brits are acquiring a nostalgic taste for the stuff. For the past 20 years, London Fog has been available in London, too, sartorial catnip for those of us who might not have got through the whole of Bleak House, but certainly enjoyed the first page. “London, Baltimore, New York” reads the label, beneath a little picture of Big Ben. Plus, of course, “Made in Vietnam”. One last song About 10 years ago, I went to a series of funerals of older people who had neither planned their own memorials nor had relatives engaged enough to do so for them. The song that accompanied the curtains closing on the coffin was therefore left to the crematorium to choose. And, in at least three cases, it was the same: Frank Sinatra’s My Way. You can understand the thinking: right generational ballpark, lyrics which basically apply to anyone. Yet I’m pleased to see it’s slipping down the charts of most popular funeral tunes and is currently at number five. Once you know how generic its use is, and in what context, it becomes an absolutely nightmarish listen. The big bite As someone who had their first tooth extracted a week ago, I was especially excited by the unearthing of one last used 560,000 years ago in France over the weekend. In a way I wish I’d seen it beforehand – it’s a bit of a shock, just how much of a tooth lies beneath the gum. But my bloody specimen was no match for the holey old Gallic gnasher you can see in the photos, its enamel storing so many secrets, so formidable in what it will reveal about ancient human experience. Small wonder palaeontologists are hailing it as such a breakthrough, a find of enormous import. And as for the student who dug it up? “I’m not sure if it’s sunk in yet.” |