When we lived in Madison, Wisconsin, the Wisconsin State Journal ran a weekly column entitled “Things Found on the Way to Other Things.” While researching his more newsworthy stories, the columnist uncovered enough incidental details, bits of trivia, and unusual statistics sufficient to fill out a weekly list of factoids and informative anecdotes. Such addenda held little significance then, but the proliferation of trivia contests and the decades-long run of TV’s Jeopardy testify to the popularity of the insignificant fact or telling detail in people’s imaginations.
The reason for supplying this lengthy explanation arises from a question often asked at author events: where do you get your ideas? If you’re a writer, you’re receptive to all sorts of inputs from your environment. Often, they’re not the result of major events like the Covid pandemic or America’s cultural divide, but small items gleaned from non-traditional news sources like cable TV or social media.
Take, for example, “Ken Fisher’s Super Quiz.” It’s a daily trivia quiz on random topics originally associated with biochemist and author Isaac Asimov. The topic of Friday’s quiz was Clothes. Most of the questions were inconsequential, but one about the term for a tailor who makes custom-made clothes stood out–bespoke. Never hearing the term used in that context before, I queried Google and found a Wikipedia article on the topic which explained the difference between custom and bespoke tailoring (the latter makes a suit from exact measurements of the customer’s torso while the former adjusts a made-to-measure suit to fit the buyer).
Significant? Not in itself, but reading the full article revealed two nuggets of information:
- Bespoke tailoring is protected by law in France.
- The new bespoke tailoring movement began in England on Savile Row in 1969.
Though neither of these developments affect me directly (a custom-tailored suit is beyond my means), they do explain why the owners of the haute couture fasion houses in Paris are so upset someone is stealing their designs in the movie musical Roberta. And maybe why John Lennon and Paul McCartney are so well-turned-out on the cover of their album, Abbey Road--Nutters of Savile Row was fiancially backed by Cilla Black and Peter Brown of the Beatles’ Apple Corps.
Clothes may not make the man, but they help explain the lasting impact that iconic cover has had on a generation of rock music enthusiasts. Like recovering a discarded T-shirt, a minor discovery like this one shows things are not lost, just buried under the avalanche of history’s advance. Future revelations of this sort may not appear in my novels, but they will be a feature of this blog in the upcoming months. Check in from time to time.to see what tidbits I’ve uncovered trolled from the back pages of People, YouTube, and elsewhere.
In the meantime, can anyone provide me the name of the reporter who wrote the column mentioned above? Let me know in the Comments section.
[mailerlite_form form_id=2]