Fashion Roundtable Book Club - Patrick Grant

This desk that I'm sitting in front of, This was the desk that I had in my bedroom at home when I grew up in Edinburgh, Morningside.

It's still got the same stickers on the drawers that weren't put on it by me.

I don't know whether it was my dad or somebody else.

you know, the drawers still stick in exactly the same way that they used to.

The leather top is the same.

It's aged a bit.

I mean, it was in a barn at my dad's house for 25 years, 30 years.

And then when he passed away, it came down to me and I'm back sort of sitting behind it.

And all of those things with clothes, with furniture, with household objects, crockery and cutlery and all that sort of stuff.

I think it is The objects themselves can have a certain inherent physical quality, but the intangible quality that is added to them by the narrative of their production, who gave them to you, whether or not over time you have fixed them, all of those things add value to the object that is far beyond any monetary value.

And it's a far greater... is a far greater source of happiness than something that is a purely financial transaction.

And so for that reason, I feel really strongly that buying things of quality allows them to last, allows them to age.

And I'm just looking down at the floor at a bag.

I mean, this bag that I carry almost every day, I have carried this bag almost every day for 20 years.

It's a simple leather bag.

It's actually a bag that my ex-girlfriend and I designed.

She designed the handbags for Marc Jacobs for years and loads of other people, Victoria Beckham and Stella McCartney and Baspre and lots of others.

Loewe...

Mulberry.

She knew a lot about bags.

I didn't know a lot about production of bags, but I knew what I liked the look of.

So we designed that together.

We went to the factory in Bergamo that used to produce them for Marc Jacobs.

And we worked with a specific tannery and a specific factory.

I met the people who made this bag.