They've arrived, but they aren't sticking around for long. We've just had a big shipment of other magazines land from Japan too, so stock up, these always sell out.
It's the new double issue of Clutch and Men's File, which is obviously very exciting, we'll pass you over to Nick now who can describe things a lot more clearly.
"Dear Readers
This is the London issue.
From Weller’s bleak post-punk evocation of youth violence on the underground to Dr Johnson’s observation, that the capital might furnish one with everything life has to offer, we consider London through its current residents and the on-going events that make the nation’s capital somehow different to other world centres. This city is where the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood established a new Bohemia in Chelsea, where Ruskin and Morris fought back against the inevitability of total industrialisation and the Bloomsbury Group looked out of elegant windows onto Georgian Squares. London is where Beardsley languished with consumption and where Crowley awoke to a Golden Down, that never bore his promised fruits and was, thus lamented by Bowie. This town, establish before the Roman conquest at a fording point on the father of English rivers, hosted Handel and Hendrix in the same house, but not at the same time. The Beatles played Get Back on the roof of 3, Savile Row and looked as dandyish as George Brummel had done 200 years earlier. London is not only a city-centre, but a vast conurbation of ‘burbs and satellites like Bromley, Hersham and Rochester. These are often the powerhouses of subcultural creativity, the testing grounds for (usually) working-class Bohemians, who hone their visual messages in the high-schools and high streets of the suburban sprawl.
In this issue we feature three important, but quite different, style-makers in Billy Childish, Christos Tolera and Jason Jules. When assessing individuals of this very independent provenance we return, once again, to the realm of the ‘subculture of one’ or the single unit that operates effortlessly and unintentionally as a generator of style. Central to the phenomenon of the self-contained subculture seems to be the ability of the people in question to focus on a seldom explored subject such as the Indian clubs, the height of the crown of a felt hat or the roll of a lapel. Once the object of their attention becomes all-enthralling it eventually reaches a critical mass and style pours forth.
As always, there is also an internationalist element to these pages and we visit the So-Cal home of surfer, shaper and motorcyclist Chris Christenson and, from the same neck of the woods, moto-x stylist Ciaran Naran. There’s also Alex Ripa’s visit to Vanson’s New England factory and Nagoya-based Mr Nishiura’s 1946 BSA. In the final analysis, Men’s File is about people and their endeavours to move the aesthetics of existence forward and it is the remit of this magazine to act as a conduit between the lives of exceptional people and our readers. A glimpse is all we usually get, but such is the potency of these stories that a few clicks of a camera shutter is usually enough to fire the imagination and, if that happens, then we have done our job.
Nick Clements (Editor-in-Chief)"