Description
Best of the Chap
Twenty years and one hundred editions in one volume
Gustav Temple
For 20 years, satirical gentlemen’s quarterly The Chap has been providing chaps all over the world with crucial advice on sartorial rectitude and anarcho-dandyist etiquette. Best of The Chap brings together in one volume all the features from the last 100 issues that have defined the publication’s manifesto. It includes features from the earliest editions, when The Chap was a slim pamphlet taken by a discreet handful of dissolute dandies, such as Dressing For Tennis, The Semiotics of Smoking and Sartorial Agony. As the popularity of the publication grew, so did the breadth of its content, and you will find features on subjects as diverse as gastronomy, cricket, military manoeuvres, millinery, vintage events, beatniks, birdwatching, science and boozing. Where else, for example, could you read about how to build a medium-sized Hadron Collider in your garden shed?
No other publication has single-handedly championed the forgotten principles of the English gentleman, while simultaneously charting the entry of the splendidly attired Chap and Chapette into high street fashion. Today the influence of The Chap is everywhere, from moustachioed hipsters to Harris Tweed jackets in Primark. Best of The Chap tells the whole twenty-year story of this magazine’s growth from a fringe publication to a style bible for the modern dandy.
300 pages gallop through the eccentric content that has kept The Chap one step ahead of fashion. The book includes chronicles of occasions when the readers took to the streets to state their cause, protesting against urban vulgarity and peacocking about in The Chap Olympics. Also included are vintage fashion photo shoots and interviews with icons of the publication, such as Patrick Moore, Fenella Fielding, Sir Roger Moore, John Waters, John Malkovich and Terence Stamp. If you’re new to The Chap and want to catch up on what you’ve missed for the last 20 years, or if you’ve read the occasional issue and wished you’d read more, Best of The Chap tells the whole story.
