One of my favourite jobs, these last ten years, has been editing harry magazine, the gorgeous, glossy menswear magazine published twice a year by Harry Rosen. I love working with the brilliant designers at Hambly & Woolley, the brains trust at Harry Rosen and my own hand-picked editorial gang. The process has turned me from a solitary worder into a fully functioning team player – a most unexpected transformation. The gig also gets me away from the table from time to time, which is a good thing, though there are plenty of intriguing similarities between the sartorial and the gastronomical. The textural pleasure to be found in slipping on a lilac-coloured Tom Ford blazer made from a silk-cotton-linen blend bears a resemblance to the rush one gets from the flavours in a Michael Stadtländer soup. You could say that a molecular pearl of bacon-washed bourbon garnishing one of Frankie Solarik’s cocktails has an echo in the weightless, high-tech, high-performance, feels-like-silk fabric of a Loro Piana Windstorm Regatta jacket. From a writer’s perspective, it’s pretty much the same process, balancing the literal with the metaphorical, trying to be vivid when describing vicarious sensual experiences. The latest issue of harry is on news stands now.
As you may have gathered from the title of this posting, this is also the week when we introduce the newly reinvigorated online version of harry. This is a project that has engaged me for the last six months – another steep learning curve scrambled over with the helping hands of a patient technical team from Babble-di-boo and Pause Productions. You can find it at www.harryrosen.com – just hit “harry magazine.” The content will be changing very frequently. For food lovers who don’t give a tailor’s judy about what they wear, the site also offers a handy survival guide to the Canadian cities where Harry Rosen has stores, including impeccable à-la-minute restaurant reviews from my favourite local critics – Lesley Chesterman in Montreal, Anne DesBrisay in Ottawa, Christine Hanlon in Winnipeg, Gail Hall in Edmonton, John Gilchrist in Calgary and Andrew Morrison in Vancouver. I kept the Toronto plum for myself, but that is an editor’s privilege.